Lisa Tejero

She’s fearless, inventive and impossible to typecast

By Kerry Reid

Chicago: If it hadn’t been for a dismissive art teacher in high school, Chicago theatre audiences might never have experienced the special joy of seeing Lisa Tejero on stage.

Growing up in Saint Charles, Mo., on the outskirts of Saint Louis, Tejero thought she might become a graphic artist and had vague plans to attend the Kansas City Art Institute. But when the teacher who championed her work became pregnant and left mid-semester, Tejero says with wry understatement, she was stuck with a replacement “who wasn’t a fan of mine.” Her speech teacher, on the other hand, seemed to think she had promise, so she auditioned for Webster University’s conservatory program—and unexpectedly found a calling that has taken her on a years-long theatrical journey to Persia, India, ancient Greece and Dickensian England, among other destinations.

Tejero’s varied acting résumé, unlike that of many longtime Chicago performers, is notable for the fact that she has never (well, almost never) been a member of an ensemble company. In a town chockablock with actor-focused companies, that’s something of an anomaly. (The almost is necessary because she was briefly a member of the now-defunct Absolute Theatre Company, having joined shortly before the troupe’s demise.)

Yet Tejero’s chameleonic talent and her willingness to take risks on behalf of that mutability have made her a stalwart for years on the Chicago scene, from the Goodman Theatre to Victory Gardens Theater to Lookingglass Theatre Company, while her ethnic heritage (Tejero is half Filipina) has allowed her to assay a wide range of multicultural roles. In the past 18 months alone, the actor has played a Japanese servant in Mary Zimmerman’s adaptation of Silk (by Italian writer Alessandro Baricco) at the Goodman; an Arab princess in Paul D’Andrea’s adaptation of G.E. Lessing’s Nathan the Wise for the new Chicago Festival of the Arts; and a winsome Spanish healer in Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’s Blind Mouth Singing with Teatro Vista, a Latino company. She also took on two very different roles in the Lookingglass production of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop, scoring favorable notices as both a fierce spinster and a mousy, abused spouse.

Much of Tejero’s highest-profile work has come to her courtesy of Zimmerman, who has to date cast her in seven shows, including Silk, The Odyssey, Journey to the West, S/M, Mirror of the Invisible World and Metamorphoses. The latter gave Tejero her sole Broadway credit. She will next appear as Hera in Zimmerman’s Argonautika, which premieres this month at Lookingglass.

According to Zimmerman, what makes Tejero a perfect match for her work (in which most actors must make seamless switches among several roles) is that she’s “very, very imaginative as well as game and inventive. She’s unafraid physically. She’s finally cut her hair, but we always used to joke that she was such a hair actor, because every time she came on stage, she had a different look.”

At times, Tejero has been at loggerheads with directors who wanted to use her (and other nonwhite cast members) as a form of window dressing—as Tejero puts it, “to walk across the stage so they can fill out a chart for the government of whom they hire, or to make a program look colorful. I don’t usually feel that, but there is on occasion that misplaced, misdirected impulse. If race is an issue, then let’s talk about it. The trick is to keep yourself mercurial enough and fluid enough that you are more than just an ethnic type.”

Tejero discovered a fondness for the experimental and imaginative back in St. Louis. “I saw the Open Theatre’s production of [Jean-Claude van Itallie’s] The Serpent on film. It was my freshman or sophomore year, and I was blown away by it. I didn’t know that theatre could do that!” There were several detours before she finally ended up in Chicago’s burgeoning off-Loop theatre scene—including a year in the Philippines, where the nonsinging Tejero, improbably cast in a production of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas, witnessed the overthrow of the Marcos regime.

“I’ve always believed in ensemble,” says Tejero of having a home base in Chicago. “I love working with the same people. You can work shorthand. You don’t have to spend the time getting the language. And, sometimes, if you’re very lucky, you get to sit in a room with a group of theatre people who are all speaking the same language.”

Zimmerman, who often works with the same core of actors, goes on to praise Tejero as “the perfect cast member, not just because of her beauty and her talent and her work ethic, but also because she’s the social chair—right away, she is roping everyone in. She’s the one who will come and say, ‘I’ve heard they’re giving away tickets to such-and-such, so who wants to go?’ She exerts such an influence of professionalism and also warmth.”

Tejero briefly abandoned Chicago for Los Angeles in 2000 during the run of Metamorphoses there, before it was picked up for its Off-Broadway and Broadway runs. But her commitment to family outweighed her desire for cinematic brass rings, and the coasts were too far away from her aging parents. Though she works consistently on stage in Chicago and supplements her income with corporate acting gigs, on the day that I interviewed her, Tejero was nervous about whether or not her bid to buy a house in Chicago would be accepted. She also worries, more generally, about trends in theatre casting that favor media visibility. “What’s really hard is when committed stage actors can’t get work because TV and film actors are getting cast. When that mentality starts to spread, it’s like trickle-down Reaganomics—people start emulating what the big boys are doing.”

While fashioning a life in local theatre has its financial challenges, it has concurrent rewards, Tejero avows, rejoicing that “the theatre gods grabbed me by the neck and wouldn’t let me go. What I’m doing is the most dynamic sort of work an actor can be asked to do, which is why I’ve stayed in Chicago.” Having played everything from goddesses to ancient crones to trees in Zimmerman’s productions, Tejero says, “I’d love to do Phaedra and Medea, those power women. And there must be a role that takes women to a whole different level of enfranchisement and empowerment. I’m not sure what it is—I think it’s still in the works.”

Kerry Reid is a Chicago-based arts reporter.