Playwright: Karen Zacarías
At: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn St.
Phone: ( 312 ) 443-3800; $10-$25
Runs through: Feb. 27
'Art is about beauty,' says Mariela Salvatierra, the consort of award-winning Mexican artist José Salvatierra. 'Nowadays, art is about TRUTH,' replies American art-historian Adam Lovitz, unaware that in this barren desert far from his tidy cosmopolitan universe, truth wears many faces.
Arriving in the company of young Blanca Salvatierra in response to a fraudulent announcement of her father's demise, the naive scholar finds himself confronted with widely varying accounts of events leading to the uneasy relationships he observes, beginning with the ranch that José, hoping to take advantage of the international interest in Mexican art sparked by superstars Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, attempted to fashion into an artists' colony. Its would-be host now Rages Against The Dying Of The Light amid the ruins of his vain enterprise, tended by his wife and his sister.
Even with the Grim Reaper lurking at the door, however, furtive questions still haunt the drought-ridden estate: Did José really paint the picture on which his fame rests? If not, did Mariela? Is her estranged daughter's career also founded on a mother's unrecognized talent? And what happened to the son, who may—or may not—have been killed in a fire? The 'factual' answers, when they are finally revealed, turn out to be less important than the destruction vested on these suffering souls by lies, jealousy and withering self-abasement—all the more terrible for being rooted in good intentions, with which the proverb says that the road to hell is paved—until only cleansing death and exile can free the survivors.
Karen Zacarías speculates on the cost of dreams pursued and deferred in a starkly written drama steeped in the intensity of classical tragedy, amply fulfilled by Henry Godinez' direction of a meticulously selected ensemble led by Sandra Marquez and Ricardo Gutierrez as the tempestuously matched Mariela and José. ( 'You love me most when you hate me' taunts José, to which his faithful spouse wearily concurs, 'Especially when I hate you.' ) Against the vivid backdrop of John Boesche's panoramic video-projections of a sun-seared wasteland and the fatal visions engendered by its shape-shifting surface, they together invoke the sorrow and loneliness of passions too long festering in silence.