Reviewed by Molly McLean
Playwrights Arena and The Victory Theatre
Through March 15
Jon Lawrence Rivera, the Artistic Director of Playwrights’ Arena, directs this new play by Nicholas Pilapil at the Victory Theatre Center in a co-production between the two companies. In Luca & Uri, Pilapil explores millennial gay relationships like in his precise, insightful The Bottoming Process. And like in Pilapil’s God Will Do the Rest, he writes characters whose two-dimensionality would not be out of place in a sitcom.
Luca & Uri is a dramatic chronicle of chapters in a relationship overshadowed, marred, and torn asunder by differing viewpoints. Luca is a pragmatic science professor, Uri is a mythology and folklore postgraduate student. How will they ever find common ground?
Well, we never see it happen. Instead, like the academics they are, they argue about ideas, telling instead of showing, and going nowhere slowly. The endless feeling of the debates is softened by actors Kurt Kanazawa, as Uri, and Roland Ruiz, as Luca, who are confident and speak with relaxed voices. They are the only two actors in the play. Their vocal and physical choices seem a bit baked in by rehearsal. It would be nice to see more playfulness, especially in a production that relies so heavily on just two people.
The play flashes back and forth to points in their ten-year relationship, pointing out places where it went wrong (like in movies such as Mulholland Drive or Nocturnal Animals). We know their love is not long for this world, as the first scene is of their breakup. But the structure of this jumping back and forth is more suited to film “cuts” than the physical transitions of a small theater. The actors have to change clothes onstage in low light, move props and stage blocks (scenic design by Christopher Murillo) as we listen to ambient music (sound design by Jesse Mandapat). The transitions sometimes feel longer than the scenes themselves. In a two-person new play, these minutes are golden. Perhaps a version of the play that used other techniques to deliver exposition would help the momentum.
Ultimately, this play is too cynical to be heartwarming and not tragic enough to be cathartic.
The Victory Theatre Center, 3326 West Victory Blvd., Burbank. Sat., Feb. 14; Fri.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; thru March 15. https://thevictorytheatrecenter.org/
