Playwright: Lani T. Montreal. At: CIRCA-Pintig at Dream Theatre, 556 W. 18th. Info: 773-931-6122; $10-$18. Runs through: Sept. 6
The revised revival of Lani T. Montreal's comic-drama Sister Outlaw is timely with all the LGBTQ issues it brings up, even through CIRCA-Pintig premiered it back in 2001. Coming out, immigration dilemmas for same-sex couples and violence toward the transgender community are just a few topics.
And as a play featuring Filipino-Americans as its major characters, Sister Outlaw gets diversity points for focusing on an underrepresented ethnic minority in America's media landscape. Oh sure, there's a gay Filipino character in the series Rick & Steve: The Happiest Gay Couple in All the World ( plus anything featuring out comic Alec Mapa ) . But I don't know of many shows with Filipina-American lesbians.
So it's with sadness that I'm carping about Sister Outlaw's structural flaws and flubbed details instead of praising its PC quotient. The show's missteps make Sister Outlaw feel amateurish.
From the outset, we assume that the butch Joey ( Joey Flores ) and femme Marina ( Je Nepomuceno ) are a lesbian couple—they wake up together in bed after Marina has a nightmare.
Marina's work visa is about to expire and she doesn't want to be deported to the Philippines. So Joey starts thinking up ways of keeping Marina home in Chicago.
Oh, by the way, Joey and Marina are actually platonic lesbian friends who are secretly pining for each other ( we find out this important plot point a few scenes later ) . And Joey's family doesn't know that she's a lesbian, despite her super-butch appearance.
Joey's metrosexual brother, Jason ( Louie Sison ) , agrees to marry Marina ( whom he thinks is hot ) . We also get visits from Oscar, who swishes it up since he's transitioning to become Carrie. ( Chip Payos gets great laughs as he toys with his newly implanted boobs. )
Just when you think things are neatly wrapped up between lovers and siblings, Montreal tacks on a visit-from-the-Mother scene that is far too rushed and dramatically superfluous. It may give co-director Giau Truong a chance to don a white wig and frumpy dress, but the scene is anticlimactic.
Co-directors Truong and Helen Young do an okay job with Sister Outlaw's disjointed script, but they really should have paid closer attention to little details.
At Sister Outlaw's second performance, Ike Cheung's set featured August 2009 copies of Gay Chicago Magazine and Chicago Free Press as props ( no Windy City Times? ) . Yet in one funny scene, WNBA fanatic Joey bemoans the fact that Chicago has no professional women's basketball team ( apparently she's unaware of the 2006 arrival of the Chicago Sky ) .
Call me snide for being such a nitpicker with Sister Outlaw's distracting problems with plotting and chronology. But artistic acumen and accuracy are needed if we really want these important LGBTQ issues to be taken seriously.
