REVIEW: The Other Americans (Arena Stage)
Seems a little busy in Southwest these days!
Arena Stage is on the cusp of having THREE concurrent shows on their stages for the first time in...I don't even know how long. Data, a silicon valley tech thriller, recently opened (I'm seeing it a bit late in the run), and later this month we're going to get a revised Death on the Nile for the Holidays. But right now? Emmy-winning comedian John Leguizamo is premiering his original drama, The Other Americans, in another case of the celebrity takeover of DC theatre. The three-time Tony nominee is known for his one-man shows that pop with brash comedy and commentary on the Latino condition, and Americans attempts to distill this into the archetypal "Great American Family Play" (GAFP), along the likes of Fences and A Raisin in the Sun. It’s a major get for Artistic Director Hana Sharif, in her inaugural season, and it reaffirms the importance of DC audiences in American theatre.
Book
Leguizamo has always placed his Latino (Colombian, specifically) identity at the forefront of his work. As the largest minority group in the country, it’s undeniably a rich narrative source to derive from, and for this I was excited to see a GAFP tackle it. Regrettably, the final result is a wiry hodgepodge of ideas that are constantly stealing the spotlight from each other, befuddling the main idea of the piece. In Americans, Nelson (Leguizamo) is the patriarch of a working-class Latino family in a 1998 Queens that is on the verge of gentrification. He owns a couple dozen laundromats, co-inherited from his father with his sister Norma (who runs hers separately). His wife, Patti, is a homemaker, and his daughter Toni is soon to marry a close family friend who works under Norma with her fast-growing laundromat enterprise. The play opens as the family hastily prepares for the return of the son, Nicky, following his release from a mental health facility. It’s not immediately clear what happened to Nicky, but while we’re waiting for him to spoon feed us the events later in Act I, we interact a little bit with the family in a slice-of-life way that still fails to capitalize on their characters’ individuality. This is underscored by some of the poorest writing of women I’ve ever seen in drama; Patti’s willingness to ignorance in this is frustratingly unexplained, only to be “reconciled” in the final hour, and Toni’s confusingly tactless dialogue seems to be blatantly written for a male role and changed at the last second. (There’s also a pregnant family friend who arrives at the house early in Act I, says a few lines, and goes upstairs to take a nap and is never heard from for the rest of the Act; her narrative input even in Act II is negligible.) I will concede that the few scenes in which Nelson isn’t present and the other characters have time to breathe are some of the best, but these are mostly limited to the start of Act II. Nicky’s character holds a lot of weight as the fulcrum of conflict within the family but is reduced to a shell of a man with an unexplained mental illness that was pushed to the edge by a hate crime. In some ways, this paradigm was reminiscent of One Jewish Boy, but with a more diluted toxicity. To add onto the PTSD and mental illness, Nelson is also not particularly the best father, and his abusive machismo helps nothing. (It also doesn’t help that Nelson constantly declares that his culture needs to drop the “victim” mindset, but merely sentences later will utter something in direct disagreement and with no outside input into the mixed message.) As the book juggles so many dark topics, its title begins to lose meaning: the one time it’s placed at the forefront of the plot, the “othering” of these Americans is just adding another straw to the camel’s back. I believe in Leguizamo’s ability to push these voices further from his own lived experiences, but there is still much work to be done before a true classic emerges from the marble. 2/10
Acting
The piece flails to prevent it being a one-man show, but it largely fails in this regard. Leguizamo, it seems, loves to hear himself talk -- whether that is via his character of Nelson, or via the other characters sounding just as brash contextually. But underneath the writer's stale self-insertive presentation is a story from the heart, which is more realized when the other characters are afforded the opportunity to present themselves. Nonesuch is proven more than by the standout Luna Lauren Velez's fragile Patti, an ensemble-anchoring matriarch blinded by her husband's selfish sleaze at the cost of all that she helped build. 5/10
Production
Ruben Santiago-Hudson’s tasteful direction gives a familial warmth, featuring nuanced side-activities by onstage characters and fostering a genuine attempt at community. Particularly, the Fichandler's in-the-round setup, organized by scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado, is splendidly utilized with time appropriate home goods and tchotchkes. The first-act costumes were well-dated and rife with Y2K kitsch -- I loved the candy bar phones on the hips -- but by the second, they felt a little more contemporary. (But I won't take points off for that, since that's kind of today's fashion anyway.) 7/10
Viz
The home that you stumble into when you enter the Fich’ feels authentic and lived-in. The kitchen is a bit untidy, the ambient bachata hums with flair from Justin Ellington's sound design, and there’s tasteful faux-70s-inspired 90’s décor in their warm, wooden house. The program, too, is homely, featuring three picture frames (one crooked, naturally) on wallpaper. My only real “problem” is the title, which implies a story of immigrant struggle — an element that does exist, but in the recesses of the play’s identity. 7/10
Verdict
Within a disheveled heap of misplaced dialogue and dramatic ideation is probably a profound drama about how an immigrant family’s relentless chase of the American dream becomes their undoing — but right now, The Other Americans remains un-excavated. 21/40
