Review: FADE at Unexpected Stage Company

Before she became creator and show runner for the well-received three-season premium cable series "Vida," the playwright Tanya Saracho spent some time as a staffer in various TV writers' rooms, from HBO's "Girls" and "Looking" to ABC's "How to Get Away with Murder."

In her first such job, for Lifetime's series "Devious Maids," she was told point-blank she was a "diversity hire." Feeling isolated, she tended to bond with other Latinos on the janitorial staff.

That led directly to her 2017 play "Fade," currently being revived by the Unexpected Stage Company in Bethesda.

There, the carpeted Fireside Room at the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation church serves well as what's described as "one of those generic itinerant writer's offices in the writers' building" that has seen "decades of bad writing, receding hairlines, and frantic all-night writing sessions."

The scenes for "Fade" all occur after hours, which may explain why nobody else is around but the newly hired Lucia, a Latina novelist finding her way in this strange new surrounding, is all by herself, except for the occasional stops by a janitor, Abel, making his rounds.

Like her, he's a Mexican-American and they briefly bond over being in this white-dominated industray, where Latinos are represented on TV, if at all, in hilariously off-putting dialogue (which we hear at times - the funniest part of Saracho's play).

And yet, the two argue a bit that not all Mexican-Americans are alike, just like not all Latinos are alike - or is it Hispanic, or is it Latinx? And there are class issues to traverse between them as well.

She vents about how she's treated in the office (she's asked to get coffee or translate orders to an executive's maid) or how terrible the show she's doing can be. He mostly listens but guardedly hides his own background trauma - until she lures it out of him and promptly uses it in the script as a way to inject reality into her show.

"Fade" often seems like an hour-long one-act stretched to 90 minutes. There's a lot of scene changing where that well integrates janitorial chores with shuffling props around.

As Lucia, Camila Calderón is an agreeable ball of energy and ambition who is easily sidetracked by self-doubt and the avalanche of office microaggressions. Michael Burgos has a convincing hang-dog look he likely developed in years of comic one-acts. He infuses the taciturn Abel with a lot of telling looks and ominous eyeballs.

And as well as both of them inhabit their characters, there was more than a little overlap in their interaction, stepping on lines, talking over one another or otherwise not having a natural (or always intelligible) exchange. It's as if they learned their parts well separately, but hadn't rehearsed enough together.

Blame early performances or maybe it was the intent of director Dylan Arredondo who had some other flourishes in the modest production that involved lights (by Jozef Orisich) or incessant vacuuming that at one point went into the audience as well. Some of this had to do with killing time while Calderón had another change of costume (by Sharlene Clinton), but some of it was theatrical interpretation that didn't always land (including, for me at least, the ending).

"Fade" has an immediacy, though, and a relevance in a time when all of the arts is sometimes clumsily undergoing its kind of reckoning as they try opening up stages to new voices. And the generic office set (by Simone Schneeberg) placed in the generic Fireside Room performance space, worked well, down to the first time you heard the vacuum cleaner in the hallway outside the door that turned out not to be an errant cleaning staff but an approaching character.

Running time: About 90 minutes, no intermission.

Photo credit: Camila Calderón in Unexpected Stage Company's "Fade." Photo by David Lewis.

"Fade" by the Unexpected Stage Company continues through Nov. 13 at the River Road Unitarian Universalist Congregation building, 6301 River Road, Bethesda. Masks required. Tickets available online.

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