I actually saw this back in August, but remain buried in unwritten blog posts and real life. I’m working on it…slowly.
One of the fun things about The Empty Space is that they devote a part of each season to newer, less well known plays, often ones written by younger playwrights.
In this case, the play is by Andrew Rincon, who lists “he/she/they” as pronouns, but seems to go mostly by “they” in the interviews and articles I was able to find. I will therefore use that for this most.
They identify as queer, which has transformed from the slur it was often used as when I was a kid, to a broader descriptor that tends to encompass a degree of gender and sexual fluidity and ambiguity. It works well for that.
The play itself could also be described as queer - fluid, ambiguous, refusing neat categories. It is about love, but far broader than the “boy and girl meet cute” kind of story.
The play is also saturated with poetry - references, quotations, and poetic dialogue. It opens with the voice of God, so to speak, who describes herself as a poet. Creation itself is poetry - something that many of us see in the holy writings of most religious traditions.
The Poet (as the program describes the deity) goes on to introduce the plot, starting with the fact that Cupid is having an existential crisis. Too many centuries of seeing love go wrong has left her jaded, hating humanity, and ready to give the whole thing up and go away…somewhere.
So, she removes her wings, and prepares to go through a doorway to…wherever. She is interrupted by Valentine - yep, the saint - who takes her down to earth, and challenges her to one last contest before she goes.
These two have a history, it appears, although it isn’t entirely clear whether they were lovers or just frenemies - and does it even matter? They fight the same either way.
The challenge is to take a pair of lovers on journeys, at the end of which they will (hopefully) be ready to embrace each other. First deity back wins!
The lovers are not promising. Benny and Alejandro have just broken up, although neither can entirely understand why. Clearly, they both have baggage that they aren’t admitting they have, even to themselves.
Into this mess comes a fifth character, Betti, a dental hygienist who befriends Benny, and then falls badly in love with Cupid. Oh boy, this could get interesting.
That’s the setup, but I won’t spoil the plot beyond that. Ordinarily, I would say to go see the show, but in this case, the run has ended locally, so I guess you will have to wait for the next time.
I will give the hint that this is a comedy, not a tragedy, so, by convention, it should contain misunderstandings, revelations, and a final unveiling that leads to marriage. Or at least reconciled relationships. It is a fundamentally lighthearted play that happens to touch on some really serious and often dark topics - child sexual abuse, homophobia, mental illness.
It also has a lot of sexual content and language, so not really for kids. (A couple of my adult kids went, though, and liked it.)
The staging of this play reminded me a lot of when The Empty Space was at its former location, with a tiny stage, no real backstage, and a shoestring budget. Well, they still have the budget, but a good bit more space. For this play, everything was minimalist, cartoon-like and whimsical.
A play like this, therefore, cannot rely on dazzling effects, but instead depends on the skills and chemistry of the cast. Fortunately, this one worked quite well.
Central to the story is the relationship of Alejandro and Benny. Played by Salvador Vidaurri and Michael Hendrix respectively, this pairing really worked. They were believable as a pair of fundamentally tender young men, wounded in childhood, and struggling to find words for their feelings. Seriously, you just want to give them each a hug.
Since these characters are the “straight” ones (in theater terms, not sexuality, obviously), the humor involving them has to be played deadpan and straight-faced, which is not easy. So, kudos to both of them for excellent performances.
The broader humor takes place between Cupid (Victoria Olmos) and Valentine (Cameron Kovac), and again, this was a good pairing - they played well off each other and really did feel like they had thousands of years of history.
And then there was Betti, played by Nikki Flowers. What a live-wire, over-the-top, too-big-for-a-small-stage performance it was. I’m not sure I had seen Flowers in a larger role before, but she was hilarious.
Finally, Azra Joy played The Poet, visible only for the final bows. I liked the pacing of the storytelling, which tied together the various episodes.
I wasn’t particularly familiar with the play before this, so I really didn’t know what to expect. I should mention that a lot of the play is in Spanglish - Rincon is Columbian-American - but it isn’t hard to follow. I am not fluent in Spanish, but I did grow up in a neighborhood where it was often spoken. I found I could understand enough of what was said to get the jokes, and for many of the longer phrases, the character repeated it (more or less) in English. Which is also a very Spanglish way to do it.
As I said, this is one of those plays by younger, queerer, and browner voices, unapologetic for expecting audiences to get with the times. It was a fun experience, even for an old cishet white guy like me.
While this play has run its course, The Empty Space has three more plays this year, starting with Machinal by Sophie Treadwell, a classic that I am looking forward to seeing. Check them out.
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