Sometimes, you just dread seeing a show and wonder if you’re getting too jaded to do this sort of thing anymore, that you just can’t abide any more [insert that kind of show here].
I have to confess to a bit of worry about that with Laughs in Spanish; however, as it turned out, Dámaso Rodríguez’s production of Alexis Scheer’s play was most decidedly not that. Instead, it was a glorious, giddy trip through the art scene of Miami, a neighbourhood that, like many other downtown areas in US cities, has gone from hardcore industrial rundown factories to even more hardcore gentrification, something that’s definitely a two-edged sword: if the area doesn’t become more upscale (too many times read “pretentious”), then it will continue to edge downward, choking off any other possibilities of growth. In both cases, the area’s original residents are either driven out or consumed by the change.
Scheer’s work, written in a mix of English (mostly) and Spanglish (enough that the programme included a guide to common phrases), is, wow, just so full of energy and fun and people shouting at each other. It all reminded me of my family in my young days—with everyone talking all at once, everyone managing to simultaneously sort out the various conversations, keep track of them all and know, just know, when it’s really important to listen. I knew that kind of talking at large when I was growing up.
Us kids knew we’d won the conversation lottery one Thanksgiving when, in the midst of that linguistic chaos, one of us (me) said something that stopped the entire conversation. My grandmother was hassling me about when I was going to get married—I was 17 at the time. I tried all the polite things that she just ignored, then ended up shouting, “because I’m GAY, Grandma, OK, THAT’S WHY!” That did the trick. Dead silence. It also made milk shoot through my brother’s nose. Good times, even if my father waited for quiet and then said, “you shouldn’t have said that, Keith.”
Plays used to be constructed like this all the time, where finally a character just couldn’t not speak utter truth—the ethnicity changed, though. It could be Italian, or Jewish, but never ever plain ol’ white American. (They’re all too polite for this kind of madcap linguistic romp.) But the rest of us knew how to talk in those days. The key as an actor playing such a role was to keep going no matter what. Sooner or later, everyone would figure out the point, after all. (The Pinter Pause is this moment’s exact opposite, when two people have absolutely run out of things to say, sometimes decades ago, and so just stop talking in that kind of awful moment in which literally nothing happens on stage.)
Not so here. One of the very funniest moments in the play was when—at the very same moment—two great reveals are given with two of the five characters (Carolina and Juan, played by Diana Garle and Gabriell Salgado) talking to and over and with each other. Both reveals are really big, big pieces of information, both need to be said and, sweetest of all, when the two actors drop those bombs, there is a moment in which both stop dead, look, really look at each other and then, and only then, really hear what the other has said, which causes both a major advancement in the plot, but also in their relationship with each other. I know some folks would have perhaps wished for a more polite exchange of news like folks waiting politely to unwrap each other’s Christmas present. That’s just not how people from some families talk. Other similar moments occur between Beth Pollack’s Mariana and Diana Burbano’s Estella: daughter and mother relationships can be, and here are, very fraught.
And another surprise reveal is played out over time, hesitantly and with great honesty, between childhood friends Mariana and Cheyenne Barton’s Jenny. The direction takes the time in a very fast-paced show to get that just so. It is a beautiful moment; I'll leave it for you when you see the show.
But my favourite moment was, for me, true magic: Estella, the mother who is also a telenovela star (soap opera actress in Spanish language television) has to present an early monologue she wrote for herself decades ago. Burbano stops the show. It’s a wonderful, loving, heartfelt moment in which a character could be played for mere absurdity and for stock purposes. Not here. Instead, it’s a moment in which Rodríguez allows the pace to slow way, way down, and to let Burbano have a moment to herself, for her daughter, and for us. And in that moment, the other characters on stage give Burbano room and do not move, though elsewhere, in Rodríguez’s skilled direction, they move a bit just to keep the stage picture alive. Here, Burbano is at the very centre of the stage, and everyone listens.
There are a number of in-jokes, which I appreciated as both an artist and an ex-professor, and those of us in on the joke laughed loudly, jokes about graduate school and the very too-trendy art world (even if that was also used to ask the role of the artist in a too-commercial art world), but they are thrown out quickly and the cast moves on.
A truly wonderful night: funny, moving, and loving. Who could ask for anything more? I sure couldn’t. Kudos, Seattle Rep, for this high quality work.