When playwright Gloria Calderón Kellett reflects on her working relationship and friendship with the late television-comedy legend Norman Lear, it’s with warmth and respect.
“My time with him,” she recalled, “was invaluable.”
Lear, who ed away in 2023 at the age of 101, was co-executive producer with Calderón Kellett and others on the 2017 Netflix reboot of Lear’s 1970s sitcom “One Day at a Time.”
“He had such a deep curiosity about people and understood the power of comedy to change hearts and minds,” said Calderón Kellett. “He and I both loved that exploration into the stories of everyday people living their lives and doing their best, loving and failing and picking themselves up and trying to communicate and grow.”
“’One Day at a Time,’” Calderón Kellett said, “was really our opportunity to do one-act plays for audiences, but in the comfort of their homes. For the most part, it’s that couch. What’s happening around that couch.”
In Calderón’s Kellett’s theatrical comedy “One of the Good Ones,” the couch is in the home of the Gomez family in Pasadena, whose startling meet-the-parents moment finds Latina daughter Yoli (played by the singularly named Cree) bringing over her Mexico-born but White boyfriend, Marcos (Nico Greetham).
In first developing the play, opening in previews on Saturday, “I thought ‘What is the framing device in which to tell a story about identity?’” Calderón Kellett recounted. “Then I thought about one of the great tropes, (the film) ‘Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner?’ Bringing somebody home for the first time.
“I love comedy as a means of talking about difficult things. There’s something about a little sugar to help the medicine go down. It allows you to tackle some topics that might turn people off. Comedy disarms people and makes them feel more comfortable to do thought experiments or to try to figure out things in their life that they have difficulty with.”
At the Globe, “One of the Good Ones” is being directed by Kimberly Senior, who also directed the comedy’s world premiere engagement in March 2024 at Pasadena Playhouse.
“The first time I read the play, said Senior, “I thought ‘Oh my gosh, it’s like ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?’ meets ‘Disgraced’ (Ayad Akhtar’s volatile-dinner identity play) in Latinidad.”
Senior directed “Disgraced” on Broadway more than a decade ago, as well as locally Akhtar’s “The Who and the What” at La Jolla Playhouse. “I’m very drawn to plays about the multitude of our identities. Every person has a story.
“Gloria was talking about how we hear all these stories of Latinos at the border and gangs, and how the representation of Latinos particularly on the American stage has not extended to reflect the diversity of that community.”
Calderón Kellett, the daughter of Cuban immigrants, ed that “I started out writing theater and I wanted to write theater. But the only hunger for Latino stories was trauma. So it turned me off at that time and I focused my effort on television and film. “When ‘One Day at a Time” began I was 15 years into my career and it was the first time I’d really written Latino stories pulled from my life.”
Suddenly, she said, “The town (Hollywood) took notice of me as a Latina storyteller, and every interview became about my Latinidad versus my craft. I understood that I was speaking for a community whether I wanted to or not. I’m not the poster child for Latinidad. We are 19 countries under this umbrella term. People don’t know the burdens we carry when we’re just trying to make a living as storytellers.”
Drawing on her past, Calderón Kellett said “One of the Good Ones” was “not a hard play to write.”
Before graduating from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, she attended high school in San Diego at University of San Diego High in Linda Vista, which has since relocated to North County and been renamed Cathedral Catholic. Many of her high school classmates “were either wealthy Mexicans who crossed the border to come to Uni or Americans on this side of the border who did not speak Spanish. These voices are very much surrounding me all the time.”
In creating “One of the Good Ones,” veteran comedy writer Calderón Kellett felt inspired not only by those voices and by the works of Norman Lear, but by another round-the-couch exercise in chaos onstage, Yasmina Reza’s “God of Carnage.” She never loses sight of the funny.
“Sitcoms have been such a great learning tool for this,” said Calderón Kellett. “You have a short time to get people to know these characters and get emotional with them.”
The power of laughter can’t be overestimated.
With a comedy, “It’s easier to listen when you’re laughing,” said director Senior. “It never feels heavy-handed when it’s packaged in a laughter sandwich. Oftentimes, what causes intensive discourse is our differences. If the audience feels united by laughter, it’s very special.
“What I loved in Pasadena, and what I think will be no different here, is standing in the lobby and hearing people saying ‘Oh, this reminds me of my uncle, or my aunt’ or someone, and these were people of different cultures. Truly, this (‘One of the Good Ones’) is a story about a young woman who is on the brink of becoming her own adult and is having difficulty straddling that gap from childhood to adulthood and seeks approval from her parents. So much of my job is to create the circumstances in which comedy is going to thrive.”
Calderón Kellett has written the words to do so.
“Even in dark moments,” she said, “I’m able to access the comedy of the moment. It’s what bonded Norman (Lear) and me. We both loved how comedy is a way to bond.”
In writing for the theater, Calderón Kellett craves its “immediate response. What’s so unique about theater is that the audience participates. It’s a different show every night. That makes it the most alive and exciting of any of the forms of writing that I do. There’s nothing like it.”
‘One of the Good Ones’
When: Previews, May 24 through 28. Opens May 29 and runs through June 22. 7 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 8 p.m. Fridays; 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays; 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays
Where: Old Globe Theatre, 1363 Old Globe Way, Balboa Park
Tickets: $29 and up
Phone: 619-234-5623
Online: theoldglobe
