Campus comedies are not all that common at the theater, so it’s a rare treat to spend quality time with a pair of humorously mismatched college roommates in the new Off Broadway show “La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao.”
Oscar and Yunior have been thrown together by the Rutgers University housing gods and the imagination of Junot Díaz, whose novel “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” inspired this Repertorio Español production. They are both Dominican and members of the class of 1992, and both are aspiring writers. The similarities end there; the young men embody radically different visions of Dominican masculinity, one boldly self-assured and the other emphatically feeble.
Oscar (the terrific Jesús E. Martínez) is a chubby, bespectacled uber-nerd obsessed with comics books, anime, science fiction and video games. Since this takes place before those genres’ stranglehold on pop culture, he is an alienated weirdo rather than a social-media influencer or Hollywood wunderkind. Oscar is also a virgin with little prospect that will change any time soon, though he is resigned to his fate rather than resentful about it.
Yunior (Mario Peguero, casually confident), on the other hand, is a cocky ladies’ man with worldly tastes — he likes to “partake in a little smoke,” for example. At first, he is stunned by his new roommate’s commitment to his passions. “You talking Elvish from ‘Lord of the Rings,’” an incredulous Yunior tells Oscar, who promptly corrects him: “Actually, it’s Sindarin.” (The production is in Spanish, with English supertitles.)
Yunior is the novel’s narrator, so we tend to see Oscar through his eyes. But the adapter and director Marco Antonio Rodríguez abandoned that storytelling approach for a more straightforward, third-person one. He also simplified Díaz’s dense, flowery writing, which is filled with long digressions ranging from footnotes to entire chapters.
The play’s streamlined style is most effective in the first act (entirely focused on the college scenes) and less in the second, which suffers from awkward tonal shifts and attempts to pack a lot of emotional load into a short amount of time. Yunior falls for Oscar’s activist sister, Lola (Altagracia “ANova” Nova). She is less than enthusiastic at first, but eventually she relents and instructs Yunior to look after Oscar, who is also smitten — with a goth named Jenni (Belange Rodríguez). Lola is afraid he’s going to get hurt. And he does.
The book breathlessly weaves in and out of timelines as it fills us in on the tragic history of Oscar’s family, burdened through generations by a kind of bad juju our hero calls fukú. Marco Antonio Rodríguez’s decision to get rid of most of those elements is understandable from practical and dramatic standpoints (the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo, whose presence looms over the entire novel, is pretty much gone, for instance).
But while the pared-down show moves at an energetic clip, it often does so at the expense of the female characters: Lola’s rich story has vanished; Oscar’s cancer-stricken mother, Beli (Maite Bonilla), appears only in Act 2; and his abuela, La Inca (Arisleyda Lombert), loses her quasi-mythical aura.
The key relationship between Oscar and Ybón (Rodríguez again), a prostitute he meets on a visit to Santo Domingo, also feels undernourished. His sexual awakening flies by too quickly, and the impact of his passion for her does not quite register — and it needs to in order for the title’s deterministic reference to Oscar’s brief life to be fully realized.
What keeps the production together is its focus on the friendship between Oscar and Yunior, bolstered by a stage rapport between Martínez and Peguero that feels earned. Their spiky banter is Díaz at his best, a shrewd exploration of male mores under often hilarious Ping-Pong dialogue. Poor Oscar: Becoming the man he thought he wanted to be is exactly what took him down.
La Breve y Maravillosa Vida de Oscar Wao
At Repertorio Español, Manhattan; repertorio.nyc. Running time: 2 hours.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
