Gerardo Navarro and Noé Cervantes (Photo by Areon Media)
Reviewed by Molly McLean
The Fountain Theatre
Through Oct. 12
The new artistic director of the Fountain Theatre, Raymond O. Caldwell, brings Fly Me to the Sun to Los Angeles. He first directed the play in 2024 in Washington, D.C. The play is a one man show about the playwright Brian Quijada and his grandmother. Apparently, in his childhood, the two would film themselves imitating television shows. Now, in his play, he uses a puppet as a stand-in for her.
This production, unlike the 2024 premiere, does not star the playwright but the young actor Gerardo Navarro. Navarro exudes fantastic energy in every scene as the child of Salvadoran immigrants living in 1990s American suburbia. Playing his silent brother and DJ-accompanist is Noé Cervantes, who refracts the mood of his younger brother or drops the beat when needed.
The event’s theatricality enthralls yet the piece doesn’t add up to a full-bodied experience. This is due to deficiencies of perspective.
The structure of the play is a series of vignettes, meant to imitate television segments. Caldwell’s direction never misses an opportunity to keep the pace as brisk as possible. Like on television, the sparkling technical elements keep our attention. For example, Andrea “Slim” Allmond’s sound design runs alongside remixes and beats by the playwright’s brother, Marvin Quijada. They give the show rhythm and keep our heads turning. Alison Brummer’s lights create a dancehall, a confessional, or an afterschool special — the long shadows of a 7- year-old’s mind. The projections by Deja Collins usually show the setting or the theme of a scene. The props by Jenine MacDonald are fun, often repurposing household objects for a television set, as a child might. Jeanette Godoy’s costumes show the time period as well as the characters’ personalities. BQ, the showy one, wears a tuxedo-shirt, and DJ “Silent Marvin” wears a bucket hat and sweatsuit that obscures him from the audience. The play takes place on a living room/kitchen set, like in a sitcom. Despite their advantages, all these technical elements in a one-person show feel out of scale with the piece’s lean essence.
The majority of the play takes place between the puppet-grandmother and the protagonist BQ. Her body is felt with a flat mouth, Henson style, in a nod to the setting and the tone of the play. Navarro does a great job keeping the audience enthralled. However, he is swimming upstream to do so, because we never get more than a child’s perspective on his grandmother. Their relationship stays the same over the course of the 90-minute play. She is a caretaker,; he is cared for. Any serious reflections she has on life get treated as jokes. This play is purportedly about a woman, but the only woman onstage is a puppet with a one-dimensional character.
This one-man show jumps through forms. There are musical numbers, which often meditate on a vague theme. The poems describe dramatic situations that happened offstage in the past. The jokes are told from a child’s perspective, and do not reveal information about characters or theme. The puppet scenes are vaudeville. Few dramatic scenes happen, and when they do, they are a welcome change. For example, when the grandmother meets a former gang member, we get to see a character and relationship shift. But for the most part, Fly Me to the Sun stays on the earth near a television set, with all the fatigue, pat morals, and short attention span that comes with it.
The Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave., Los Angeles. Fri., Sat., and Mon. at 8 p.m.; Sun. at 2 pm; thru Oct 12. https://FountainTheatre.com.
