Past Reviews

Regional Reviews: New Jersey

Marisol Is Naught but Sound and Fury
Luna Stage


Nehassaiu deGannes and Cynthia Fernandez
Employing magic realism, theatre of the absurd, agit-prop theatre, bombastic poetics, anger, revolutionary fervor, feminism, and tales of the apocalypse, playwright José Rivera created the 1992 Marisol. Clearly, an attempt to demonstrate virtuosity, Marisol emerges as a sophomoric series of bombastic scenes in which there is precious little in the way of depth, progression or insight.

Marisol Perez, who is an editor for a Manhattan publisher, still lives in the vicious hellhole of the Bronx neighborhood of her birth. Riding home on the subway to the last stop (180th Street), she is harassed and assaulted by a mentally disturbed, incoherent man who brandishes a golf club as he chases her from the train. After arriving at her oppressive tiny apartment, Marisol is visited by her guardian angel who informs her that she will no longer be able to remain there to protect her. It seems that she is a member of an alliance of thousands of angels which is about to launch an attack to destroy an uncaring G-d who has abandoned humanity.

Marisol's apartment is visited the next morning by her friend June. It has been reported that last night "26-year-old Marisol Perez" was beaten to death with a golf club on a Bronx train. June brings Marisol to her stay at her Brooklyn apartment. June shares the apartment with her nutty disabled brother Lennie who threatens both women with a knife. Lennie comes on physically to Marisol. In self defense, she conks him with a golf club.

The now homeless Marisol is wandering the streets. Apocalyptically, fires are spontaneously breaking out, smoke is blocking out the light, gas masks are being worn, and Nazis are burning homeless people in the streets. We meet a woman who was always careful in the use of her credit card, who has been abused and rendered homeless because of a $200 debt incurred when she bought a hat on sale. Another disturbed, lost soul is a man with a beard and a hoodie who is confined to a wheelchair. Marisol or another says, "I had tickets to Les Misérables, but I took a wrong turn and ended up on this street."

Moreover, Lenny is still alive and pregnant ("Every man should have this experience. There would be fewer wars."). The angels are now armed with Uzis. It may be that the poor and suffering are following their guardian angels into war. There is a lot of metaphysics or the like still to come. I found Marisol to be both tiresome and confusing. We are in a world where "Time is crippled, geography is transformed, and you are lost forever".

Although Rivera's characters as written lack dimension, Cynthia Fernandez's unmannered, intense yet naturalistic performance makes Marisol more interesting than one would expect under the circumstances.

Nehassaiu deGannes as Angel, Emma O'Donnell as June, and Debbie Bernstein as Woman with Furs lend Fernandez strong support with confident, credulous performances that largely hold the risibility of the pretentious writing at bay. Christopher Kelly brings a sense of menacing brutality to Lennie and the other males in the play, all of whom he portrays.

Director Niegel Smith has elicited solid performances from his cast and made excellent use of the flexible space configured with the audience seated in banks of seats on either side of the long playing area with sets placed at both ends. The sets by Arnulfo Maldonado have a distressed, makeshift quality suitable to the nature of Marisol.

If playwright José Rivera's writing had given any indication that he was attempting to write a play which would illuminate societal injustice and inequality or that he was concerned about suffering humanity, then one might praise his ambition as well as his ability to from time to time create striking phrases and images. However, Marisol makes no attempt to provide any meaningful analysis of the realities and complexities of his troubled characters and the society and system in which they live. By opting to work in shallow waters, Rivera has written a play which leaves behind a sour taste for its seeming exploitation of the discontents of the economic under classes for the sole purpose of displaying his rhetoric and imagery.

Marisol continues performances (Evenings: Thursdays 7:30 PM/ Friday and Saturday 8 PM/ Matinees: Sunday 7:30 PM) through May 11, 2014, at Luna Stage, 555 Valley Road, West Orange. Box Office: 973-395-5551; online: www.lunastage.org.

Marisol by José Rivera; directed by Niegel Smith

Cast
Angel................................Nehassaiu deGannes
Marisol.................................Cynthia Fernandez
Lenny, et al..............................Christopher Kelly
June.........................................Emma O'Donnell
Woman with Furs......................Debbie Bernstein


Photo: Steven Lawler


- Bob Rendell