John J. Caswell Jr.’s play is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre.
Late on a thundery monsoon evening in a well-appointed basement in Sedona, Ariz., the ghosts are restless. Or something is — thumping and scratching inside the walls of a congressman’s gated home, where Imaculada, the housekeeper, has been holding down the fort alone.
When her friends Rosemary and Lupita show up unannounced, fleeing domestic danger, the noises don’t take long to creep them out.
“You’re supposed to disclose your home’s paranormal status to guests upon arrival,” Rosemary chides, dryly.
But this is just what she needs: a place rife with spirits that might be enlisted for vengeance on her live-in boyfriend, a police officer who has beaten her bloody yet again. On the internet she found “a little witchcraft” that she’s been wanting to try.
“It’s called death walking,” she says. “Energy harnessing, engaging spirits in highly active spaces to do your bidding in exchange for eternal release from their own purgatory.”
“Man Cave,” John J. Caswell Jr.’s new play at the Connelly Theater, is a political drama wrapped in the spooky pleasures of the horror genre, and it works on both levels. Its characters are Mexican American women on the economic fringes, and its concerns are theirs: work, love, heritage, survival; how to be safe, and feel at home, in their own country.
Unfolding in the congressman’s man cave (designed by Adam Rigg), with its cowboy-movie posters and mounted elk head, the play is also a contemplation of what the United States was built on, what’s buried underneath — and which insistent, haunted voices it’s determined not to hear. (Lucrecia Briceno’s lighting is vital to the chilling of our spines.)
Directed by Taylor Reynolds for the theater company Page 73, the show cultivates a scary mood even before it starts, thanks to Michael Costagliola’s supremely clever sound design, which thrums ominously as the audience settles in but cuts to an unnerving quiet in the opening scene. We are primed to be startled by the slightest noise, and so we are. And because the audience is expecting, even hoping, to be frightened, its attention has a tautness that’s sustained throughout the play.
That’s helpful with a show that takes its time, as “Man Cave” does — sometimes to the point of bagginess — letting the friends bicker and snipe over the course of a fraught weekend. Why, Rosemary (Jacqueline Guillén) wants to know, is Imaculada “cleaning house for an overtly racist politician”? Is Imaculada (Annie Henk) right that something is trying to kill her? And where is her missing 20-something son?
Why is Lupita (Claudia Acosta), Rosemary’s sober girlfriend — her tender romantic refuge from the abusive cop — suddenly drinking again? How gross is it, exactly, that Rosemary has brought a bag of the cop’s fingernail clippings for the spell she means to cast? What has drawn her to the spirit world, when that used to be her mother’s thing?
Her mother, Consuelo (Socorro Santiago), an undocumented immigrant, raised Rosemary to assimilate. But when Consuelo arrives at the congressman’s house, she doesn’t need anyone to tell her its paranormal status. She has a supernatural sensitivity to the dead.
“I can hear them screaming in my head,” she says.
A program note explains that Caswell wrote “Man Cave” over the past five years — a time of immense social and political turmoil in the United States. If the play sometimes feels bloated, it may be from absorbing so much anger and anxiety from the air. But its shape also feels like an act of resistance to the constraints of theatrical convention.
On a wall of the man cave, near the elk head, hangs a rack of vintage rifles, emblems of American cowboy culture. This isn’t Chekhov, though, and those guns never go off. They just stay in plain sight, silently menacing.
Man Cave
Through April 2 at the Connelly Theater, Manhattan; page73.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
