Interview with Fernando Dovalina, one of the writers of “The Gospel According to Tammy Faye”

You guys are from Houston, so why come all the way to Cincinnati to stage your show?

We heard people in Cincinnati desecrated chili by serving it over spaghetti, and we wanted to make sure that was true, and it is.

No, really…

No, really, you guys actually slop chili over spaghetti.

No, really, why did you come to Cincinnati to put this play on?

Oh, the “seriously-folks” part of the interview?

Yes.

The short answer is that we--my writing partner, JT Buck, and I--submitted our musical to the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, and the festival people liked it and told us, “Come on up, the weather’s fine,” but that was a lie. When we got here for rehearsals in May, it was colder than a witch’s tit.

That’s a Texanism or a Southernism, I gather.

You’re a good gatherer.

You consider yourself a Texan. I mean, you’re Mexican-American, right?

I plead guilty to being a Texan. And I’m also Mexican-American.Yes, guilty on both counts.

Are there a lot of Mexican-Americans writing for the theatre?

Not enough, I say. Or for movies or TV, or newspapers. So the majority of OUR stories usually are not told by people like me.  They’re usually told by people who often don’t understand who they’re writing about. I worked for newspapers most of my life, and that was the situation in the newsroom. And that’s why the preponderance of Hispanic characters in theatre, movies, TV and news stories are drug lords, gang members, prostitutes—and, when we’re lucky--maids and gardeners. We’re rarely bankers, or journalists, or physicians, or teachers, or ministers.

Did I touch a nerve?

You betcha.

So, you’re going to change all that all by yourself by writing for the theater?

Wish I could, but fortunately there are more and more Mexican-Americans and other Latinos writing for the theater. Just off the top of my head, among my Texas friends, there’s Cesar Jaime, Alvara Saar Rios, Chris Rivera and James Garcia. And they’re damn good, too.

So then why “The Gospel According to Tammy Faye”? The characters in her life are not Hispanics.

This Hispanic does not live in just one culture. I live in both the Anglo and Hispanic cultures, and I suppose most Hispanics do, given the demographics in this country. So I do know what I’m writing about. Most Anglos, on the other hand, live in only one world. I would venture to guess that Edward Albee, for instance, is not qualified at this moment to write about Hispanics-- or blacks or Asian-Americans, for that matter. As for Tammy Faye, one of the great things about her is that she was always inclusive, even from the early days when that was not the case with other conservative evangelicals. This treatment of Tammy Faye’s life is based on truth, but it is fictionalized, and because it is seen through her famous eyes as a fantasy, our license is incredibly large. So I made an important character in the musical a Latino. He’s Angel (Dovalina pronounces it AHN-hell), which is a common first name among Spanish speakers, and you can probably guess what kind of a character he is. But I’ll give you a hint. He’s not a drive-by shooter.

I understand that there are three Tammy Fayes in your script and that we get to see all three at some points in the show.

That’s true, and if you count the drag queens in the scene about the Tammy Faye look-alike contest…

Oh, that sounds very funny.

It is absolutely a riot, if the first rehearsal of that scene is any indication. Just uproarious. But going to your question, if you count that scene, we have nine Tammy Fayes in the show.

But why have three to start with?

When some people read that I studied under Edward Albee, they immediately assume that I stole the idea from “Three Tall Women,” except that since Tammy Faye is short in stature, this is more “Three Short Women,” but the truth is that I did not have that in mind at all when the  storyline decision was made. It wasn’t until later that I recognized the similarity. So, it may have been a subconscious parallelism at work. My point is that I did not do it intentionally, at least not consciously. Dramatically, it made sense to have the child, the televangelist and the present-day Tammy Faye on stage at the same time. They represent three very different characters, in one way, and three different stages in life, although the first and the last converge, and there’s some theatrical logic to that confluence. But in the end, we could have taken this concept out of the musical and told it straight, but the thing is—the three Tammys work and work beautifully.

So the idea for three Tammy Fayes is not original?

Let’s face it, very few ideas are original. “Three Tall Women” was not the first play in which the various selves of a character interacted with one another. But Albee’s execution was singular. It’s the execution that makes most creative work original. I think we, too, have been original in the way we have executed the three-Tammy concept. I hope the audience agrees with us.

What kind of an audience do you want?

A full house.

Come on.

You’re really asking what’s the ideal audience for this show. Let me tell you who might not be right for this show, and that’s right-wing fundamentalists whose minds are shut tight. After the Enquirer ran a short piece about our auditions, a right-wing preacher from Indiana posted a blog on his website calling our show "an abomination."

But he had not seen the show, had he?

No, no, this Cincinnati show will be the premiere for this musical. We had a reading in October of some portions of the show, but no, this show has not been performed. This guy had not seen the script, either. He had not bothered to call us, and he maligned me and JT. He implied we were taking advantage of Tammy, who is very ill with cancer. But what he did not know was that Tammy wanted us to do the musical. She granted us a long interview that gave us the seed for this show. He didn’t know that she spoke to us honestly about her illness and that we deal with it with sensitivity. I'm not saying that Tammy approves of our script because she has not told us what she thinks, but she has sent us her good wishes because she is a gracious lady. The point is we are not acting behind her back. She and her agent have been kept abreast of our progress and have been sent copies of the script-in-progress. Anyway, I e-mailed this preacher, straightening him out, in the hopes that he would post my response. But instead of posting my rebuttal, instead of asking us to forgive him for having maligned us--for bearing false witness--he chickened out and removed the blog. What happened to the Ten Commandments, Rev? So please, closed minds, stay at home during our run. 

Our best audience will be people who like good theater, who want to experience a good story told well, wonderful songs, terrific voices and magnetic actors. I think it will also resonate with those who believe in a loving God, those who don't believe in God but want to, and those who are shunned in many Christian churches.

So you’ve written as a reporter and now you’ve written for the stage. Have you written other plays?

Yes, and you can find out more about that at our website, fdovalina.com

What else have you written?

I wrote this interview.

Oh, my God, you’ve used me.