Joanne Pottlitzer and TOLA archive

Joanne Pottlitzer has been working in the theater since 1961, when, after graduating in dramatic arts from Purdue University, she won a fellowship to go to Chile and study Chilean theater. In 1967 she founded the Theater of Latin America (TOLA) and became a key figure in bringing Latin American theater people and their works to the U.S. She also invited Richard Schechner to meet theater people in five Latin American countries on a tour she designed for him in 1968. At TOLA Joanne produced more than 30 Off Broadway plays (two of which won Obie Awards) as well as fifteen major concerts and ten national tours. She has worked in the theater in virtually every capacity -- as a playwright, producer, translator, director, even actor -- and she has worked with many of the leading figures in Latin American theater, including Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa, avant garde filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky, surrealist artist and writer Leonora Carrington, Brazilian playwright and director Augusto Boal, Brazilian singer Gilberto Gil, and Chilean theater director, singer and folk hero Victor Jara, among many others.

TOLA’s production of “A Latin American Fair of Opinion,” directed by Boal, won a 1972 Obie Award.

While Pottlitzer’s work has included Latin American theater from a wide range of countries, after the 1973 military coup in Chile, her focus shifted to that country for several years thereafter. Between 1974 and 1977, she brought some of Chile's leading singers and singing groups to New York, i.e. Inti-Illimani, Angel and Isabel Parra, Quilapayun, whom she presented at Carnegie Hall. TOLA’s 1975 production of “Chile, Chile!” documented the years leading up to the election of Salvador Allende -- the first socialist president to be elected in the western hemisphere -- and the aftermath of the military coup which turned Chile into a dictatorship for nearly two decades under the leadership of General Augusto Pinochet. The production, directed by Joseph Chaikin, won a 1976 Obie Award.

In 1978, she began to organize TOLA's Theatre in the Americas Festival, bringing theatre groups from five Latin American countries and Canada. She also brought representatives of every theatre discipline from Canada and twenty Latin American countries. The groups performed at the Kennedy Center in D.C. for one week and at La Mama ETC and the Entermedia theatre in New York for two weeks. All participants, including U.S. artists (among them Edward Albee, Arthur Miller, Irene Fornes, and The Bread and Puppet Theatre) spent a week of workshops at the Eugene O'Neill Center in Waterford, CT.

In 2001 Pottlitzer was given an award by the Permanent Representative of Chile to the United Nations “acknowledging and in appreciation of contributions toward restoring democracy in Chile.”