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Review: Teatro Luna’s Crossed
Review: Teatro Luna’s Crossed
By Alexander Perry
Opening this week and running through December 18, Teatro Luna’s Crossed explores the immigrant experience through a festival of eclectic stories. Using poetic prose, monologues, overlapping dialogue, character vignettes, and even a few vibrant musical numbers, the production (under the energetic direction of Miranda Gonzalez) creatively gives a human voice and heart to the often faceless problems of immigration. Framed by scenes set in an airport, the production travels through a dizzying number of stories: some autobiographical, others ripped from the headlines, but all treated with enthusiasm and passion.
The entire cast- a diverse group of performers that includes Christopher Acevedo, Yaw Agyeman, Sydney Charles, Kristiana Colón, Melissa Duprey, Christina Igaraividez, and Lauren Villegas- gives superb performances. Each actress (and lone actor) has multiple spotlight performances, moving effortlessly from comedy to drama, and something in between. The play- written and developed by Miranda Gonzalez, Kristiana Colón, Christina Igaraividez, Gaby Ortiz, Yolanda Nieves, and the entire cast- opens with the hurried traffic of an airport terminal and from there splits off into a diverse smattering of unconnected scenes, each giving voice to one particular facet of the immigrant experience. Every scene has its own aesthetic texture- some are bright and poppy (as in a memorable scene of two older women haranguing a Canadian traveller), while others are meditative and bittersweet (as in the tale of an Indian man’s long journey to the United States).
Along the way, Crossed covers a huge breadth of issues, including color (as seen through the spectrum of lighter and darker skin immigrants), nationality (not all immigrants are Mexican or even of the Latinidad, as seen through the story of a Black Frenchwoman), and the problem of assimilation (through the tale of one woman’s mother and the erasure of their Latina past). Running through these disparate stories is the recurring setting of the airport and all the havoc that international security and travel bring. Audience members who have traveled as an immigrant (or even those that haven’t) will viscerally relate to the frustration (and occasionally unwarranted fear, even when traveling legally) that these scenes cleverly invoke to comic and dramatic effect.
The production design also helps add a strong foundation underneath the festival of immigrant stories. The domed and airy Viaduct Theatre (at Belmont and Western) gives the production a wide, borderless sense of space, which is further enhanced by the set: a simple four-cornered structure with piles of luggage on platforms. The set (as designed by Dan Matthews) is effective at reinforcing the play’s suggestion that the problems of immigration- all due to borders- are essentially a social construct and as illusory as the walls of a theatrical space. The light (Mac Vaughey), costume (Christine Pascual), and sound and composition (William Kurk) design also help provide a thematic undercurrent to the production.
In the end, the play succeeds at its goal: to create a broad, borderless mosaic of the immigrant experience through an eclectic collection of stories, scenes, and songs. Teatro Luna’s colorful Crossed runs through December 18 at the Viaduct Theatre at Western and Belmont. Recommended if you are in the mood for a festival of short stories performed by a passionate group of artists.
