Reviewed by Katie Buenneke
Pasadena Playhouse
Through April 7
Gloria Calderón Kellett’s world premiere at the Pasadena Playhouse will appeal to those who like Calderón Kellett’s TV work, like One Day at a Time on Netflix and With Love on Prime. I find both shows to be fine, and One of the Good Ones to be cut from the same cloth. The jokes are often funny, and frequently land to great laughter, but the play, which is directed by Kimberly Senior, fundamentally lacks emotional depth.
One of the Good Ones centers on a Latino family who live in a luxe Pasadena house. Mother Illana (Lana Parrilla) is of Puerto Rican and Mexican extraction, but she doesn’t speak Spanish, and she harbors a lot of guilt over that. She’s married to Enrique (Carlos Gomez), whose family is Cuban and who speaks Spanish fluently, as does their only child, daughter Yoli (Isabella Gomez). Yoli tells her parents that her boyfriend, Marcos (Nico Greetham), is coming over for dinner, and her parents are excited to meet him, especially after Yoli tells them that he was born in Mexico, his dad works for the Dodgers, and his mom teaches Spanish. Yoli also tells her parents that she and Marcos have been having sex, which Illana finds beautiful and Enrique doesn’t wish to hear about.
Yoli’s parents are shocked when Marcos arrives at the house, a piñata in tow, and he is, well, remarkably White. Marcos’s parents are White, but Marcos, who speaks fluent Spanish, considers himself Mexican as he was born and raised in Mexico. Debates about what actually defines one’s ethnicity ensue. The show fundamentally feels like a generational battle between Gen X and Gen Z over identity politics.
This quickly becomes tiring. The back-and-forth between the characters feels more like demonstrative online discourse on Twitter or Tumblr than the way that people actually debate and discuss these kinds of topics.
Perhaps because it is a live performance, and because Calderón Kellett comes from a multi-cam sitcom background, many of the lines feel like they’re anticipating an applause break. That doesn’t mean they’re not good lines but they feel so obviously performed for the benefit of the audience.
The show is genuinely funny, and the cast are all quite capable. Greetham in particular steals a few moments with his awkwardness. But the whole thing feels like an updated and inverted re-do of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — a very fine movie that still holds up well in 2024. What made Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner notable is that it was released in 1967, at the height of the Civil Rights movement (Martin Luther King was assassinated a few months after it was released, requiring the filmmakers to remove a punchline about him as a dinner guest from the movie’s theatrical run), and interracial marriage had only just become legal nationwide a few months earlier. That’s a far cry from California in 2024, where interracial marriages and biracial and multi-racial children are far from controversial, much less illegal.
There’s still fertile ground to be mined about how much culture gets lost when two or more cultures combine, both on the microcosmic scale of a family and the macrocosmic scale of a nation. The show, in some of its more intriguing moments, has some of those conversations — but the overall effect of One of the Good Ones is the sitcom version of a justifiably iconic film.
Pasadena Playhouse, 39 S. El Molino Ave., Pasadena; Wed.-Fri., 8 pm., Sat., 2 and 8 pm, Sun., 2 pm through April 7. https://Pasadenaplayhouse.org. Running time: approximately 90 minutes with no intermission
