Fighting Shadows

Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Rosenthal Theater, Inner City Arts
Through May 8

RECOMMENDED

Love, muses Richard Cabral during the opening moments of his autobiographical solo show, means different things to different people, and can even be something different for any one person at different stages in his or her life. Cabral’s perception of love as a young boy, he tells his audience, differed from how he experienced it as a gang member, and then as a prison inmate — and still later as the man he is now.  

I am paraphrasing, of course; this anecdotal memoir, co-written with director Robert Egan, is spun with far more streamlined eloquence than I can relay, and tracks his journey from a loveless broken home in the barrio to the present, where he’s recognized as a performer, a poet, a father and a teacher.  

The story is filled with all too disturbingly familiar details that might be drawn from a case study in gang member behavior. Cabral grew up deprived of his natural father, who abandoned his mother and himself when he was two. Then came a series of his Mom’s abusive lovers, who beat them both. He briefly found comfort bonding with his abuela, but after she returned to Mexico he was on his own and ripe picking for gang recruitment. As a young teen, this is exactly where he turned, deriving a sense of belonging and self-esteem missing elsewhere in his young life.

The narrative intensifies after Cabral witnesses the death of a friend in a gang confrontation, and narrowly misses being tried for murder when a man he shoots survives. Though still eaten away by anger, eventually he begins to question the values of the gang culture that sustained him through his youth, especially after he becomes friends with an old enemy while in prison. When he discovers that a homie he likes and respects premeditatedly executed a young girl, he experiences an epiphany, and his rejection of gang culture is complete.

On stage under Egan’s direction, Cabral is all pulsating emotion. It’s a raw, un-prettified performance, although the night I attended I observed a distance from the audience that I myself would have liked to have seen bridged. But many around me were rapt.

Rosenthal Theater, Inner City Arts, 720 Kohler Street, downtown; Thurs.-Sat. 8 p.m.; Sat., 5 p.m.; Sun. 3 p.m. & 6 p.m. Brownpapertickets.com or fightingshadowstheplay.com. Running time: one hour, 35 minutes with no intermission