Playwright: Matthew Paul Olmos. At: Teatro Vista at Chicago Dramatists, 1105 W. Chicago Ave. Tickets: At the door or www.teatrovista.org; $25. Runs through: Dec. 9
Viewed at the final preview, the world premiere of "i put the fear of mexico in 'em" (sic) was not ready for prime time. There were a few small performance glitches, but the play itself was the problem, not the capable production by Teatro Vista's co-artistic director, Riccardo Gutierrez.
Middleclass gringos Jonah (Bryn Packard) and Adray (Cheryl Graeff), from "north of Los Angeles," visit the Mexico/California border town of Tijuana seemingly on impulse, without apparent plan or purpose. As the play opens, they are forced at rifle point into a refuse-strewn back alley by Efren (Miguel Nunez) and Juana (Charin Alvarez), a threatening Mexican couple. Jonah and Adray fear robbery, rape, ransom, torture and/or murder—as one would if the situation were real—but Efren and Juana don't do any of those things. Although they aggressively mindfuck the Yanks, they are equally as lacking in purpose. Absence of motivation is a problem with Matthew Paul Olmos's still-new script.
Eventually one realizes Olmos is concerned with issues rather than with characters. Through magic realism, Efren and Juana know things about the Norte Americanos that they could not possibly know. They even know their adolescent son and Jonah and Adray's teen daughter have fallen in love that very morning back in Los Angeles, although the Mexican family doesn't live there. We see offspring Angela and Javier (Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel and Marvin Quijada) as Anglos attack Javier and Angela falls out of love with him. Back in Tijuana, Jonah and Adray also encounter a mariachi, a drug dealer and a policeman.
The shifting foci and improbabilities are imposed upon a gritty and naturalistic setting so Olmos can raise all the issues touching Latino-Yankee relations: immigration, racism (blatant and latent), criminality (real or perceived), sexuality, employment, empowerment and exploitation. He puts Jonah and Adray on the defensive most of the time, but doesn't let his Mexican characters completely off the hook: They are torn between playing into Yankee expectations and fears by choice, and a natural deep resentment of being forced into shallow, common stereotypes.
The play ends as arbitrarily as it began, without completing character arcs or story arcs, such as they are. Olmos doesn't offer solutions in a play that's purposeful but not hopeful. Merely airing the issues may be helpful, but Olmos has too many things on his plate with too many focal shifts in 95 minutes, while the not-fully-developed magic realism techniques obscure the message. Some aspects of Olmos's play recall the pseudo-Latino setting of Tennessee Williams's Camino Real, but Williams wrote a fever dream Romance while Olmos offers a cultural nightmare from which neither Mexicans nor Anglos can awake. Regina Garcia's suitable alley set is clever, colorful and claustrophobic.
