Weak material sinks great acting

Blood-soaked "El Grito del Bronx" doesn’t work

07/29/2009 10:00 PM

By MELISSA ALBERT
Contributing Reporter

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El Grito del Bronx Courtesy SAVERIO TRUGLIA

Theater
The program of “El Grito del Bronx” describes the play’s setting as a “poetic dreamscape,” but it inhabits far earthier territory. A partnership between Collaboraction Theatre and Teatro Vista, “Bronx” is nominally the tale of a woman trying to outrun the shadow of her violent family history. But more specifically it’s a blood-soaked exercise in histrionics and emotional heavy lifting. The fantastic actors rise to the occasion, but I wish it was for more considered material.

The play opens on a woman, Lulu (Sandra Delgado), on her wedding day. The geometric, bi-level set allows for action past, present and imagined to occur simultaneously, and Lulu, in bridal white, watches her history unfold: a hastily drawn sketch of a Bronx childhood and her powerful bond with her brother, Papo (as children they went by their given names, Magdalena and Jesus); her father’s theatrically rendered violence; and his eventual murder by Papo.

We learn in pieces that Papo was never punished for this early crime, and that he and his family move soon afterward to the blank white canvas of Ohio. The adult Lulu resides in another mostly white patch of America—Connecticut—where she’s shacked up with her reporter boyfriend. She talks about the brother of her childhood obsessively, but can’t acknowledge him in the present.

Papo (Juan Villa), we learn, is a serial killer. His murder of 18 people can’t be explained away as class fury—though Lulu, a Puerto Rican woman living in Connecticut, is a victim of exactly that.

Nor is it the result of paternal abuse, though his first murder seems to imply it. In fact, Papo is a maniac, and no insight can be gained from the relentless mining of a psychopath’s mind. Though Villa gives a chilling, gut-wrenching performance, finding nuance in the ravings of a lunatic, his character is too inaccessible to make for meaningful theatre.

More effective is the chorus of grieving mothers: that of Papo, of one of his victims, and of a young boy who died in an accident only marginally related to the play’s main plot. The three women are a soothing presence, though they distract only momentarily from the play’s lust for blood. People drink it, lick it, paint with it, gurgle on it audibly as they die. Bordello lighting soaks the stage in red, a redundant touch.

This crimson nightmare is the interior landscape of Papo’s mind, and of Lulu’s memories. From inside that dank place, she heaps abuse on her besotted boyfriend, belittling his job, his love, and his proposals (he responds to this with more proposals). Delgado, a charming actress, isn’t given much with which to charm, and it’s hard to imagine anyone waiting around long enough to pierce her armor.

But she’s got to end up in that white dress somehow, staring down her past over the barrel of a wedding aisle.


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