Fantazmx @ Cara Mia Theatre Company ("Teatro en Fuga" Festival of New Play Staged Readings)
—Teresa Marrero
Cara Mía Theatre Company´s second work of the company's "Teatro en Fuga" Festival of New Play Staged Readings was presented on Saturday, July 2 at the Latino Cultural Center's black box theater. Fantazmx, a work-in-progress written by local playwright Hector Cantu and directed by frequent Cara Mia collaborator Jeffrey Colangelo, is a story of superhero proportions anchored in barrio politics and ritualized Mexican Aztec indigeneity.
Eight actors seated in a semi-circle portrayed an array of characters. Central to the storyline is Frida Espinosa Müller as Abuela/Spirit. To her right side were grandchildren Polo (Eduardo Vélez III), followed by his older brother Armando (Victor Santos, who also played Mayor Talamántez), his wife Sandra (Ana Armenta, who also played Cop #1/Spirit) and the youngest sister Sissy (Isa Flores, who also played Spirit). This seating arrangement made it clear
who was on the right hand (meaning nearest to the González family), and who was on Abuela´s left, (meaning her nemesis): Yolanda (Alondra Estremera, who also played Mayor Sánchez), Nacho/Kid/Assistant (Matthew Roy Rodriguez), and Tomas V. Moquete as Jorge/Reporter #1, Cop #2).
The storyline is simple enough. The Gonzalez family have a super power that the bad guys--namely the politicos and businesswoman/gang leader Yolanda--want. This secret power is encoded and ritualized in Abuela, as carrier of an ancient Aztec juju that resides in the family altar in the form of four necklaces stashed in separate boxes. Whenever the bad guys do evil, a mist miraculously emerges and dons superpowers to the righteous Gonzalez family. Armando gets heady with the power, and for this reason, Abuela does not think he or his pregnant wife Sandra is suitable to possess it.
As in many plays where two brothers appear, there is a power struggle between the elder Armando, who covets Abuela´s secret for personal gain, and his younger brother, Polo, the reluctant one who wants nothing to do with it. His just wants to leave the broken-down barrio and continue with his college education. An aging and tired Abuela needs to find an appropriate receptacle. Little sister Sissy, a young teenager, is ignored as a possible contender, though she protests that she is the one carrying on the family Aztec torch. She knows the names of the great female deities such as Coatlicue and Tonantzin. Nevertheless, both her age and gender count against her.
Overall, the play feels like pure masculine energy. In the center is the desexualized elder Abuela (whose female function is restricted to the archival of family memory), Sissy who is dismissed, Sandra the wife who proves to be a thief, and Yolanda, who impersonates and is in cahoots with toxic, corrupt masculinity. That leaves the game to be played out by the only characters who really matter: the brothers Armando and Polo, and the supernatural male super-hero Fantazmx. So, while Abuela is the matriarch, her days are numbered.
The play's 15 scenes left the audience with many questions. Who are the parents of Polo, Armando and Sissy? What is their backstory? Why is the Mother mentioned as having died mysteriously and early? Why is there never any mention of the Father? The audience expressed some confusion as to the actual theme of the play. Good vs evil? Tradition vs forgetting one’s roots? To what genre does this belong? One audience member asked if this was a theater piece or a movie, and commented on the potential expense of the numerous stage design elements needed to pull this off. I noted the extensive and quite detailed stage directions offered, which to me read more like narrative story-telling--and later I imagined this piece as an anime-type cartoon, even prior to reading the artist program bio that reads: “Hector Cantu is co-creator of the nationally syndicated Baldo comic strip, which appears in more than 200 newspapers nationwide.”
Fantazmx feels like a comic strip story.
The actors did a fine job of playing their parts, as did director Colangelo in guiding them. Stage movement is Colangelo's forte, of course (and this story has a lot of action!), but the restrictions of the sit-down "staged reading" format were handled well.
My final comment during the talk-back was one that came from my experience as an educator in higher ed. Posing Polo’s desire to continue with this college education as a sell-out to his community is problematic for me. He had to make a choice, and in this case, he neglected his studies to remain in the barrio. Many college students today face this dilemma, and this is not a message that as an educator I would like to convey to my aspiring first-generation Latinx college students. This ‘vendidos’ (sell-out) trope is one we saw many times in early Chicano plays of the 1960s, 1970s and beyond. Recently it was subverted in Lin-Manuel Miranda´s musical In the Heights, where the either-or dichotomy was broken--with both higher education and the legacies of the barrio seen as important values to uphold. Possibly with further development this play can address the questions and concerns the audience had, unnecessary dichotomies can be blasted in midair, and young Sissy may even be given the agency she deserves. Why couldn’t she be the superhero of this story? After all, the word "Fantazmx" is gender neutral. Anything is possible in the rewrites, and we wish the playwright the best!
The festival's third and final reading is entitled Yanga, and will be performed on July 9. Originally written in Spanish by Mexican playwright Jaime Chabaud, it's been translated into English by Tomás Torres-Ayala, and is directed by Anyika McMillan-Herod, co-founder and Executive Director of Soul Rep Theatre Company, Dallas' longest running theater company dedicated to the Black experience. This new play is inspired by the real-life story of Gaspar Yanga, who led a slave revolt and eventually negotiated an independent territory with the Spanish crown less than 100 years after the arrival of Hernán Cortés in Mexico. Yanga is presented in partnership with the Latino Arts Project and the African-American Museum’s visual arts exhibition, “Yanga: Journeys to Freedom.”
This one is a must see!
WHEN: July 9 (Saturday), 7:30 p.m
WHERE: Latino Cultural Center
WEB: caramiatheatre.org
