July 2015 - Let Us Entertain You - Aye, No!

The National Hispanic Cultural Center is partnering with Camino Real Productions and Albuquerque drag theatre troupe The Dolls to open the NHCC’s 2015-2016 Siembra: Latino Theatre Season with Liz Coronado Castillo’s bilingual farce Aye, No!. The show opens on Thursday, July 30, running for three weekends in the Wells Fargo Auditorium with performances on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2 pm and 6 pm.

In Aye, No!, Alicia, a Latina girl from a small town in Texas, goes off to college and falls in love with Cathy, an Anglo girl. As the play opens, Alicia is bringing Cathy home to introduce her to her abuelita and tías, who raised her. They, of course, think that the “friend” she is bringing is a boyfriend or fiancé. When they discover the truth, they are so horrified that they decide to find a curandero to cure her of “the gay.” But each of the lesbian and gay characters in the story has a drag queen fairy godmother to help out, and when the fairy godmothers recruit a friend to pretend to be a curandero, hilarity ensues.

Producer Linda López McAlister says, “I wanted to produce this play because it’s rare to see a fun, positive coming-out story on stage, especially one about a Hispanic family, and even in 2015, coming out to one’s traditional family can be hard to do.” In order to enable local LGBTQ young people to see the show, López McAlister launched a crowd-funding campaign to raise money to offer free tickets through several organizations serving LGBTQ youth in Albuquerque, including Teen N'Mpower, the New Mexico GSA Network, the New Mexico Youth Alliance, Common Bond U21, Young Women United, the University of New Mexico's LGBTQ Resource Center, and Casa Q.

Tickets are $18 with a $3 discount for seniors and students, and are available from the NHCC Box Office, at (505) 724-4771, or at www.nhccnm.org.