This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Enrique Bravo has been acting in Juneau for nearly 20 years. He didn’t think he’d end up in Alaska, but he says the theater community here has allowed him to perform roles he never expected.
Bravo plays the titular role in Theater Alaska’s “Henry V,” opening Friday at the Juneau Makerspace. It runs until Oct. 20 at multiple locations around town.
Listen:
Enrique Bravo: My name is Enrique Bravo, I’m a theater guy in town, I guess. I used to work for Perseverance Theatre, but I kind of now sort of do theater all over town.
In high school, even junior high, where I’m from in South Texas, they had a very competitive theater program in South Texas, and we would go to these competitions on the weekend, and we would compete against each other with theater, and our school was very successful with it. I found out later that every dollar the football team — and this is Texas, mind you –every dollar the football team got also went to the arts program as well.
I had a mentor there, my high school teacher, who really sort of believed in me, and said, “You can really do this.” And he was right.
My buddy that actually runs the Theater Alaska — so we go way back — we met in grad school. He was working as a marketing director at Perseverance, and this is when I was living in New York, and he asked me if I wanted to come up and maybe be part of the tribe for “Hair,” which was in 2006.
And they got a grant back in 2014 to actually pay for an artist in residence. And I, you know, I put in my application for that, and I ended up getting that. So for six years, I was the actor in residence at Perseverance, which was kind of like a dream come true, honestly. I mean, I love Juneau. That, and then I’m a little bit of a nature junkie, so I was just like, I would have never thought I was going to find it here in Juneau, Alaska, like when I was in my 20s. But it’s crazy how it all sort of worked out. And I’m very fortunate.
It’s just — it’s seriously this community. I mean, that’s the other part of the piece of the puzzle that has also kept me here and drawn me here. But that is part of the thing that I love about this community.
I came from a town of 30,000. It has nowhere near the sort of arts community that we have here. I mean, the fact that we have three, four theater companies that are producing shows. I love Juneau for that, and I try to never take that for granted.
I have to say, Perseverance has given me roles that I never in my life would have thought I would have played. I played Atticus Finch, you know, I was able to do “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof” and play Brick and, yeah, even this last role with “Indecent,” you know, playing a Jewish man.
I will say that’s also been a giant draw for me to come back as much as I did at the beginning, and then why I’m still here now, is that those opportunities did not go unappreciated. Or I — because I was given those opportunities, I wanted to make the best of them.
Which sometimes I was just like, “Well, I also want to tell my story too, you know?”
So that’s the thing that I think I’m looking for now in my career — I do want to, like, share part of my history and my upbringing, my roots that I have in Mexican sort of culture, my grandmother spoke nothing but Spanish. She didn’t speak any English at all. Where we grew up, in South Texas, and, you know, 10 minutes away from the Mexican border. So I think for me, those are the things that — those are the stories that I’m also, like, now actively trying to find to tell for myself.