Theatre Review: Nilo Cruz’s Beauty of the Father

Posted on Tuesday, November 15

By Alexander Perry

“With you, I’m sadly happy…”

Closing this week at the Wicker Park Art Center (at St. Paul’s Church), UrbanTheater Company’s Beauty of the Father follows the complicated relationship tangle of a father, his daughter, their mutual paramour, and the ghost of Frederico Garcia Lorca.  The production is simple yet evocative, creating a world rich with the happy sorrow of the living and the sad happiness of the dead.  This contradictory truth- that the living are happily sad and the dead are sadly happy- is convincingly embodied in the performance.

The Wicker Park Art Center at St. Paul’s Church, where the production finds its home, is wonderfully atmospheric.  The church’s dilapidated walls, sturdy pews, and grand but faded stained glass windows frame the altar where directer Cecilie Keenan stages the dramatic action.  The set itself- an environment packed with easels, paintings, and tapestries- is simple yet evocative and efficiently creates the atmosphere of a small town in Spain where art, religion, and romance intertwine sometimes harmoniously, other times in dissonance.  The lighting adds a warm and airy quality to the production, while the costumes exude the well-worn aura of an artist and his menagerie.

“You assign roles, phantom relationships…”

The simple set plays home to an increasingly complicated web of relationships.  At the center of this web is Emiliano (Madrid St. Angelo), a painter now living in Spain with his mistress Paquita (Mari Marroquin), a young man he rescued from the streets and now occasionally employs named Karim (Nicolas Gamboa), and the ghost of Frederico Garcia Lorca (Ivan Vega).  Emiliano and Paquita are a couple, but Paquita is married to Karim for immigration purposes.  Emiliano is like a father to Karim, who is grateful to be helped off the streets.  In the midst of this, the ghost of Garcia Lorca has daily conversations with Emiliano, who is painting a picture in honor of the dead writer.

This seemingly quaint life of an artist is interrupted by the presence of Marina (Jasmin Cardenas), Emiliano’s long-lost daughter, who has decided to visit her father after her mother died.  After reuniting with her father, Marina quickly falls for the charms of Karim.  Marina’s dalliance soon upsets a life that rested on keeping certain truths unsaid and unexamined.

“The living have a way of beckoning us back to life through prayer or a work of art, and sometimes what pulls us to the world exists independently of our will…”

While it would be unfair to spoil all the secrets, it is fair to say that the relationship map for these characters easily rivals the complexity of any soap opera.  The soap opera analogy is fairly apt, too: this is a relationship drama that, while focusing at times on the inner lives of the characters, spends most of its effort exploring the strands, textures, and fibers that interconnect their lives.  What heightens this play from standard soap operatic affair (apart from the passionate performances and hard work of the actors) is the ghostly presence of Garcia Lorca.  As a ghost, Lorca is both beyond and at the end of all the follies of life.  While he could be unconcerned with the missteps and trivialities of who slept with who (and who betrayed who), Lorca is inextricably drawn to Emiliano’s web of passions.  His engagement (and narration) adds an element of poeticism to the production.  In the end, it becomes apparent that it is not Lorca that is haunting the living, but the living that are haunting Lorca.

Recommended if you are in the mood for an atmospheric relationship drama with poetic elements.  The Beauty of the Father runs through November 19^th at The Wicker Park Art Center.

Photo by Anthony Aicardi