Playwright: Jose Rivera
At: Bailiwick Repertory
Phone: ( 773 ) 883-1090; $22-$25
Runs through: April 10
You could call this play 'Women are from Venus, Men are from Mars,' as Gabriela—for whom the moon represents the poetic nature of the Eternal Female—clashes over love, lust and beauty with her career soldier husband, Benito. Their being Latino almost is beside the point, although as imagined by Puerto Rico-born playwright Jose Rivera it provides them with attitude as well as pungently poetic language.
Rivera's typical magic realism plays tricks with reality. References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot begins as a dreamscape with Cat, Coyote and the Moon as characters who converse with each other and with Gabriela. In the comic first scene, Coyote sells sex to Cat—who sells it back—when he really has cat food on his mind. However, a harsh and more realistic tone emerges in Scene 2 when Benito returns from his all-night duty at a military base near Barstow, Calif. The cat-and-coyote dreamscape has been an animistic foreshadowing of the human relationship.
Written in 2000 but set 10 years earlier, the play carries a strong anti-military message. Benito is a veteran of the first Persian Gulf War who's emotionally scarred and closed from the things he saw and did. Gabriela longs for the open and loving husband she married six years earlier. He seems to want only a beer and a fuck, but its' really more complex than that. Benito wants a predictable life without questions or ambitions, other than retiring from the Army at 38 with full benefits. He'll defer all dreams until then. But Gabriela wants more now, and her dreams drive the play, literally.
After keenly establishing the play's emotional core, Rivera nearly punctures his own balloon by introducing social and economic issues that are too real-world specific for his poetic rumination on romance: Gabriela wants more than minimum wage work, Benito reads at a 4th grade level, military service offers upward mobility for underclass Latinos. A little reality goes a long way as these issues aren't pertinent to the emotional center, and don't play to Rivera's originality which is his image-laden language and earthy energy. Fortunately, originality dominates as Rivera's style trumps his story.
Bright young director Sean Graney grasps the material and interprets it clearly, nurturing performances with edge and energy. John Byrnes ( Coyote ) and Nicole Adelman ( Cat ) tear things up with their comic dry hump. Ivan Vega ( Benito and the Moon ) and Marsha Villanueva ( Gabriela ) effectively alternate ferocity and vulnerability. Ricardo Gamboa provides eager charm as a lovestruck and horny adolescent, a persistent memory of the boy Benito once may have been. Graney's simple scenic design has primitive painterly appeal, but is awkward to manipulate. Lighting designer Jared Moore's strip footlights—rarely seen anymore—provide atmospheric green-and-red tinted moonlight.
