Ay, caramba. Next Theatre, a company that loves to live on the edge, and Teatro Vista, a company devoted to mining the riches of Latino playwrights, have collaborated to come up with Octavio Solis’ “El Paso Blue,” a one-act Greco-Mexican tragicomedy that plays like the Three Stooges meet Oedipus Rex.
It’s a real stew, but a tasty one, laced with hilarity and served up with some fine, juicy performances in a vivid, imaginative production prepared by director Henry Godinez.
If nothing else, Solis roundly demonstrates in this play that he is a master of great, loopy language. His characters, larger than life, express their passions in goofy, yet highly appropriate phrases.
When Alejandro, the play’s hero, waxes poetic on his wife’s beautiful white skin, he describes it as soft “as the felt on a brand new regulation pool table”; and when he tells his sad tale of woe, of how his wife ran off with his father while Alejandro was in prison, the Mexican woman who loves him sympathizes by saying, “Double, double tragedy, with extra cheese.”
The fatal passion of Alejandro, the Mexican-American, for Sylvie, his white trash American wife, is expressed in vivid, vulgar terms. Sylvie, for example, is scornfully called an “extra crispy chunk of white meat.” But when she makes love to him, Alejandro exults, she “pledges allegiance” to him.
Placed by scenic designer Rebecca Hamlin somewhere in the no man’s land of the Texas-Mexico border, where barbed wire is strung with Christmas tree lights, “El Paso Blue” roams through past and present, myth and magic, poetry and the blues (in original music by John Kamys, terrifically played with the hot licks of onstage guitarist Jeff Kust).
The drama is non-realistic, to say the least, featuring such characters as Duane, a guy with a metal plate in his head that picks up radio signals, and China, a spitfire who protects herself with a water pistol.
Wild as it is, however, it makes great theatrical sense in Godinez’s staging; and the actors, speaking sometimes in poetry and occasionally bursting into song, give it a big, blazing performance.
Edward F. Torres, fired up with lust and revenge, is Alejandro; Amy Landecker, singing the blues and tossing her blond mane, is his hot, errant wife; Gustavo Mellado, mostly melancholy but capable of zinging out a funny line, is his ill-fated father; and Sandra Marquez, crackling with bitter humor, is China, the woman who joins the search for vengeance.
The role of Duane, Alejandro’s dim-bulb buddy, is taken by Steve Pickering, who gives this dullard a consistently sharp comic delivery. His account of how his girlfriend dumped him and left him with only processed cheese in the freezer is a little classic.
This is a good teaming-up for Next and Teatro Vista. It shows up both their strengths, and it makes them both look good.
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“El Paso Blue”
When: Through Oct. 18
Where: Next Theatre, 927 Noyes St., Evanston
Phone: 847-475-1875
