Bretta Gerecke’s imposing set for american (tele)visions – four giant copper-tinged cubes, stacked in pairs – promises an epic, but Victor I. Cazares’s script, boiled down, runs more along the lines of a domestic drama.
Initiated in 1999, this play took its time making it to the stage, or at any rate a New York stage (it had workshops, readings, and one pre-Covid production in Texas). A long time brewing, the script also – unfortunately – takes its time getting around to the good stuff.
Twelve-year-old Erica (Biana “b” Norwood), popping up between the cubes, serves as the central narrator of her family history. This is presented nonlinearly and accompanied by her own parallel quest involving a Pacman-style early video game, projected as a backdrop with epic sound effects. If you either sat out the early computer-game era or were born too late to be exposed to its slow, crude graphics, you may be immune to the nostalgic interludes meant to underscore Erica’s real-life challenges.
We meet her immediate family, undocumented Mexican immigrants, as they go wild with consumerist bliss amid the aisles of their local Walmart. (According to them, this is the first in the country, which would set the action in the early ‘60s: clearly the timeline has been jacked up). Carts full, they always reunite in the television department, there to gaze in awe at looming stacks of screens, projected on the theatre’s back wall.
The mighty cubes, it turns out, can be pried open to reveal two more intimate settings: the cramped living room of “half a double wide” trailer and – more invitingly – Walmart’s roseate toy aisle, where gender-nonconforming Erica stocks up on Barbies only to trade them for trucks purchased by her concomitantly nonconforming neighbor Jeremy (Ryan J. Haddad). Their negotiations are a highlight of an otherwise rather turgid, often incomprehensibly scrambled script.
The family is reeling from trauma. Erica’s brother, Alejandro, has died. When, where, at what age? The nonlinear script takes its time teasing out the story, as the author starts to hint, fractally, at a number of unsettling givens.
Apparently Alejandro did achieve adulthood. Their father (Raúl Castillo, exuding truculence) forced him to drop out of school early and start working to help support the family. Was Alejandro sexually involved with Jesse (the actor Clew, shouldering – confusingly – both roles), the homeless Vietnamese work friend he invited to stay? Looks that way – although how they hid their attraction in such tight quarters puzzles.
At some point, the mother of the family, Maria Ximena (Elia Monte-Brown), also perishes, when a truck’s brakes fail on a steep incline. How did she end up in the truck? You’ll have to wait to find out – and that straightforward segment is actually rather touching.
Bits of the family’s dysfunctional backstory get parceled out, and some developments beggar belief. Would the mother of a deceased gay son really proposition – physically maul, actually – his surviving lover, in an attempt to connect with the spirit of the departed? At least Monte-Brown gets to shine, later, in a fantasy segment in which she plays “Wal-martina,” dressed by specialty costumer Mondo Guerra in a vavavoom gown comprised of receipts and UPC codes.
Young Erica is pretty much typecast into braying and striking poses, so it’s a real treat when we get to meet her contrapuntal playmate. The minute Haddad, as Jeremy, starts making arch pronouncements, we’re thankfully released from the depressing confines of what writers of the ‘80s used to label “K-mart realism.”
Otherwise, it’s a long wait for a minimal payoff. There’s a strong story there, buried beneath the gimmickry. It’s as if this script got run through the shredder a few too many times.
Often the best impression one can take away from a murky production is the wish to see a standout performer resurface in the future. I can’t help wondering what marvelous use Charles Ludlam might have made of the charismatic, very game Haddad. He’ll go far.
american (tele)visions opened September 29, 2022, at New York Theatre Workshop and runs through October 16. Tickets and information: nytw.org
