Cultural clashes: 'In My Father's House' explores forbidden love affair

It’s 1992 and the City of Angels is smoldering.

Gunshots scald the streets. A pervasive fear of new riots echo everywhere.

Opening at Santa Fe’s Teatro Paraguas on Thursday, Oct. 3, “In My Father’s House” explores the romantic, multicultural love affair between a Jewish graduate student and a Hispanic former gang member.

Their relationship navigates cultural clashes and familial disapproval wrapped in themes of gang violence, racism and police brutality.

The play germinated when Santa Fe playwright Jacalyn Kane was living in Los Angeles. The violence was sparked when a jury in the Los Angeles suburb of Simi Valley acquitted four police officers charged with using excessive force in arresting Black motorist Rodney King a year earlier.

It was there that Kane met Aqeela Sherrills, a former gang member, who negotiated a truce between the Crips and the Bloods.

“Some things are autobiographical, many are fiction,” Kane said. “It parallels what’s going on in the Middle East. It’s how to stop the revenge killings.”

Alana is a social worker who lives with her parents in Beverly Hills. She travels to East LA, where she meets Angel in a coffee shop.

What follows defines culture class.

Alana’s father, after years of lecturing her about the importance of marrying within her faith, highly disapproves.

“There’s a poignant scene with her father as he goes to look for her and Rose, Angel’s mother,” Kane said.

Her younger son died in a gang drive-by shooting.

The fear and violence reflect Kane’s own family history.

“My grandfather played clarinet in the czar’s band during the Russian Revolution,” she said. “He was secretly Jewish.”

This was while Czar Nicholas II was imposing pogroms, or organized massacres, on the Jewish people.

“He left in the middle of the night with a gypsy Jewish caravan,” Kane said. “He went to Rotterdam and then New York. He had the equivalent of $50 in his pocket.”

Such hardships fueled Alana’s father’s determination that she marry a Jew.

Kane visited her father in Puerto Vallarta while she was living in Los Angeles.

“The night I arrived, I had this heated political conversation with my father’s friend,” she said.

The friend didn’t understand why the rioters couldn’t “pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”

“If you don’t have an education and politics is in the way of that, plus police brutality, how can you rise up?” Kane asked.

Then she got food poisoning. She was confined to her hotel room.

“There was a little stubby pencil the housekeeper had left and it just came pouring out,” she said of the play. “I feel like it was channeled. I was obsessed.”

“In My Father’s House” stars Albuquerque actors Svea Kennedy as Alana and Levi Lobo as Angel.

Kane has produced concerts for Tito Puente and Celia Cruz at Madison Square Garden, and managed clients from Ruben Blades to Marc Anthony and Menudo. She also produced and directed The First Americans in the Arts Awards, honoring the achievements of Native Americans. She independently produced and promoted dozens of concerts starring Jackson Browne, Stephen Stills, Lila Downs, Mavis Staples, Kris Kristofferson, Rufus Wainwright, America, Natalie Cole and Judy Collins.