Playwright: Tanya Saracho. At: Teatro Vista at the. Greenhouse Theater Center, 2257 N. Lincoln . Phone: 773-404-7336; $35
Runs through: March 29
You know the people of Our Lady of the Underpass. Well. The good, the bad, the heartbroken and the cluelessly, internally ugly—playwright Tanya Saracho has captured a deep and dazzling cross-section of humanity from the sacred to the profane. Yes, we know; "humanity" is a vastly overused noun in theaterland, the promise of its illumination touted in virtually every press release and mission statement theaters issue. Teatro Vista's Our Lady is among the rare few that deliver on that promise. Our Lady veers—just like real life—from laugh-out-loud hilarious, to gut-wrenching to enraging to contemplative.
Directed by Sandra Marquez, the 90-minute production also manages to transcend the bumbling human condition. In this docudrama of an urban altar, there's a glimmer of something arching above and among the people who come to pray and gape and scoff and mock the image by the highway. The devil, so conventional wisdom has it, is in the details. But in Our Lady of the Underpass, it's something on the other end of the spiritual spectrum. Something that defies the endless mundane tragedies of the everyday and hovers, defiant and hopeful, between the asphalt and the eternal.
To compose the power monologues that make up this piece, Saracho hung out at the Fullerton Avenue underpass, tape recorder in hand, for over a year starting in April 2005. That was when—a week after the pope died—Obdulia Delgado saw what she believed to be a manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the discolored cement near Logan Square. The photos are still up all over the Internet, a softly curving image that does indeed look like an archetypal image of the Madonna. Or a bad patch job. Or a giant vagina. All of these interpretations arise in Our Lady.
Marquez makes all the disparate elements of this ensemble piece resonate. She's got a powerful cast: Charin Alvarez, Chris Cantelmi, Ilana Faust, Suzette Mayobre, Rosie Newton and Juan Gabriel Ruiz play various interview subjects with layer upon layer of believable individuality. It's impossible to discount the startling degree to which Saracho got complete strangers to spill their darkest, most desperate secrets, telling stories that—in many cases—they had never shared with a single living soul. Pondering whether that phenomenon is the hand of God at work or a testimony to Saracho's mad interviewing skills adds another layer to Our Lady's immensely enjoyable intricacies.
Brian Sidney Bembridge's set is a museum-quality replication of the underpass. Combined with Mike Tutaj's projections, Ray Nardelli's soundscape of prayers and traffic and Jesse Klug's crucially important lighting, Our Lady of the Underpass is worth a trip for the spiritual, the secular and everyone in between.