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| Who's arresting who? Daric Gutierrez playing Officer Derek taking in Amalia (Molly) Arroyo played by Alix Hudson (Photos by Carla Garcia, courtesy of the production) |
Even
more amusing than swinging a big blunt stick at the head of a Donald
Trump piñata, director Roxanne Tapia's joyful production of Welcome
to Arroyo's cracks open Kristoffer Diaz's playful and comedic
exploration of (some of the important) edgy divides in Manhattan's
Lower East Side Nuyorican culture. Forgive me for being a bit dazzled
by the show: I belly-laughed my way through the 90 minutes, which delivered
if not Aristotelian catharsis, the kind of relief that can come from
laughing oneself silly.
The
play is set in 2004, though it's unclear why Diaz picked that year
and not another. There's no mention in the play of the main event
that year: no reference to the NYPD giving protesters to the
Republican Convention a taste of Guantanamo on the Hudson. But it was
a year in which there was a marked uptick in the number of Latinos
harassed by the NYPD's bogus-to-the-max Stop and Frisk Program.
According to the New York Civil Liberties Union, 89,937 Latinos were
stopped and frisked that year, up from 44,581 in 2003. In 2005 the
number would swell to 115,088. In 2006 147,862. The number peaked in
2011, a year in which 223,740 Latinos were stopped and frisked by the
NYPD. As law enforcement policy Stop and Frisk was completely
illegitimate, and has been acknowledged as such. But as an effective
means of social control, huge hassle and painful distraction to
Latinos who were losing more and more ground to developers gobbling
up prime LES real estate--very effective.
I
mention this because early on there's a moment in the play when
Diaz's graffiti-art-appreciating NYPD beat cop (played by Daric
Gutierrez) busts Amalia “Molly” Arroyo (played by Alix Hudson)
for tagging the back of the police station, a provocative grief
response to the recent loss of her mother. The nakedly frightened
look in Hudson's eyes when he approached her put the truth to those
statistics. And the dialogue is informed. Molly's only 18, but
clearly she knows the drill:
Officer Derek: Stay right there, drop the can, hands on the wall.Molly: You're like two steps behind, son. Should be up to frisking me already.Officer Derek: Are you carrying any weapons and/or narcotics on your person at the current moment?Molly: You sound all young. And you don't want to frisk me?…Officer Derek: Young lady I understand that you're frightened. You've probably never been in trouble with the law before. But don't worry, it's my job to get you back on the right track.Molly: You gotta be fucking kidding me.
And
then because it's a comedy, they fall in love. And then because it's
a fantasy, she punches him out. I don't usually laugh at acts of
violence, but I roared at that slug.
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| Latina cultural historian Lelly Santiago played by Cristina Vigil |
Tapia
makes sure that none of these considerations are overshadowed by the
show's party-like atmosphere and improbable love stories. They're
integrated into her direction as she deftly moves the characters
around the multi-level set she designed with Hudson. Starting with
Lelly Santiago played by a bespectacled Cristina Vigil.
Bursting
the confines of the proscenium from the get-go, Lelly's practically
in the audience herself bursting with excitement at what she's on the
verge of discovering. Standing outside of Arroyo's, which until
recently was a bodega but is now a bar, she's in a heightened state.
In a kind of thrall to the narrative she's spinning in her hopeful
imagination, she clues us into what she's investigating—Is an
originator of Latin Hip-Hop, a woman named Reina Rey who,
Rimbaud-like, vanished from the scene in 1980, the recently deceased
mother of Alejandro and Amalia Arroyo? And more personally, was Rey
the lady she bought candy from when she was a little girl living in
the LES? Are her scholarly worlds and personal worlds about to
collide?
These
are questions that have all kinds of redemptive possibilities for
Lelly who escaped tenement life for the Ivy League and the suburbs,
and who now wonders if the skills she's bringing back to Loisada are
even welcome at all. Is she a boorish over-intellectualizing
intrusive freak, or a talented persistent hands-on cultural historian
whose gifts will come to be valued by her former neighbors? Vigil,
who recently appeared in the Vortex Theater's production of Bless
Me, Ultima, expresses her character's struggle bodily: the lovely
young actress becomes in these soliloquies a kind of centaur--half-woman half-thoroughbred filly chomping at the bit, reining herself in,
straining against the starting gate of her own high stakes race to
clarity.
There's
this running joke in the play about the officer who ridiculously is
named Derek Jeter (yeah, that's the cop's name, and he's no Yankees
fan), and it got me thinking about names: why Welcome to Arroyo's
and not Santiago's or Garcia's or Lopez's?
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| From Wikipedia |
Arroyo.
It's a gulch, a marker in the dryness where the wet will be when the
rains come. But how to bring the rain, or in the case of the
bar/lounge, the customers? Trip Goldstein and Nelson Cardenal (played
respectively by the superbly comedic Jonathan Harrell and Matthew
Montoya making his low-key funny-as-hell Paraguas debut) have the
answer—local live performance. Deejaying at Arroyo's...well, it's
okay, but these homeboys want to rap. In fact, they want to rap with
every fiber of their being, and Tapia makes sure we feel it. Like two
school boys squirming in their seats, hands raised and waving down
the teacher standing only feet away from them, their irrepressible
need to rap has them spinning like the lps on their turntables.
Harrell,
who in Arroyo's somehow looks a full decade younger than his
actual age, is especially beautiful to watch in this regard--arms in
the air, torso twisting, dancing to the art form his character
passionately wants to be part of. His control over the volume and
speed at which the outrageous jokes issue from his fresh mouth lands
somewhere between the borders of impressive and phenomenal. Whooosh,
whooosh, the words come flying out through his smile, and
astonishingly are always intelligible. He doesn't just talk fast, he
communicates fast, and the show wouldn't be half as much fun were he
not in it.
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| Matthew Montoya, Jonathan Harrell and Rick Vargas |
Matthew
Montoya plays Nelson as Trip's affable more subdued partner who
nonetheless wins his share of laughs. There's a bit when he
flicks the lights on and off to pretend they have strobe effects.
It's funny but telling—Nelson will make do with whatever he's got
to work with, but oh he wants more. But Trippy Trip and Nelly Nel are
up against Alejandro's closed-mindedness, and they can't budge him
from his magical thinking and the mantra that affirms it:
Alejandro: A bodega needs to be a bodega. A bar needs to be a bar. We do what we're supposed to do the way we're supposed to do it. The customers will come....It worked for my mother.
Rick
Vargas, who was trained in theater at Northwestern, thoroughly
embodies Alejandro, the sturdy and dignified barkeep displaced by
grief who's struggling to manage this unfamiliar place he's created
in a blur in the month since his mother died—is it a bar or a
lounge and what the heck's the difference? Fully present, Vargas is
an actor's actor who conveys more with the placement of his
suspenders than many others do with an entire costume change. The
distracted way he handles the receipts as he tries to lose himself in
accounting chores lets us know business is not what's primarily on
his mind. Contrasted with the very touching moment when he reaches
for Lelly in an embrace of acceptance; he enfolds her completely,
pulls her to his heart, and they both regain a sense of equilibrium.
He
plays Alejandro with an acute sensitivity to the character's
condition as a son in the throes of deep loss. He's weighed down by
his filial responsibilities; they keep him locked in ritualistic
routines of hope. But few customers appear, no matter how briskly he
wipes down the bar and polishes the already pristine stemware. He
clocks in and out just as his mother did--he's holding a place for
her. In time, he'll let it go.
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| Rick Vargas as good listener Alejandro Arroyo warming to Lelly Santiago played by Cristina Vigil |
These
serious emotional meanderings through the arroyos of grief and
renewal are punctuated by moments of high camp and hilarity. None so
much so as when Daric Gutierrez draws his roller brush from his gun
holster to aim his desire at Molly's tag on the police station wall.
It mimics DeNiro's classic “You looking at me?” moment in Taxi
Driver, but it's hysterically funny in its sheer inspired
goofiness.
Which
brings me to his love object, the rebellious Molly Arroyo played as a
hell raiser on steroids in a very fine and moving comedic performance
by Alix Hudson.
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| Alix Hudson playing Molly talking to her big brother Alejandro played by Rick Vargas |
Hudson,
who dyed her hair dark for this role, gives her versatile all: from
her perfectly polished Nyurican accent...her full-throated
head-thrown-all-the-way-back laugh of sisterly derision...her
shoulders-hunched-forward ferocious charging through “the streets”
to paint, come what may...the way she holds the can in her almost
trancelike, prayerful miming of the act of spraying an imaginary
wall...the ardent first kiss instead of a poke in the eye she lays on
Officer Derek Jeter --in all of these she breathes puffs
of poetic breath into Amalia's contours, and finds (and exposes) the
many tender, raw parts of her homegirl's innards, the wounded
loneliest places that she's healing in her art. It's
a beautiful, striking and vulnerable performance. Somewhere Dionysus
is smiling.
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| Viva Vela! |
Tapia's
painterly use of color is subtly
sophisticated. Because of the liveliness of her actors one never
notices the monochromatic palette until it's replaced with the
vivacious brightly-colored panels by muralist Sebastian "Vela"
Velasquez,
and the vitality that has always been there, hiding in some realm of
potentiality, is discovered and revealed.
There's
a fantasy scene in which Reina Rey (also played by Hudson) kicks the
boys out of the deejay booth and takes the mic. Tapia's direction
here is pared down, minimalist, the action plays out almost in slow
motion, relaxed but not casual. When Rey takes the mic it's with a
deliberate purposeful sense of inevitability, of cultural history
being made even if it remains underground. The moment is now, you
were either there or you weren't.
Director Roxanne Tapia has taken the mic. It feels like a fulfillment for Teatro Paraguas, maybe even a turning point. In the program's Director's Notes, she writes:
I love that Arroyo's lounge is a place where the Lower East Side community can come together. A place that unites them and gives them something they can't get anywhere else. Teatro Paraguas is that, here in Santa Fe!
That's it. That's all I got. Enjoy the show!”
Welcome
to Arroyo's will play through April 24th, Thursday –
Saturday at 7:30 pm and Sunday at 2:00 p.m. At Teatro Paraguas, 3205
Calle Marie, Santa Fe, NM (505) 424-1602 www.teatroparaguas.org
$18 general, $12 limited income Pay-what you wish Thursdays
