Beauty Of The Father
Reporting from Off Broadway.
I’m Isa Goldberg.
Nilo Cruz’s new
play BEAUTY OF THE FATHER is an iconic celebration of love. Be
it romantic, familial or spiritual, it’s consistently Latin.
And therein lies its dramatic structure: equal parts telenovella,
magical realism and poetic drama.
But it’s drama,
clearly, that the playwright evokes as the ghost of Frederico Garcia
Lorca appears, posing for a portrait of himself dying which Emiliano
paints when he’s not just obsessing about his Moroccan boyfriend,
Karim, or his daughter Marina. As the story evolves she too will
fall in love with Karim.
Love while an obsession
is also a cure and BEAUTY holds out for the happy ending, even
though it arrives after lots of torture, usually because of love,
but sometimes because of politics. Hence, Lorca’s lament
at dying so young at the hands of Franco’s fascists.
Indeed there is a diversity
of elements here, some of which are esoteric even ethereal and
others which are down and dirty, the stuff of trashy romance. As
Lorca says with a comic edge “love has always been a forest
and I have never been able to see through the trees.” Dressed
in a white suit the playwright Lorca is almost always present and
usually invisible to the characters on stage with the exception
of Emiliano. And as played at the performance I saw by the understudy,
JoaquinTorres, he is captivating. Fey with a gaunt, handsome face –he
weaves through the story with graceful mimetic gestures.
The other characters
are real unto their telanovella version of reality. Pedro Pascal’s
Karim is a muscled boy toy. Elizabeth Rodriguez sustains the realism
of her role as Emiliano’s estranged daughter in search of
her father, coolly aloof from the poetry of Cruz’s language
as well as its melodrama. Priscilla Lopez is sexy as Emiliano’s
unrequited lover, but Ritchie Coster’s Emiliano is so boorish
in his narcissism. Indeed one wonders why these characters are
all so obsessed with this weak gay character along the lines of
Ennis Del Mar, the lonesome cowboy in BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN. Who needs
another emotional cripple to sympathize with?
Still, in BEAUTY OF THE
FATHER, acceptance proves a golden rule.
That’s This Week Off Broadway. I’m Isa Goldberg.
