Review: THE HISPANIC/LATINO/LATINA/LATINX/LATINE VOTE at Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum

Election season ‘24 is cooking and playwright Bernardo Cubria is laughing to keep from boiling over. After several years of “arguing with strangers on Twitter,” the writer of CRABS IN A BUCKET and THE PLAY THAT YOU WANT has channeled his frustration into a political comedy. Regrettably, the world premiere of THE HISPANIC/LATINO/LATINA/LATINX/LATINE VOTE is as unwieldy and scattershot as its title. The work’s premiere at the Will Geer Theatricum Botanicum feels like a couple of different narratives – along with a screed or two – stuffed into a single evening. It’s an identity quest! It’s a perilous journey to motherhood! It’s a rumination/condemnation on what it means to be Latino! It’s a…circus?

The 10 performers in this free-for-all are working tirelessly and often at high emotional pitch to keep us engaged. Serving as narrator/emcee, the mostly solid Xochitl Romero spends a large portion of the play interacting with the audience, soliciting our input or approbation on decisions that her character – a professor of Latinx studies named Paola Aguilar – makes in her effort to get pregnant via IVF. Now, when you bring in the crowd to this degree, you risk someone upstaging you by saying something funnier or more poignant than what you’re offering, both of which happened on opening night. Romero wasn’t derailed. To the extent that this play is carry-able, Romero is happy to grab the handles. Conflicted or conspiratorial, she has us in her corner.

And what a corner it is. Paola, 39, without a partner and bearing the scars of a previous relationship, wants to become a mother, and has plunged herself into serious debt to try to make that happen. When she is recruited by the research arm of the all-powerful Political Party to try to better understand and thereby win over the Hispanic/Latino/Latina/Latinx/Latine vote – with regular $50,000 paychecks – her decision is an easy one. She’s selling out, but she takes the money and plunges back into fertility cycles.

What’s the conundrum?  Well, the four members who round out her research team are a parcel of inept and potentially racist dimwits. Rebecca (Laura Schein) speaks a few words of Spanish and claims to have studied in Venezuela. Nicola (Emily Jerez) the fair skinned daughter of a Cuban father. Bernard (Max Lawrence) is the only Black person in the group. And group director leader Kaj (Steve C. Fisher) is white, smug, overeducated, and seriously misguided. Everyone professes their great admiration over Paola, and over book she wrote about Latinx identity, and they think she’s got the answers they need. But when the interview questions they provide her include “Would you finish building the wall” and “Rate your machismo level,” Paola quickly determines that the entire methodology is going to need an overhaul, and pronto.

Playing a bunch of interviewees who exemplify elements of Latin culture is Roland Ruiz, who – stolid, flamboyant, macho and everything in between - comes in for a series of focus group interviews with Paola that her team members quickly derail. The shape-shifting and very funny Ruiz is also called upon to play a series of sperm donor candidates as well as Paola’s fertility doctor - usually with a clown nose.

Yes, a clown nose. It's in scenes like this, in which a very agitated Paola talks about the challenges of her endeavor while sitting with her feet in the stirrups as her goofball of a doctor urges her to “relaaaxxxx,” that LATINE VOTE feels like it has jumped the tracks. Granted, the play is largely supposed to be a satire, but we’re also being asked to invest in our protagonist’s painfully unfulfilled desire to procreate. The production can’t achieve any kind of consistent balance between its personal and political agendas, its broadly comedic elements and its sociological insight. Cubria, who directs the production with Willow Geer, defaults most consistently to letting the actors mug and the camp.

Except, that is, when these characters prove not to be as one-dimensionally witless as they first presented. In a series of predictable one-to-one encounters with Paola, Bernard, Rebecca, Nicola and Kaj each proceed to subvert our heroine’s first impressions, just as she thought they were collectively doing to the entire Latinx population. Come to discover that everyone is more or less trying to do the right thing.

Which means that Cubria has written a play without a place to direct our own anger. Well and good, but the play is neither funny, angry or insightful enough to keep us engaged. Should Paola ever reach her dream of motherhood, we can wish her offspring the best of luck. That child will join a smart woke mother amidst a world of clowns.

THE HISPANIC/LATINO/LATINA/LATINX/LATINE VOTE continues through October 20 at 1419 N. Topanga Canyon Blvd., Topanga

Photo of Max Lawrence, Xochitl Romero and Laura Schein by Ian Flanders

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