David Anzuelo’s generous, unwieldy play about an oil-and-water friendship between two high school boys opens at 59E59 Theaters.
Let’s get this out of the way: The highlight of David Anzuelo’s new play, “Día y Noche,” is a wild, riotously funny sex scene that brings Act 1 to, well, a climax. It involves a trio of teenagers, Martin, Danny and Edna, enacting an unconventional scenario punctuated by Edna yelling encouragements in a fake French accent as she writhes in ecstasy, looking feral and her eyes bulging.
Any show would have a hard time living up to this memorable sight, and unfortunately so does the LAByrinth Theater Company production “Día y Noche,” which is currently at 59E59 Theaters in Manhattan. The play is ambitious and generous but also unwieldy — the overlong sum of individual moments that often feel rushed.
The show focuses on Danny (Freddy Acevedo) and Martin (Neil Tyrone Pritchard), who meet in their high school practice room in El Paso, Tex. — the first plays the guitar, the second the oboe. They form a bond that, despite Martin’s initial wishes, is not romantic but just as complex: an enduring friendship between oil-and-water boys.
We are in 1984, and Danny, who is from a lower-middle-class Chicano family, is cooler than cool — he likes Patti Smith and David Lynch, girls and theater. Martin, one of the few Black students at their school, is a shy, bumbling nerd who is more well-off. He is just coming out as gay and wants to major in computer science in college.
They should not get along, but they do.
Anzuelo, who grew up in El Paso in the 1980s and also has a long career as an actor, is best at mapping out the way kids outside the mainstream found and supported each other in the pre-internet days — he is attuned to what can bind people over differences of class, ethnicity and temperament.
It takes a little while for both the play and Carlos Armesto’s production to settle into a groove. The show is divided in “tracks” of various length, with projected titles, as if we were listening to an album, though this format also gives a choppy feel to the proceedings. Punk and proto-punk numbers punctuate key moments (the mood music in that teenage ménage: the Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog”), but Anzuelo forgot that brevity was one of the genre’s signatures: The Ramones’ debut album lasted just 29 minutes; “Día y Noche” goes on for close to three hours.
After the intermission, the momentum evaporates into a succession of disjointed scenes filled with enough for two more plays, though the twin narrative helixes are that Martin finds a boyfriend (Peter Collier) and deals with the specter of AIDS, while Danny falls under the spell of a manipulative older theatermaker (Joe Quintero) with a taste for the stage director Peter Brook and drugs.
To his credit, Anzuelo also gives us a couple of distinctive female characters, Edna (Emma Ramos) and Jessica (Viviana Valeria), though we learn just enough about them to be left wanting more — especially of Ramos, whose quirky, ferocious performance is downright electrifying. The lesbian Jessica is mostly an accessory to Martin’s gay baby steps, and is rewarded with a brief, wordless scene with a girlfriend, which is worse than no scene at all. Sometimes, more is just less.
Dia y Noche
Through April 15 at 59E59 Theaters, Manhattan; 59e59.org. Running time: 2 hours 45 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
