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Denver Post Theater Critic |
Friday, October 18, 2002 -
El Centro Su Teatro has long been known as Denver's only Chicano
and Mexican theater company, but with "Botanica," director
Phil Luna and artistic director Tony Garcia have chosen a modern
yet classic story that reaches out to Denver's growing Puerto
Rican population.
Dolores Prida's "Botanica" does not traverse any fundamentally
new territory; the sacrifice of culture by assimilation is a theme
as old as the printed word. But what is fresh is its point of
view. Almost anything El Centro does is inherently unique because
it is our only opportunity to see anything around here from that
perspective.
Long before but most dramatically in "West Side Story," cautionary tales have shown the violent consequences of assimilation. The newest hit on Broadway is a revival of "Flower Drum Song," the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical about struggling to become authentically American without abandoning Chinese traditions.
The easiest and most recurring target of these plays is the homogenous American wasteland. Any ethnicity that has struggled to fit in here has a tradition of such work. But playwrights around the world from Northern Ireland to Bosnia to South Africa have struggled with similar themes.
"Botanica" is different from "West Side Story" and many other assimilation stories because, though fraught with peril and consequence, it is an ideological play without violence. It is also a generational story written by a Cuban-American and told almost exclusively from the point of view of a proud family of women.
"Botanica," which ran in Spanish for nine years as the resident school production at New York's Repertorio Espanol, is a funny and often sarcastic look at a culture that has been uprooted from Puerto Rico and transplanted to the El Barrio neighborhood of Manhattan, where its roots are drying out.
The title refers to the name of a creaky-floored boutique on Lexington and 113th Street run by Doña Geno, a grandmother who sells serious and silly spiritual prescriptions to adoring neighbors.
It also refers to the mysterious Ceiba, 15-foot-wide holy trees that live for 300 years. Doña Geno says the Ceiba was the only tree that survived an apocalyptic flood and thus replenished the Earth with life. The Mayan believed a Ceiba anchors the heavens through to the underworld. Throughout the world, people pray to spirits at Ceibas for protection.
"Botanica" opens with bright but spiritually calloused sourpuss Millie (Laura Chavez) returning home after her graduation from a private New Hampshire business college. Millie has lied to her proud mother (Magally Rizo Antuna) and doting grandmother (Yolanda Ortega-Ericksen) to keep them from the ceremony.
While she plans to move to lower Manhattan and work at a bank, where she can make something of herself in the Anglo world, Millie's grandmother sets out to convince her that her place is at home.
The playwright's delicate struggle is to fashion a climax that allows Millie to use her business skills and still experience a reawakening about her heritage.
El Centro's humorous and heartfelt production screams its nobility from the start, but it suffers from an obvious disparity in acting experience. This can be frustrating to watch, but it is something I have actually come to embrace as one of the more endearing attributes of El Centro.
Because the company has closer grassroots connections with its community than perhaps any other theater in Denver, El Centro welcomes newcomers with bearhug abandon. As a result, you often see an actor struggling with nervousness performing next to another with decades of experience.
This inevitably results in missed and unfulfilled comedic and dramatic moments. But just as often, someone surprises you with a moment that is as real as the trunk of a Ceiba tree.
Even when moments don't ring true, the overall authenticity is unquestioned. Angel Mendez Soto, who plays the crazy neighborhood bum Pepe, comes to El Centro direct from the Bronx, and Vicente Olan (Ruben) from Brooklyn. It is Ruben who delivers the play's central theme when he tells Millie that becoming a better person does not necessarily mean becoming a different person.
The primary relationship concerns Millie and her grandmother. Doña Geno's meddling, manipulation and dread of what is being lost on the younger generation could make her anyone's grandmother. Chavez delivers a noble Millie but could benefit from not delivering every line with utter exasperation.
Those who identify with Millie
might disregard "Botanica" as superficial and formulaic,
but those who relate to Doña Geno will say its spiritual
heart is true.