Sol Project

Subterms

    Latest story

    138 Shares149 Views

    Review: In ‘Bees & Honey,’ Love Is Both Sweet and Sticky

    by

    In this play by Guadalís Del Carmen, a couple’s shared heritage is integral to their meeting and the ups and downs of their daily relationship.What draws two lovers together may be more obvious than what keeps them in sync. An inviting smile and smooth opening line can pierce the noise of a crowded club, but then what? In the case of “Bees & Honey,” which opened at MCC Theater on Monday, eyes lock and hips swivel to the plucky guitar and eight-count beat of bachata.This Dominican style of music and dance, with its sensual cadence and professions of heartache, is a foundational metaphor in this boy-meets-girl two-hander by the playwright Guadalís Del Carmen. After falling into step on a steamy night out, Johaira (Maribel Martinez) and Manuel (Xavier Pacheco) they begin a duet that soon finds them sharing an apartment in the Washington Heights neighborhood of Manhattan.She is a district attorney who ascends the ranks to prosecute high-profile cases; he’s a mechanic with plans to expand his auto-repair shop across the five boroughs.By the next scene they’re navigating the rhythms of a long-term romance. immersed in the tenor and flavors of their Afro-Dominican backgrounds. Instinctively, they sometimes slip into Spanish, teasing and rooting for each other as their lives continue to intertwine.The slice-of-life naturalism of “Bees & Honey,” presented in partnership with the Sol Project, is more interested in capturing culturally specific detail than in breaking ground with an original plot. The churn of daily ins and outs in this staging by the director Melissa Crespo, on a catalog-colorful living room set by the designer Shoko Kambara, has a familiar sitcom quality. And nearly every story development reflects an inevitable truism (sex lives dwindle, women get pregnant, elders require care). For a marital drama that runs two hours including an intermission, it feels light on substance and surprise.But what’s distinctive about Johaira and Manuel, and how their syncopation thrives and falters, is the texture of their shared heritage. Del Carmen skirts the edges of stereotype in underlining qualities variously associated with Dominican men and women, but ultimately succeeds in creating believable, if conventional, characters. Del Carmen betrays a heavy hand in how Johaira compels Manuel to read bell hooks, as an antidote to his inherited machismo. That she prosecutes sexual assault cases in court adds synthetic emotional fuel to the play’s highest-stakes climax, which happens offstage to people we never meet.Still, the ease and electricity between Martinez and Pacheco, whose performances deepen as the union predictably grows more complicated, lend the production a sticky-sweet appeal. Johaira is by turns headstrong, soft and a stranger to herself, inner tensions that Martinez embodies with luminous transparency. And Pacheco’s Manuel is spring-loaded with empathy and eroticism, reflexively attentive and affectionate, ready to respond to the slightest provocation. They seem to gibe perfectly until they don’t. So what happened? As Johaira says of dancing bachata: “You lose your footing and the moment is gone.”Bees & HoneyThrough June 11 at MCC Theater, Manhattan; mcctheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

    More stories

    • 100 Shares149 Views

      in Theater

      Review: In ‘Sancocho,’ a Family Crisis Is Cooking

      by

      Attention to culinary detail is the best part of this heavily seasoned family drama by Christin Eve Cato at the WP Theater.“Sancocho,” a new play by Christin Eve Cato, begins long before the lights come up. As ticket holders file into the WP Theater, a large pot simmers on the stove (the hyperrealistic kitchen set is by Raul Abrego), releasing the savory scents of the stew of the title. A little later, when one of the play’s sisters describes her mother’s cooking — sofrito made from scratch, pastelillos, arroz con gandules, tender pernil, “the way she made oxtail slide off the bone” — I heard a woman in the audience audibly moan.This attention to culinary detail — the smells, the sights, the hand towels with a weave you can practically feel — is the best, most succulent part of this heavily seasoned domestic drama, produced by the Latinx Playwrights Circle, WP Theater and the Sol Project. Though it occupies a single set, a roomy kitchen somewhere in East Harlem, and introduces just two characters, sisters born to Puerto Rican parents a generation apart, the play stirs together two lifetimes of trauma and catastrophe into only 90 minutes. “Sancocho,” with the stew as its central metaphor, is a meditation on inheritance and family, how its members might eat and celebrate together, but suffer apart.Renata (Shirley Rumierk), a successful lawyer, heavily pregnant, has stopped by the apartment of her older sister, Caridad (Zuleyma Guevara), a cleaner. This is a brief visit, Renata insists: she has to leave for New Jersey before the traffic kicks off. But it is also a fraught one. Their father is dying. Renata needs Caridad to review his will. Caridad has a few items for Renata to review as well.A lesser playwright might have emphasized what separates the sisters. There are obvious differences between these women — in age; class; education; and as Caridad, who inherited their father’s complexion, points out, even skin color. But there are just as many similarities. Prickly and volatile, both are quick to take offense and just as quick to offer absolution. Caridad is clearly more at home in the kitchen. It is her kitchen, after all. And Renata doesn’t know how to peel a plantain. Yet this is a dish they cook together.The specificity of this cooking — as when Caridad shows Renata how to score the plantain’s skin and strip the peel away — gives the show its particular flavor. But the heated discussion the sisters have over and around the ingredients strains the play’s naturalism, as does the more presentational performances that the director, Rebecca Martínez, encourages. Would all of these revelations really emerge in this same moment? Why have they never had any of these conversations before? And crucially, will the stew have time to cook before the other guests arrive?In the program, Cato includes a sancocho recipe borrowed from her grandmother. Carnivorous members of the audience can make it at home. But even the vegetarians might try out a few of the play’s other recipes: for forgiveness, for love.SancochoThrough April 9 at WP Theater, Manhattan; wptheater.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. More