America is so precariously, unharmoniously big—and our varied histories of expansion and migration so freighted, vexed, and mythologized—that the road-trip drama, as travelers from the Joad family to Sal Paradise to John Cusack and Daphne Zuniga make manifest, is our quintessential form. The journey, vast and symbolic, makes the pilgrim small, reduced to a dot moving imperceptibly along lines where millions of other dots are simultaneously moving and have moved before. The byways, as two new plays by Matthew Barbot and Kallan Dana are currently demonstrating, are thick with ghosts.
In Barbot’s the beautiful land i seek (la linda tierra que busco yo), now having its world premiere at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, those ghosts are shades of past, present, and future, come to visit two would-be assassins on one long, strange night of the soul. Dickensian echoes, while seasonal, aren’t the intention; Beckettian echoes are more to the point. It’s 1950, and Oscar (Alejandro Hernández) and Gris (Bobby Roman) are Puerto Rican freedom fighters, anxiously whiling away the time in a private compartment on a train from New York to Washington, D.C. They’re in motion, but still, there’s nothing to do but wait. This time, though, the tramps are taking their grievances to Godot, and they’re armed. Inside their boxy double-breasted suits, Oscar and Gris are packing Lugers, on a mission to kill President Truman.
As charged as our present moment suddenly is with the question of vigilantism, whether audiences are even aware of the historical truth behind its premise is one of the balls that Barbot’s audacious, quick-witted play keeps constantly in the air. Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola really did open fire on the Secret Service outside Blair House, where Truman was staying during a White House renovation, on November 1, 1950. They killed one cop and wounded another; Collazo was also shot and died. The specific and grisly catalyst for their attack had occurred two days before, when, in response to attempts by the pro-independence movement to take over Puerto Rico’s government, Truman had bombs dropped on the towns of Jayuya and Utuado. (It’s worth restating: A U.S. president bombed U.S. citizens — add it to the long list of “not included in most U.S. history curricula.â€) “My friend and I are on our way to kill you,†says Gris to a dandyish Truman (Daniel Colón), who swans into the compartment in the first of many surreal visitations. “Oh. I see,†replies the president airily. “Why? … The atomic bombs?†Gris’s righteous ire is knocked off-kilter: “…Different bombs,†he stammers, trying to remain severe. “But I’m mad about the atomic bombs, too.â€
Of the play’s two hitmen, Gris in particular is tormented by the question of whether their act will matter. He doesn’t want glory, but he does want to be remembered, for “it to count.†“What will make it different this time?†he asks Oscar, “What will make it stick?†Oscar, older and more outwardly stoic, has no guarantees. He’s resolved on martyrdom, while Gris wants outcomes, the promise of revolution. As playwright, Barbot sits between them, turning the mainstream obscurity of his protagonists into a biting political point, and reflecting poignantly on the long arc of history, which sure seems to take its sweet time bending toward justice. In terms of both tone and information, Barbot packs a lot into a condensed container, and does it with an overall light touch. With a few minor blips, the beautiful land impressively avoids slipping into history lesson mode, while at the same time managing to teach us a lot. And, though it’s driven by ache, it’s also never far from laughter, sometimes straight-up nuttiness. Colón and Ashley Marie Ortiz play a parade of uncanny guests to Oscar and Gris’s compartment, from a maniacal Christopher Columbus (Colón), constantly “discovering†and laying claim to everything, to, in a more sincere vein, Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican activist who the two men learn is visiting them not from the past but from the future (she, at least, knows their names). Later, they’ll even get to meet the “Writer†(Nate Betancourt, channeling Barbot), in a meta-turn that could easily go awry but that manages to walk the tightrope of cheekiness and theatrical efficacy. The highlights, though, have got to be Colón’s hilarious appearance as an extremely familiar-looking, and familiar-sounding, Alexander Hamilton, along with Ortiz’s as West Side Story’s Maria, dramatically heartbroken in her pretty white dress and really pushing the accent as she demands, “How many bullets are left, Chino? … How many can I kill … How many? And still have one bullet left for me?â€
What makes these cameos so rewarding is that Barbot doesn’t use them just for easy laughs — he keeps digging, reaching for richer, more difficult strains of both humor and angst. “I didn’t know any of the Founding Fathers were so brown,†says Gris, watching Hamilton bounce and rap his way around the compartment. “Some have theorized that Hamilton was of mixed background,†contributes Oscar with scholarly equanimity. “Does this change anything?†asks Gris. “I don’t know,†says Oscar, thereby neatly summing up pretty much all of the contention that came in the wake of Hamilton’s glory days. Meanwhile, Ortiz’s Maria becomes far more than the butt of a joke. After Gris, wiping her tears upon her first appearance, realizes that she’s wearing brown facepaint, the musical heroine flees in humiliation — but later she returns somehow changed. No longer able to sing, she speaks instead, weaving in and out of Spanish for the first time, searching and unsure but now full of real, fleshy memories. “I remember the powdered milk and cold cereal for breakfast at school and the teachers from America failing Bernardo and Chino until they dropped out,†she says. “I hated the way my love said my name. Sin acento, sin trino … ‘Muhrrhea’ … So heavy, so dead, so alien.â€
In another bittersweet twist, the beautiful land i seek takes its name from Puerto Rico’s national anthem, “La Borinqueña,†whose lyrics proudly purport that Columbus described the island with the title phrase upon landing. Throughout the play, which is subtitled in both Spanish and English, characters are struck with passing flurries of confusion about what language they’re speaking: “Are you speaking English now or Spanish?†Gris asks Oscar early on, and that feeling of slippage informs Barbot’s whole dramatic world. How do you hold onto identity, to ideals, in the long, choppy wake of colonization? How do you make sense of the violent liminality it leaves behind? How do you seek something more just, more beautiful?
Barbot’s play has a lot going for it, and if anything’s currently letting it down, it’s José Zayas’s direction, which often keeps things feeling plodding and earthbound when they could hop, skip, and shapeshift. There’s plenty of trippiness to revel in, but Zayas plays things straight: Eamonn Farrell’s overly illustrative projections give us literal photographic backgrounds splashed across the set to make sure we’re clear on each of the visitations (upper West Side fire escapes for Maria, a Law & Order courtroom when an FBI agent shows up). At the same time, Chad Raines’s sound design stays surprisingly recessive, stepping back when it could do so much to bolster Barbot’s text in its fluidity, its surreality, and its humor. There’s more richness and strangeness in the beautiful land than its creatives have released into the theater. Still, if these whitewater currents don’t necessarily make themselves seen, they always, in the voices of Barbot’s characters, make themselves heard.
Whereas Zayas is downplaying the theatrical possibilities of a bold script, the director of Kallan Dana’s RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR, Sarah Blush, is leaning all the way in. Like Barbot, Dana is writing about a trip through America—full of its own hauntings and getting closer and closer to explosion as it goes along—but nothing on Blush’s stage says “reality.†A father and daughter (Bruce McKenzie and Julia Greer) are road-tripping from Brooklyn to California, but there is no car, signified or otherwise, no prop bags of fast food, no passing scenery. What there is is an eyeball-searing barrage of orange. Brittany Vasta’s set is a raised neon-orange thrust stage, backed by an orange curtain, with a strangely sinister pit of orange shag carpet in the stage platform’s middle, like a ’70s sunken living room. A cursory Google tells me that people who are into color psychology associate orange with energy, enthusiasm, optimism, and youth but also with desolation and madness. As the owner of an orange cat, I can confirm that it means violence and chaos.
The atmosphere, in other words, is already plenty suspicious. And while RACECAR’s signature shade may be one off from the Red Room, its vibes are knowingly Lynchian, starting with an ominously cheerful backwards announcement that encourages us to “wohs eht yojne.†Dad and Daughter, it turns out, have a driving game they’ve played since Daughter was little (now she’s in her “twenties, thirties,†she chatters with smiling anxiety): They pass the time on the road by coming up with more and more complex palindromes. “Did Hannah see bees? Hannah didâ€; “A Toyota’s a Toyotaâ€; “Tulsa night life: filth, gin, a slut†(okay, a hitchhiker they pick up comes up with that one, but come on — A-plus). Like the whole of their relationship, the game initially seems sweet, kooky, a little edgy in a nerdy way — but there’s menace to it, too. A palindrome would sound the same even in the mouth of a Twin Peaks demon, so how are you supposed to use it to distinguish nightmare from reality?
Proceeding from New York to New Jersey to Pennsylvania and onwards all the way out to the Pacific, and then state by state back again—as the ensemble members throw backwards shadows of each place name, cut out of cardboard, against the set with flashlights—Dana’s play is itself a palindrome, a tape played forwards and then in reverse. But its episodic nature stays frisky, weird and unpredictable throughout. Both Dad and Daughter’s language will sporadically warp and snowball, spilling past the boundaries of casual conversation into sticky pools of id; and the people they encounter on the road—whether a creepy old woman or a silent, pink-ruffled little girl (both Camila Canó-Flaviá), an aggressive stranger at a gas station (Ryan King), or a too-chipper Wendy’s cashier named Wendy (Jessica Frey)—all seem to cast spooky shadows. After too many states in the car with the little girl and her alleged father (also King), Daughter starts to freak out: “Fuck this was all supposed to be fun and now are we complicit in some kind of child trafficking, oh my God, is this the banality of evil?â€
The call is inevitably coming from inside the house. Both the banality and the evil that Dana wants to investigate live within Dad and Daughter, and gradually the poison starts to seep from their memories like blood through gauze. RACECAR treads a fine line — as we learn more truths about its protagonists, about the addiction they share and the chaos they’ve wreaked on the people in their lives, the play weaves dangerously close to psychological neatness, the kind typified by simplistic trauma narratives that say, conclusively, “this happened to me when I was young, and so I am broken in this particular way.†But Dana’s writing is trippy enough, and Blush keeps things heightened and unsentimental enough, that the pair avoid the cliff. It also helps that the cast fully understands the assignment. McKenzie and Greer are both great with the text’s herky-jerky rhythms, its upswings into grinning, anxious mania and its nosedives into the ugly and eerie, and Canó-Flaviá and Frey find depth of feeling in a sequence in which they embody Daughter’s estranged sisters while still remaining puckish inhabitants of the play’s tilted dream world. In the end, the terror that Daughter is concealing beneath layers of chattiness, fibs, and alcohol is almost exactly the same as Gris’s: What will make it different this time? Is change, no matter how violent the fight, even possible? Or does it all sound the same, no matter which way you play back the tape?
the beautiful land i seek (la linda tierra que busco yo) is at Pregones/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater through December 29.
RACECAR RACECAR RACECAR is at A.R.T./New York Theatres through December 22.