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In Teatro Vista’s ‘¡Bernarda!’ Blood is Thicker Than Truth

Snap. Crackle. Pop. If you listen close enough, you can almost hear the bones crunching in the walls of the house of Bernarda Alba; echoes of the sacrifices and secrets on which the house’s foundation was built. The women who reside there are barely holding themselves together under the immense pressure that threatens to break them. In the wake of the death of Bernarda’s second husband, the doors are closed, the windows shut, and mourners left to boil outside the home in the oppressive heat. In spite of the weather, Bernarda insists that all her daughters wear “rigorous black” to honor their father’s memory. 

Traditionally, adaptations of Federico García Lorca’s The House of Bernarda Alba, originally published in 1936 two months before Lorca’s assassination, take their design inspiration from the macabre attire of the bereaved. By contrast, this adaptation titled ¡Bernarda!, authored by Emilio Williams and directed by Wendy Mateo, boldly uses light, color, and comedy to showcase the darker parts of humanity.  Continue reading “In Teatro Vista’s ‘¡Bernarda!’ Blood is Thicker Than Truth”

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‘Enough To Let The Light In’ Creates Terror Out of Love’s Shadows

Paloma Nozicka’s two-hander script, Enough to Let The Light In, grips you from the very beginning and doesn’t let go. Director Georgette Verdin builds a deliberate pulse underneath the work, aided by Stefanie M. Senior’s spooky’ sound design and Sotirios Livaditis’ set, full of delightful tricks that drive the action forward. 

Enough to Let The Light In  is one of the tightest and most satisfying new plays I’ve seen in a long time. The economy of language and onstage movement means every action matters, even where a guest hangs their coat becomes a point of dramatic tension. It’s very hard for a story to get ahead of me, and I noticed pretty much every suspicious thing or could-be suspicious line of dialogue. Georgette Verdin directs the piece with a swift and intentional hand, with incredible attention to the details. The actors are so compelling, I forgot what I’d seen, and was shocked all over again by the discovery that my suspicions were correct! Continue reading “‘Enough To Let The Light In’ Creates Terror Out of Love’s Shadows”

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‘The Fifth World’ at Teatro Vista is a Captivating Audio Horror Adventure

Ever since the smash hit true crime podcast Serial aired in 2014 and catapulted the medium into the national spotlight, many audio storytellers have taken that formula — that is, a plucky reporter from out of town comes in to try and solve a highly personal mystery — and tried to fictionalize it with, in my opinion, limited success. Podcasts like TANIS, The Message, and Limetown tend to run up against the issue that the truly appealing thing about Serial was how off-the-cuff it felt, consisting as it did of Sarah Koenig talking to real people about real things. The obviously staged feeling of most fiction podcasts works against that tone a great deal. So how do you create a story that works in this formula?

Well, if you are triple-threat playwright, lead actor, and co-director Gabriel Ruiz in The Fifth World at Teatro Vista, the answer seems to be that you lean as hard away from realism as possible, embracing the limitless possibilities of audio to create something otherworldly, strange, and transcendent.

Continue reading “‘The Fifth World’ at Teatro Vista is a Captivating Audio Horror Adventure”

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Key Reviews: ‘Hope: Part II of a Mexican Trilogy’

The Key: Young Critics Mentorship Program is back for our third year, and with a new format! This year’s cohort: Ada Alozie, Alisa Boland, Anyah Royale Akanni,  Hannah Antman, Mariah Schultz, and Yiwen Wu. The third show of our session was Hope: Part II of a Mexican Trilogy produced by Teatro Vista at The Den Theatre. Read selections from each critic below, and click through to their author profiles to read the full critique and learn more about them! The Key is co-facilitated by Regina Victor and Oliver Sava. 

Hannah Antman: “Directors Bruce and Gutierrez landed some evocative and heartfelt moments. Hope is a true period piece, in the sense that it showcases the past in order to illuminate something about our world today. I found Betty’s deep fear of the atomic bomb to be especially prescient, reflecting many young people’s current fears about climate change – in 1961 or 2019, being a teenager comes with the threat of the world ending. As an extension of that fear, Betty (excellently portrayed by Caraballo), has a series of imagined phone calls between herself and JFK (and later, Fidel Castro). I found these fantasy phone calls to be particularly compelling, and I wish the rest of the play delved as deep in its theatrical risk-taking.” –  Read Hannah Antman’s full critique and learn more about the author!  Continue reading “Key Reviews: ‘Hope: Part II of a Mexican Trilogy’”

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‘Fade’ Explores A Poignant Friendship Where Race But Not Class Intersect

Victory Gardens Theater and Teatro Vista’s co-production of Fade, by Tanya Saracho, directed by Sandra Marquez is a compelling journey through class, race, and ambition.  Marquez’s finely tuned direction enriches Saracho’s nuanced approach to the heightened and complicated world of power that these characters navigate. Continue reading “‘Fade’ Explores A Poignant Friendship Where Race But Not Class Intersect”