If Mariela in the Desert had an intermission, you would not be reading this review, because I would have walked out after Act I--an hour during which nothing whatsoever happens and all we learn about the characters is that they're annoying. Fortunately, Karen Zacharias's play runs uninterrupted, so I had the opportunity to see the one-third of a great play that she's written, and to leave the theater with vivid images and intriguing questions in my mind.
But having sat through the first two-thirds, I had to struggle to notice when the plot finally kicked in, and thus struggle to care about its resolution. As the play opens, the title character is dictating a telegram to her daughter: "Your father has died, come at once, I won't bury him until you do." In fact, the father, while on his death-bed, is still alive. So our first experience of Mariela is while she's being a manipulative liar and, as the saying goes, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Sandra Marquez's Mariela has wit and fury and love and the ability to turn from one to another on a dime, but the playwright's Mariela is just an embittered woman who married the wrong man, allowed one word of discouragement to destroy her career, and proceeded to devalue her daughter in exactly the way Latin culture had devalued her. She and her much-older husband Jose (the one-note Ricardo Gutierrez) are painters who left Diego Rivera's glittering circle in Mexico City for a desert ranch, conceived as a communal refuge for them and their artist friends but lived out as a prison for the couple and their two children. Jose repeats to Mariela a disparaging comment Rivera made about her work, and she abandons it to rear a daughter she resents and pushes away and a son--autistic, from the sound of his symptoms--whom she adores but who dies in childhood.
Zacharias obviously wants us to focus on what happened to Mariela between the halcyon days in Mexico City and today's desert, but she spends most of her time portraying the contemporary quotidian: Mariela's fights with her sister-in-law, her efforts to keep the diabetic Jose from eating flan and her disapproval of her daughter's much-older boyfriend, clearly a reflection of his own disastrous May-December relationship. It's clear that there's some mystery here, but the playwright takes her sweet time and then some letting us know what it is. As a result, we spend a full hour floating around wondering whether the question is why the daughter left, how the son died, why the husband never achieved greatness, or something wholly other (this last turns out to be the case). Once she begins to unpack the mystery, Zacarias does so very well; but she waits so long to do it that it's stale, like finally getting your Christmas present at Easter.
These script problems defeat not only the actors' efforts to portray three-dimensional human beings, but the well-paced work of director Henry Godinez. His enlivening touches are evident in moments of comedy that sneak through the lifeless gloom, particularly in the performance of Laura Crotte as the sister-in-law whose traditions and religion are constantly affronted by Mariela. Godinez also deserves credit alongside projections designer John Boesche and lighting designer Robert Christen for the video backdrop that expresses more powerfully than most of the dialogue the struggle between the creative impulse and nothingness.
I just wish the play itself didn't bear such unmistakable marks of that struggle.