Archive
Noah Diaz: Metro theater’s man for all seasons and stages
Theater prodigies of the kind portryaed in the Wes Anderson film “Rushmore” have their antecedents in real life and just like in that story, they spring up in the most unexpected places. Omaha’s Noah Diaz is the latest Omaha theater prodigy and he finds himself in some very good company historically speaking. Perhaps the best known American theater prodigy, the late Orson Welles, first emerged as a stage presence to be watched at the Todd School for Boys in Woodstock, Illinois before he brazenly announced himself to the world in Dublin and then New York City. Across the pond, Kenneth Branagh, born in Belfast, first asserted his thespian bent in elementary school in Reading, Berkshire after his family’s move to England, and then he displayed his precicious talents at London’s Royal School of Dramatic Art. Back home, Omaha has had its own share of youth-must-be-served stage lights. The most famous of them all, Henry Fonda, was encouraged to try his hand at theater by Dottie Brando, mother of future stage-film icon Marlon Bramdo, at the Omaha Community Playhouse. A young Henry found his calling three and threw himself into all aspects of the craft – from building, painting and taking down sets to acting on stage. Dorothy McGuire soon followed him in the fold. They appeared together in a 1930 production at the Playhouse. Older than her, he left first to pursue a life in theater. Her family moved from Omaha and she soon left home to pursue her own career in theater. They both made it, of course, and two and a half decades after they shared the stage in Omaha in that 1930 show, they returned, this time as Broadway-Hollywood stars, to perform together in “The Country Girl” as a fundraiser for the new Playhouse. Now comes Noah Diaz, who by his early 20s has racked up more theater credits than most players twice or three times his age. He’s also been nominated for and won a slew of local theater awards for his acting. But he’s also a director and his work behind the stage has received raves as well. But it turns out his real calling in theater may be as a playwright. An original piece he’s written, The Motherhood Almanac, is being workshopped around the country and makes its world premiere here in January at the Shelterbelt, which is his theater home. Not to put pressure on him, but he may just be the latest in a recent line of Omaha-bred theater talent – Andrew Rannells, John Lloyd Young, Stephanie Kurtzuba, Quiana Smith, Kevyn Morrow – to make it to Broadway one day. Remember his name.
Noah Diaz: Metro theater’s man for all seasons and stages
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appeared in El Perico
Noah Diaz has been a force of nature in metro area theater since age eight. Still just 23, he owns 90-plus credits and multiple Omaha Theatre Arts Guild and Omaha Entertainment and Arts Awards nominations and wins.
He’s also a feted writer-director. He’s in good company as a local theater prodigy. A young Henry Fonda and Dorothy McGuire blazed early trails at the Omaha Community Playhouse before Broadway and Hollywood stardom. More recent stage-screen stars Andrew Rannells and John Lloyd Young got their performing starts as kids in Omaha theater.
Diaz, a University of Nebraska at Omaha student, is set on making theater his life but he only recently concluded that writing, not acting, may be his calling. A play he’s written, The Motherhood Almanac, is creating buzz. He served a residency with it at the Seven Devils Playwrights Conference in Idaho. Two New York City theater companies will workshop it in 2017. It premieres at Omaha’s Shelterbelt Theatre on January 27.
He said it was in Idaho he discovered his true “theatrical path,” adding, “I’ve been directing a number of things recently and I’m enjoying directing very much. But I think I might be a playwright. I think that might be what I want to do. That was like a very crystal moment of clarity for me.”
As a kid, Diaz and his cousins put on shows for their parents, but he’s been been writing since childhood, too. Almanac began as a poem he wrote as a youth.
“Over the years it expanded and kept unfolding. That poem turned into a handful of different poems that turned into scenes that turned into stories. It was two years ago I sat down and pieced it all together and understood what I had written. It’s a fragmented, nonlinear story with seven actresses about mothers across time and space. It’s my answer to the question – what does it meant to love somebody other than yourself.
“I’m constantly working on it, developing and workshopping it.
That’s why I’m opening myself up to these opportunities to work with different companies and actresses.”
He’s always had the internal drive and discipline writing requires, just as he’s long known he was meant to do theater.
“It’s always been a thing I’ve just understood about myself since I was young.” His parents encouraged his theater interests. “They recognized where my passions lay and they were about fostering my achieving that.”
His pursuit has landed him on virtually every metro area stage, including the Omaha Community Playhouse and The Rose. “By sheer tenacity I’ve wracked up a number of credits and a lot of experience.” No matter where he does theater, he’s younger than his fellow creatives, “I’ve been very fortunate to have had zero run-ins where age is an issue.. I’ve worked with actors who are so open with their process that they’ve allowed themselves over to me. It’s a profoundly high compliment in my book.”
He added, “The only thing I find tricky to maneuver is simply getting the work – being given opportunities. Directing work is hard to come by. It’s scary for people to put a full production in a 23 year-old’s hands. Luckily, I’ve made an artistic home at the Shelterbelt. They’ve been great to me. They’ve given me a number of opportunities.”
He counts theater veterans as teachers.
“I’ve worked with a staggeringly high number of talented people on stage and off. I’ve learned from them, I’m still learning from them. I have mentors, big and small, everywhere. I think in many ways I was raised by my mentors. I received theatrical and life lessons working in shows.”
He admires writers who sacrifice to get their stories told. “I’m so inspired by local playwrights like Ellen Struve, Beau Berry, Kaitlyn McClincy, Laura Leininger-Campbell, Nick Zadina, Joe Basque.” He’s collaborated with some.
He sees a vibrant local stage scene with “a big surge of people wanting to make theater.” He also sees gaps that need addressing. “I’m a very big advocate for accessible theater,” said Diaz, a special education and communication disorder major. He played a deaf character on stage in SNAP Productions mounting of Tribes. “Opening possibilities and opportunities for inclusivity in theater is important to me. Theaters can do better in terms of offering interpretive performances. I taught a deaf integrated acting class at the Rose (Theater) and I will be training to be an audio describer for the blind.”
Since he’s done so much so early, Diaz often gets asked – why haven’t you moved away yet to try Broadway or Hollywood?
“It’s simply about going when I’m ready. I’m still in school. I’ll be applying to a number of MFA programs this fall for playwriting.
Hopefully I’ll be be accepted to one to begin in the fall of 2017.
“I will move away eventually and work.”
Chicago’s vital theater community is a likely landing spot. He’s well aware of those who’ve left here to find stardom.
“If great success comes my way, that’s cool, but I’m more interested in doing the actual work itself.”
Meanwhile, he’s not giving up acting quite yet. “I will still continue to do it because I enjoy it.”
For details and dates on Almanac’s run at the Shelterbelt, visit http://www.shelterbelt.org/.
A good man’s job is never done: Bruce Chubick honored for taking South to top
Bruce Chubick cuts a John Wayne-like figure with his tall frame, square jaw and plain-spoken, don’t-mince-words ways. He is, for sure, a throwback to an earlier era and in fact at age 65 he represents a distant generation and hard-to-imagine time to the players he coaches at Omaha South High. But the well-traveled Chubick, who is nothing if not adaptable, has found a way to reach kids young enough to be his grandchildren and great-grandchildren and gotten them to play hard for him. The South High boys basketball program was down when he took it over about a dozen years ago. It was the latest rebuilding job he took in a long career that’s seen go from school to school, town to town, much like an Old West figure, to shake things up and turn the basketball fortunes around before lighting out for the next challenge. Much like his counterpart at South, boys socer coach Joe Maass, who has risen the school’s once cellar-dweller boys soccer program to great heights, Chubick has elevated South High hoops to elite status. After coming close the last few years, Chubick’s Packers finally won the state Class A title this past season – he survived a heart attack en route – and for his efforts he’s been named Nebraska High School Coach of the Year. His team’s championship came just weeks after South’s soccer team won the Class A crown, giving the school and the South Onaha community it represents the best run in sports they’ve had in quite a while.
A good man’s job is never done: Bruce Chubick honored for taking South to top
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in El Perico
Omaha South High 2016 Nebraska High School Coach of the Year Bruce Chubick and his wife Dianne envision one day taking off in their new motor home and not coming back. The couple recently made a road trip by car, but duty still calls the much traveled Chubick. At 65 he’s the metro’s oldest head coach. He’s back prepping for the next boys basketball season with his reigning Class A state champion Packers.
He lost key players from that 28-1 squad that won South’s first state basketball title since 1990. South is the latest rebuilding project he’s engineered at Nebraska and Iowa schools. South came close to hoops titles under him in 2015 and 2012 before breaking through versus Fremont in last March’s finals – giving him his second title after leading West Holt to the C1 crown in 1988 behind his son Bruce.
“It was real satisfying we got it done. I think I appreciated this one a lot more just knowing how valuable that is for a community and school,” he said.
This coming season Chubick lacks depth but has talent in returning all-Nebraska star Aguek Arop. The athletic wing bound for Nebraska may be the main reason Chubick’s coming back despite health concerns. In the midst of last year’s dominant run Chubick suffered a heart attack during a game and elected to coach through it before seeking treatment.
“I didn’t want to quit on the players,” he explained.
He’s no stranger to toughing out difficulties. His son Joe had brain cancer and the family endured an ordeal of doctors, tests and procedures. To get away from it all, Chubick built a cabin in the Montana wilderness, where the family went off the grid for two years. It was a trying but healing time.
“It made the family close. I wouldn’t want to do it again,” he said. “it was a simple but tough life. There’s a lot of stories there, trust me.”
He later survived a kidney cancer scare. Then the recent heart issue. Stints opened clogged arteries. He’s still coaching because he keeps his word.
“I promised Aguek (Arop) when he came in I would stay until he graduated, so I want to keep my word,” said Chubick, who may have his best player ever in Arop. “Aguek is probably the most gifted of all of them, i mean, he’s really special.”
It’s no accident Chubick calls rebuilding programs “the fun part” of his job. He’s been building things his whole life. That cabin. Houses,. Until now, he’d always left after building a program up. “Once you get ’em built I never thought it was that much fun.” But he’s still at South even years after laying a successful foundation. “South happened toward the end of my career. It’s pretty comfortable. I really like South. It’s a good place for us. We found a home when we landed in South Omaha. Once we got this thing built I thought I might as well enjoy it a few years before I turn the keys over to somebody else.”
His “logical” successor is his son Bruce – his top assistant.
This lifelong student of the game grew up in Council Bluffs, where he played whatever sport was in season. “I was the one who usually organized teams. One neighborhood played the other.” He starred at Abraham Lincoln High. While at Southwestern Junior College in Creston, Iowa and at Briar Cliff College in Sioux City, Iowa, he coached junior high ball. “That was my work study program,” he said. At SJC coach Ron Clinton let Chubick and his mates help strategize “how to play teams.” Game-planning and leading got in his blood.
“I don’t know what I’d do if I didn’t work with kids.”
His wife Dianne, who’s seen nearly every high school game he’s coached, said she most admires “the way he can touch kids,” adding, “When they come into his program they’re like his family and he wants the best for every one of them.”
He said his son Joe’s resilience in the face of struggle has affirmed for him that “things are what you make of them.”
Chubick still hungers to coach. “Honest to God we were on the bus after we won the championship headed back to Omaha and before we got out of Lincoln city limits I was thinking about next year. How we’d have to build around Aguek and figure out which players would have to step up.” He said he believes in “that old adage – when you’re through learning, you’re through. That’s true with coaching. You think you know it all, you should quit because you never know it all. I use the analogy that coaching’s like a jigsaw puzzle. You pick up pieces here and there and you try to put the puzzle together. For most coaches, the puzzle’s never complete. I’m not sure mine’s complete.”
His health will determine when he retires. “As long as my health holds up, I don’t think it’s time. Not yet.”
He won’t take it easy in the meantime. “A lot of people go through life and they don’t really live – they just kind of go through the motions. We’ve gotten our money’s worth. We’ve lived.”
Follow his and his team’s viviendo en grande (living large) journey at http://southpackerspride.com/.
Mural project celebrates mosaic of South Omaha culture
Historically, South Omaha is the city’s receiving community for new immigrants and refugees, though North Omaha plays some of that role, too. Blue collar jobs in the commerical, industrial labor sector have provided the livelihood for succeeding waves and generations of ethnic groups to have settled there. South O once had and to some extent still does have neighborhoods with distinct concentrations of ethnic groups. Traditionally, these ethnic enclaves become communities within the larger community. At one time, there were neighborhoods where Poles, Czechs, Lithuanians, Croats and other peoples of Eastern European origin established their own enclaves. There were also strong Italian, Irish and Mexican contingents. And the Great Migration brought many African Americans from the Deep South here as well. The railroads and packing houses were the main employers for many of these new arrivals. World War II-era manufacturing jobs were lures as well. The residents living in the various ethnic neighborhoods that took shape were bound by their shared birthplace, language, customs, religious affiliation and so on. They had their own churches and community centers that reinfoced their tight-knit connections. Festivals celebrated their hertiage and traditions. Having long ago assimilated and with second-third generation descendants moving to other other sections of the city and with the wartime, railroad and packing house jobs disappearing, those once ethnic-centric areas in South Omaha became more homogenized over time. Today, only trace elements of their once ethnic identities remain. The last three decades have seen the emergence of new emigrees from Latin and Central America, Asia and Africa, thus repeating the patterns that happened with earlier groups in the late 19th century through the late 1920s. All of this is context for an art project now underway in South Omaha that celebrates the different heritages that have made it such a melting pot over time. The South Omaha Mural Project is creating a mural for each of the major ethnic groups that have populated the area. A future mural may also commemorate the stockyards-packing plant epoch that dominated the South Omaha landscape for decades with that industry’s acres of buildings and structures that emplpyed thousands of people and with all the ancilliary businesses that served those workers.
©by Leo Adam Biga
Appearing in El Perico
What began as a one-off neighborhood mural by Richard Harrison and his daughter Rebecca Van Ornam has morphed into a project with several artists depicting historical South Omaha ethnic groups and landmarks.
When historian Gary Kastrick saw the South 13th Street mural Harrison and Van Ornam did illustrating the area’s Czech heritage, it sparked an idea for a mural culture series celebrating South Omaha’s role as a gateway for ethnic immigrant and refugee assimilation.
More murals followed through the help of the South Omaha Business Association (SOBA), who secured grants for a history mural at the Metropolitan Community College south campus and a Magic City Mural at 24th and N. Thus, the South Omaha Mural Project was born.
Artist Hugo Zamorano joined the team for a Lithuanian mural on the Lithuanian Bakery at 5217 South 33rd Avenue. A Mexican mural in the Plaza de la Raza was unveiled July 10. New murals are planned for the Polish, Irish, Croatian, Italian, Jewish, African-American ethnic enclaves that traditionally called South Omaha home. The more recently arrived Honduran, Guatemalan and El Salvadoran communities will get murals, too. There’s talk of one celebrating South O’s stockyards-meatpacking legacy as well.
The Polish mural will adorn a wall of Dinker’s Bar at 2368 South 29th Street. The Irish mural will grace another popular hangout, Donohue’s Pub, at 3232 L Street.
“We’re looking for walls that have good visibility in relationship to the neighborhood,” Harrison said. “Size is a good thing.”
Every wall poses its own challenges.
“When a wall is rough and covered with obstacles like water meters and things we are coming up with solutions of putting up profile cut sign boards with characters and symbols on them, so the wall has sort of a pop-up book, three-dimensional feeling to it,” Harrison said.
Project funding comes from SOBA, the Nebraska Arts Council, the Mayor’s Neighborhood Grants Program, the City of Omaha’s Historical Grant initiative and various community sources.
David Catalan served as SOBA president when the organization decided to support the mural project. He said the project aligns well with SOBA’s mission of “preserving the diversity and heritage of South Omaha.”
Some ethnic organizations hold fundraisers to help underwrite their individual murals. The South Omaha Neighborhood Alliance is a new partner.
Harrison is a project facilitator and a supporting artist. Michael Giron and Zamorano trade-off as lead artist. Kastrick serves as the history consultant. Catalan is an advisor and liaison.
This labor of love entails extensive community engagement and input for each mural. Multiple public meetings elicit information and ideas. The public can view the final sketch projected on a wall and can join community paint days.
“We are connecting with a lot of people in each successive community we focus on,” Harrison said. “We’re happy how fast this connects with people and how much it matters to them. They come to the meetings and share their stories and memories. Everybody we talk to finds it meaningful to them.”
He believes the community taking ownership of the murals explains why none have suffered graffiti.
After the communal paint days, Harrison, Giron, Zamorano and other artists paint for a month or two – working in acrylics to sharpen images and to apply shading and highlights. A clear protective sealer is added at the end.
When a mural’s finished, a public celebration is held.
This community-based approach is much more involved than the private commissions Harrison does under his A Midsummer’s Mural business but he said it’s all worth it.
“What’s really special is bringing the community together to talk about what’s important to them and what memories they have.”
Kastrick, a retired Omaha South High history teacher who leads South Omaha history tours, hopes the murals educate and entertain about South O’s long, unfolding melting pot story.
“It’s about rekindling South Omaha roots in people who moved away and reestablishing those roots with their children and grandchildren. I envision people coming to see the murals and talking about the people and the history they see on them.”
He and Harrison believe the murals can be destination attraction urban maps for residents and visitors wanting to learn about the area’s cultural history.
None of the primary artists working on the project are originally from Omaha and for these transplants each mural is an education.
“There is a lot that I did not know before this project and still more to learn.,” said Zamorano.
The Mexican mural he took the lead on is a perfect example.
“Almost everything I learned was new information to me. I learned about some of the different waves of Mexicans that moved to Omaha, why they moved, and where they came from. I never knew how much the Catholic church and Lutheran church were involved in the community helping people move forward in education and empowerment. The list goes on. I never knew how much history there is in South Omaha alone.”
Fostering appreciation for place is what the project team wants every mural to encourage. Zamorano said Mexican mural images represent “topics and themes about unity, struggle, education, work, identity, education and celebration.” A working couple eats dinner with their family. A “Dreamer” graduates high school. Community anchors, such as the American GI Forum and Chicano Awareness Center, loom large. “In the center,” he said “an ancient Aztec god and two children share a history book to symbolize the past and future.”
Follow the project’s progress at http://www.amidsummersmural.com/for-communities/south-omaha-mural-project/.
Mini-Profile
Leo Adam Biga's My Inside Stories 