Election Section

Over the stage of a tiled plaza, backed by a screen framed by flags of the Western Hemisphere—not so much draped as running together, a Rorschach test— are projected words of Simon Bolivar, the Liberator, of how we’re the children of one America, out of different origins and different colored skins: “This dissimilarity is of the greatest significance.” 

These words were spoken almost 200 years ago, and their continued veracity is tested on this set (Christina LaSala’s design). 

The dual nature of the U.S. premiere of Fronteras Americanas, staged by TheatreFIRST at Mills College, soon becomes plain: playing the author of the piece (Argentinian-Canadian playwright Guillermo Verdicchia, who first achieved notice a decade ago playing himself in this play) is Bay Area actor and comedian Ben Ortega, of Peruvian origin. Identifying the Latinos in the audience, Verdicchia/Ortega separates them from “the gringos.” The piece has been written to be seen by an Anglo audience, and the performer’s ambition is to tell about himself, a Latino among gringos, of his trip home to Argentina, to be a kind of an Everylatino before Anglo onlookers—and maybe a little bit of a gadfly. 

Almost immediately, another character’s introduced—a Mexican bandito from central casting, guns blazing, grinning, shouting—an Alfonso Bedoya impression, for all the world. But the performer peels off the mustachio and proceeds to perform a comic striptease, assisted by the audience, of the bandoliers and the rest of “my old Halowe’en costume.” In place of this kitschy joke, Verdicchio/Ortega introduces another figure, a Chicano or Pachuco, whose name has so puzzled Anglos he’s taken on a venerable English name: Wideload. 

Wideload struts through and banters with the audience, playfully baiting them at times (extolling local neighborhoods: “Piedmont—you got professionals, you got families ... you got professional families! ... So how ‘bout a Chicano for a neighbor? Liven up the neighborhood--you like music?”). 

Wideload also interrupts and burlesques the often heartfelt tale (bordering on confession) of “the other guy in this piece—that neurotic Argentinian”-- the playwright Guillermo’s Canadian education and his journey back to Argentina, terrified he’ll be questioned about doing his military service. “Don’t you hate to go to the theater and have some guy just talk about his life?” cracks Wideload; “What about plays? Remember plays?” 

But this is cabaret in more ways than set design. Guillermo’s tale rambles through his arrival in Chile (he’ll sneak into Argentina over the Andes) and the shooting of an unknown man in the street outside his hotel window the night he arrives (the memory sticks with him; he identifies with the corpse, traces of which seem to follow him: “I realize I have willed this to happen!”) to his nausea just before his flight back, his visit to a brujo who administers a potion that brings up further memories—of his fear and disgust over other latinos. 

Meanwhile, Wideload discourses on Tango “forbidden by Pope Pius X, it was born of a gaucho’s crude attempts to walk”), on The Latin Lover (“always being reincarnated ... a little secret: Latins aren’t sexier than Anglos; the difference is we like it—and practice, a lot!”), the Drug War, a movie audition for a Latino role (“a short guy in a dirty suit—perfect for me!”)—even the difference between ferrets and avocados (one northern and cold, the other southern and tropical: “It takes generations to domesticate a ferret, but only one to revert to a feral state ... Avocados make lousy pets; never give an avocado to a ferret!.”). 

It’s all sketched out in pantomime and much mugging by the indefatigable Ben, directed by the able Wilma Bonet—with constant counterpoint onscreen, the media projections designed by Verdicchia and theatreFIRST Artistic Director Clive Chafer. 

An ambitious trip, with many sidetrips, that seems to end where it began— “Where I make the most sense, in this Noah’s Ark of a nation ... Big, clean—back in Canada!” 

It occurred to me that aspects of the script that seemed a little too much at loose ends, dropped threads unconcerned with being picked up, were due to being intended for an Anglo-Canadian audience. But the Whitmanian cry of triumph at the end declares for the border itself as being home. “I am the Pan-American Highway!” Before intermission, Wideload told us we were all strangers, going through the show together, to find “a common bond, a point of reference ... it’s a theory, anyway ... maybe what you all have in common is, you’re listening to me!”  

Verdicchia’s declared his ambition to make monologue function as dialogue; a fastchanging, somewhat amorphous script often diverts or entertains more than informs or draws out. But the most intriguing aspect, not fully developed, of this collage of a show with its layers of text and of identities of speaker (and of spectator?) is not just the self or stranger-as-other, but the Other-within-the-self: as the screen reads “Towards un futuro post-Columbian,” Ben/Guillermo (whose tour-de-force this is) says, ecstatically: “Me, your neighbor, your dance partner!” 

8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays through Feb. 13 .  

Tickets: Thurs. and Sun. $18; Fri. and Sat. $22; half-price for those under 25 years old. Seniors, students, and members are $3 off. 

Mills College, 5000 MacArthur Blvd., Oakland. 

For tickets and information, call 436-5085 or visit www.theatrefirst.com. ›