El Channel, Latino Comedy Project at Center Stage, August 21 - 29

I had expected to like this show a lot more than I did.

I'd seen and really appreciated the clever videos spots in which Guillermo Deleon as the "BC -- born citizen" compares notes with Adrian Villegas, as the "Mex" illegal. You can catch them either at the Latino Comedy Project website or on YouTube. They ran on MTV and they've been nominated for an Emmy award.

In those one-minute sketches, each gets to shine. For example, in the one on "travel," Deleon plays the self-important yuppie citizen, progressively more appalled as Villegas cheerfully details, mostly in Spanish, the vicissitudes of crossing the border.

It's irreverent, fast and funny. If you don't speak Spanish, you see Villegas do his wild pantomime and babble; if you do speak Spanish, it's even better. Click on the image to take the ride.



Read more at AustinLiveTheatre.com . . . .

Cuentos y Risas, Teatro Vivo at Dougherty Arts Center, March 5 - 15

Teatro Vivo is always fun, and this evening of two one-act plays is no exception. Both were written by the group's artistic director Rupert Reyes. The opening piece, Two Souls and A Promise, was presented for the first time last August as one of several short pieces. At that time I commented, in part,

"With 2 Souls and A Promise, veteran Rupert Reyes offers us a meditation that starts in whimsy and finishes with reflections on social equality. Young lovers Joe and Lisa cuddle at night on a mountaintop beneath the stars and exchange romantic promises for their souls to search out one another, should they ever be separated. Uh-oh! And yes, when Lisa immediately insists on going alone to get the car, she hits the wrong gear and precipitates it over a cliff, leaving Joe alone in life. We see Lisa as a departing soul, cross-shaped in a choir robe, confused and then really annoyed at this turn of events before she whisks away into the darkness. In the distance, one hears the birth of a child.

"So far, so good, and in line with Reyes’ most recent Petra frolic on the comic machinations of the supernatural. Two scenes follow, echoing dialogue and some movement. In the first, Joe, aged and infirm, is surprised when his son Pablo brings home a new classmate, Lily, with an uncanny resemblance to Joe’s young love Lisa. The comedy arises as son Pablo seeks Dad’s advice on wooing the young lady, who is feeling eerily attracted to the older man.

"The following scene is a variant of the idea that delivers us the aged Joe witha daughter. Again, the offspring unexpectedly brings home a classmate for dinner, and Joe and the visitor feel a strange affinity. Visitor Albert is handsome, deferential and enthusiastic about their shared class in Chicano lit. Only hitch: he is black. Reyes has fun playing Joe’s ill-concealed hostility with the growing awareness of supernatural bonds between them. With this second skit Reyes deepens the piece considerably, moving from a comedy of identities to one of social reconciliation."

The current production is only slightly modified. Reyes has walk-on scenes at the beginning and after the first reincarnation, in which he poses as a writer scribbling variations on a story -- a hint to those in the audience who might get confused by the double run-through of the reincarnation idea. Mateo Barrera is again cast as Joe and displays fine timing. For some reason this time I found him more convincing in the opening scene as the adolescent Joe, yet he still plays a convincing older Joe without resorting to makeup or to exaggerated mannerisms.

Karinna Pérez, recently in Teatro Vivo's Fantasmaville, plays the young girl throughout, and Jarrede Tettey plays Albert the visiting new student. At a key moment in the scene, each picks up the gaudy little heart charm that Joe's vanished girlfriend left to him along with the promise to return. It's an obvious little moment, almost cheesy in its simplicity, and yet it works.

I found that this time through I was again struck by the passage given to Albert. He says that his father was in the military, and he once observed a table of servicemen and their wives from Puerto Rico, in which blacks were married to whites, Latinos and Latinas, representing for him a new idea of equality and cordiality.

The second piece, Crossing the Río, is a skit about policing the U.S.-Mexico border along the newly constructed wall (Reyes' comment: "A brown people not welcome sign if I have ever seen one. We should be ashamed.") He deals with the absurdity of the wall by using it as a setting for slapstick. Reyes himself plays a tough ole Immigration officer, saddled with a brand new recruit who just happens to be his son (Mario Ramírez). The old guy has swallowed the administration's line on the border and he sputters, growls and fumes about the aliens and terrorists menacing American soil -- with the amusing quirk of making those macho Americano remarks mostly in Spanish.

A cheerful young man (Mateo Barrera) pops out of the wall but the old "Migra" officer is in no condition to apprehend him, so the job falls to the probationary officer (Ramírez). It turns out that they're the best of friends already, a fact that puts the new officer in a tight spot -- and even more so with a second arrival, the guy's sister (Karinna Pérez) , because she and the young guy are already sweet on one another. Gangsters have made threats, and the brother and sister don't dare try the regular crossing points.

There's amusing debate and further slapstick, especially when Reyes gets back into the scene, and eventually the young officer has to make an early career decision.

Some of the initial comedy between Karinna Pérez and Mario Ramírez comes as she is searching for vocabulary in English -- though many of her later utterances are much more colloquial, sophisticated and grammatically correct. But we can cut the playwright some slack on this and just enjoy the laughs, instead.

At the end of the piece Reyes comes forward to emphasize the company's respect for those who protect our borders -- ". . . and we're just having a little fun with them."

The piece doesn't pretend to provide any deep analysis of the complexities of nationality, migration or border control, but dwells instead on exaggerated beliefs, bureaucratic missions, and intergenerational incomprehension. And that's material ripe for making comedy.

Fantasmaville, Teatro Vivo at Rollins Theatre, November 5 - 16

Raul Garza’s Fantasmaville won last year’s Latin Playwrights award even before it had been produced.

I’ve been anticipating the show for months, because I read the play last August. In fact, I auditioned for the “cranky old man” role of Akers, which seemed to be the best fit for my age, if not for my temperament.

"Fantasmaville" ("Haunted City") is here. Garza sets it in east Austin, complete with references to César Chavez Avenue, local schools, Capital Metro, Wheatsville Co-op, and even to a recent project to establish a dog park.

As I read the script I was charmed by the magical realism of the piece, in which an enigmatic spirit in the shape of a gigantic raccoon has been watching over the middle-aged party lady Flor, frequenter of beer halls who hasn’t lost a single dice game in the past 18 years.

And by the humor -- Flor’s daughter Celeste is an ambitious, underemployed idealist who, without informing her husband, jumps at the chance to offer foster care – only to discover that their new ward is in fact the cheeky local paperboy, Joaquín.

The chorus for this confusion is a pair of muddle-brained beer drinking buddies, Gustavo (Donato Rodríguez III) and Freddy (Rupert Reyes), operating on the principle in Tecate veritas.

Teatro Vivo has given the piece a beautiful production in the Rollins Theatre at the Long Center. The scene looks bleak when you arrive – a couple of couches and a bed, no more – but the panels behind each of these furnishings transform into video screens. With a click of the back projectors the scene switches from a bus in motion across an animé landscape to a living room to the interior of a tavern. Actors still have to tote a bit of furniture between scenes from time to time, and the faint glow of the screens silhouettes such moves – in fact, after one beloved character collapses and dies under a magical hex, that actor then has to scuttle backstage across that dimly glowing background. But such minor visual giveaways can certainly be forgiven.

Patricia Arredondo as the prancing, partying Flor has great gusto and a pack of juicy put-downs for some of the other dubious ladies of the neighborhood. Arredondo may just be herself, for her blurb in the program could accurately be applied to the character: “Patricia Arredondo is a versatile and energetic actor, delivering performances that teem with physicality, comedy and sheer reckless abandon. . . She is every bit as crazy as she looks.”

As I watched the action unwind, I realized that this is not, in fact, a happy story at all. The real protagonists of this play, Flor’s daughter Celeste (Karinna Pérez) and her Anglo husband Martin (Chase Wooldridge) are in serious conflict both with one another and within themselves.

In the opening scene on the bus Martin tells us a rambling story about middle school, twenty-two years ago, when he turned his back on his Tejano friends because they weren't “cool.” He is still looking for one of them, to re-establish that contact.

Celeste is angry at her irresponsible mother, frustrated with the lack of political engagement of her Latino neighbors, and unsuccessful in her search for full time work. Celeste tells the phlegmatic, pragmatic social worker Sonia that since she can’t get a real job, she is thinking of starting a family.


But Celeste never voices that desire to her husband Martin. Never. She speaks harshly to him, rejects his bumbling efforts to reason with her or console her, and insists on being left alone. Not even in a final, maybe hopeful scene on the bus do we hear a word of reconciliation between them -- earlier, Sonia coached Martin to put his arm around the despairing Celeste, but the gap between them persists.

Akers, the scrawny, resentful white man on the block is so spiteful and dismissive of "mojados and the rest of those people," including specifically Celeste, that he goads Martin into punching him out. David Blackwell in this role has a reptilian stillness and flat Texas accent that makes him scarily real -- all the more so when we learn of the cross-cultural scarring that made him that way.

Garza works to balance the two visions of Latino experience -- the magical, imaginative celebration of pleasures on one hand, and the tight-lipped lower-middle-class dealing with daily difficulties, on the other. But the melding of those two traditions is a brittle and not entirely successful one. Garza gives Celeste insight and information, but he has to resort to the "deus ex machina" of the raccoon spirit accompanied by a visitor from the afterworld to do so. The scene is entertaining, but we are not convinced that it provides any lasting spiritual solace to Celeste.

Erica Saenz as Sonia the friend and social worker is a solid, sympathetic presence, and Mario Ramírez as the newspaper boy Joaquín gives us a portrait of a Tejano who is disadvantaged but confident about his own abilities and future. They are the middle ground, really, representing Latinos who have faced economic and social realities and applied themselves to capture the possibilities.

In the end, Fantasmaville is a gentle, insistent admonition to the audience that real people populate east Austin. This is no brownface comic show; it is a reminder that while cultural differences persist, Tejanos face the same dilemmas as the rest of us.

Fantasmaville page on Facebook, including performance photos

Click for Jeanne Claire van Ryzin's pre-opening piece in the Statesman's XL, November 6

Click for thoughtful review in Austin Chronicle of November 13 by Avimaan Syam

Click for review by Joey Seiler on Austin Chronicle website

Click for review on Decider.com and interview with playwright Raul Garza

KUT "Arts Eclectic" audio feature (2 minutes)

KUT audio feature "A Funny Take on Gentrification," including dialogue from Fantasmaville, commented by Julie Moody, with interviews (4 minutes)