Laughs in Spanish, now at Hartford Stage through Sunday, March 30 should be lighthearted, perhaps even a romantic comedy.
However, the play by Alexis Sheer seems to aim for something very different. Although the program explains the author’s point; unfortunately, the play does not make it clear what that is.
The result is a 90-minute play that had me checking my watch after 30 minutes, wondering why it seemed to be dragging.
It just seems the play can’t decide if it wants to be realistic, a frantic farce, or a fantasy.
The play is set in an art gallery in Miami during the Basel Art Festival, a major cultural event. Mariana runs a small gallery and discovers that the paintings from the current exhibition have been stolen; later that day, she is hosting a reception with many affluent collectors attending.
She immediately blames her intern for failing to lock up the night before. The intern, Carolina (played by Maria Victoria Martinez), emphatically denies it, but there is no sign of forced entry. Carolina’s boyfriend, Miami police officer Juan (Luis Vega), is there, supposedly investigating the case.
After this setup, you might suppose that we will learn more about the theft and how Mariana salvages the evening.
Instead, we have a series of scenes, many of which are totally improbable.
Sheer says the play is about code-switching, or how people adjust their behavior and language to fit into a particular group. We see this early in the play when Mariana who is having an emotional, loud conversation in Spanish, suddenly switches to a very calm, polite English to answer the phone.
As the day goes on, we have a series of incongruous interchanges as we learn more about the characters: Juan and Carolina, Mariana and her actress mother, and Mariana and Jenny, her mother’s personal assistant and a former college friend. Estella, Mariana’s mother, a movie actress, suddenly appears, although they are estranged.
The play seems more about people’s innate self-centeredness and opportunism than code-switching. Estella only shows up because she needs Mariana to be a character witness for her; Juan has acted out of a desire to promote Carolina’s career. Only Mariana does not appear to act on these impulses; she desires to succeed at her job at the gallery.
It is always a problem when the audience needs to read the program notes – in this case conversations with the author and the director – to get the intent of the play. It means they haven’t made it clear.
Two years ago, Hartford Stage used super captions above the stage for their production of Espejos:Clean, which was half in English and half in Spanish. This play could have used that as well. In the opening dialogue, Marianna is yelling at Carolina about the missing paintings; we certainly get the emotion, but not what she is saying.
The cast tries to create three-dimensional characters; Stephanie Machado as Mariana and Maggie Bofill as Estella are the most successful, primarily because these are the most developed characters. Machado shows the conflicts within the character and the ways she resolves them. Bofill’s character also seems to changed during the play, though less than Mariana. Jenny (Olivia Hebert) is good in an underwritten role. It is harder to understand either Carolina or Juan, particularly the latter. His actions – even if motivated by love – seem so outrageous as to be unbelievable.
Bofill’s extended monologue in the second half of the play is a tour de force; unfortunately, I didn’t get parts because of her accent.
The scenic design for most of the play (by Brian Sidney Bembridge) is a bare white gallery wall with picture hooks where the missing art should be and a desk that could easily tip over. Later, he creates a vividly colored mural and tiki bar.
Daniela Hart/Uptown Works created both the sound design and the original music — the Latin music blasts, as it should, during the final scene.
I wanted to love Laughs in Spanish, but I came away puzzled and disappointed.
Tickets are available at HartfordStage.org.
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