Playwright: Raul Castillo. At: Teatro Vista in the Richard Christensen Theatre at the Biograph, 2433 N. Lincoln Ave. Tickets: 773-871-3000; www.victorygardens.org; $25-$30. Runs through: May 10
The premise of Raul Castillo's play—a fugitive seeking sanctuary among strangers encounters unexpected hospitality—has provided laughs since antiquity. Its characters are likewise generic: the feisty widow Jesse and her meek teenage son Woody, handsome-but-dumb officer Max and adventure-hungry tourist Kristen. The plot proposes not one, but two, "drunk scenes" obligatory to 1950s farce. Indeed, so faithfully do the opening moments adhere to comic formula that even a potentially fatal injury, when doctored by frontier methods, is dismissed as humorously inconsequential.
When your setting is a trailer home in a Texas border town, however, and the desperado fleeing the authorities is a terrified young woman vowing to reunite with her husband, the stakes get higher. Sheltering an undocumented immigrant is against the law, after all, punishable by deportation at best and vigilante gunfire at worst. To protect her unexpected guest from discovery, Jesse must play along with Max's amorous advances. The distraught refugee's visions of her slain spouse are induced, not by alcohol, but the residual effects of rattlesnake venom. Oh, and there's also the matter of Woody's curiosity regarding his missing sire, culminating in a burst of daring attributed to his ingestion of hallucinogenic drugs—Castillo obviously doesn't know his pharmacopoeia—at the urging of SoCal gamer Kristen. Not so funny now, huh?
Director Ricardo Gutierrez and his cast ( led by the always-commanding Sandra Marquez ) strive heroically to maintain a narrative line through Castillo's undeniably worthy intentions, hurdling its more elliptical patches with practiced ease. Even so, the dramatic tone of this world-premiere production veers abruptly from light-hearted repartee as Valley girl Kristen and country-boy Woody explore their cultural differences, to armed confrontations involving a shotgun brandished, but never fired. Stretching credulity are Jesse's claim to be a social worker—who speaks no Spanish—and Amparo's extended seclusion in a far-too-small broom closet. Other details in need of further scrutiny are Max's "pushiness" verging dangerously close to stalkerly harassment, while Woody's age could be advanced a few years to ensure the legality of his psychedelic romp in the desert with his pixilated mentor.
According to Teatro Vista's publicity, the lesson we are to take home is that secrets make for complications seriously affecting people's lives. With fewer distractions arising from incomplete backstories and nebulous motivations, the irony of the ending—in which everybody, after coming clean and renouncing clandestine tactics, unite in concealing the circumstances of Amparo's entry into the United States—could transform this play into a bona fide comedy.
