"Cupid pierced us ... on the artistic side and the romantic side," Hugo Medrano, co-founder and artistic director of the GALA Hispanic Theatre, told Efe.
"We became a couple, we worked together and we realized that there was a large Latino audience in Washington that had nowhere to see theater. They didn't even do theater in Spanish so we decided to create it."
It was that can-do spirit that led the Medranos in 1976 to found GALA, which moved among different venues for 29 years until settling in its current home at the newly renovated Tivoli Theatre in the U.S. capital's Columbia Heights neighborhood.
The project initially got off the ground because many intellectuals were settling in Washington to escape the dictatorships that reigned in Latin America for decades.
"There was a very interesting, very educated audience of refugees here who filled our house," Medrano said in reference to GALA's early days, when the walls of a townhouse in Washington's Adams Morgan neighborhood were torn down to make way for a theater with seating for 80 people.
Over time, GALA has acquired a faithful following of theater-goers - roughly 40 percent of them non-Hispanic whites and 60 percent Latinos - who showed their appreciation for the Medranos by nominating them for this prestigious prize, awarded annually by the Washingtonian magazine. READ MORE
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