Melissa Carvahal (Photo by Alaska Jackson)
Reviewed by Deborah Klugman
Outside in Theatre
Through September 30
RECOMMENDED
Playwright Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s Torera spans 18 years and is set in Yucatán in our own times, bridging the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. Directed by Jude Lucas, the play is about a young woman who yearns to be a bullfighter, and it’s billed as the tale of one determined gal’s challenge to patriarchy and tradition. While this Davida-Goliath theme is certainly predominant, Torera is also very much a love story, with something of the aura of another-time-and-place romance, one involving two people whose love is viewed as verboten because of rigid class distinctions. At its most ambitious, the play strives for a macrocosmic perspective, signaled by its inclusion of ill-crossed lovers and its reflection on the responsibility of human beings for their choices.
Elena (Melissa Carvahal) and Tanok (Wilson Aldas) grow up together in the privileged home of Tanok’s father, Don Rafael (Matias Ponce), a celebrated rejoneador. Elena is the daughter of Don Raphael’s housekeeper, Pastora (Susana Elena Boyce), whose husband was killed in the arena while shielding Don Raphael from a bull. Don Rafael is rich and proud and wants nothing more than for his son to follow in his footsteps and become a celebrated bullfighter. Tanok very much wants to please his dad, as well as achieve the fame and glory that goes with rising to the heights of the bullfighting profession. But he’s not a natural; he has to work very hard for even a crumb of his father’s approval. Elena, on the other hand, possesses a natural grace and precision that, even as a child, makes her suitable for the training Tanok struggles to undertake.
This disparity is not a barrier between them. As children they frolic and show deep affection. (The first lengthy section in the play takes place in their childhood.) If there’s conflict, it’s because Pastora showers Tanok with the same love and warmth she shows her natural daughter — she’s cared for him from when he was an infant. Elena’s fleeting resentment always dissipates behind the admonishments of her mother and Tanok’s pleading devotion. When they grow up, that devotion remains unswerving and, maneuvering around his father, he engineers the circumstances to allow them to remain together and for Elena, possibly, to pursue her dream of entering the arena.
From its opening moments, Torera’s dynamic pivots on Carvahal’s sparkling performance; it’s an alluring display of one woman’s warm, willful drive to secure what she thinks should be hers. (Also, she’s the only actor who seems to have mastered a toreador’s cape maneuvers.) Aldas captures his character’s honesty and heartfelt allegiance to his childhood friend, as well as his vulnerability; the actor’s transformation in the second scene from a boy to a grown man is so awesome, you’d think you were watching another performer on stage (though some of that new potency dissipates in ensuing scenes). Ponce as Don Rafael and Boyce (appearing for the first time on stage) as Pastora are fine, but neither performance is layered, though Ponce has commanding moments when an enraged Don Raphael confronts his son.
The four principal players are supported by an ensemble of dancers (Anakarina Gallardo, Nate Riel, Destiny Rivera and Marcus Wooling, with choreography by Julie Turner), who perform variably between scenes, sometimes as toreadors, sometimes engaged in folk dances, sometimes representative of the spirits in Elena’s fantasy, and sometimes as the bull (Wooling). They also serve as set pieces — along with a ladder, a tree the children climb in childhood — and most impressively, as a horse which Tonak rides during training sessionswith his father. (A special shoutout to Riel who, as the rear half of a galloping horse, bears Aldas on his shoulders for multiple moments!)
Some of these between-scene-intervals, while enriching to the story, go on for too long. This may be to give the principal actors an opportunity for costume changes (Arroyo Repertory Theatre); nonetheless, the length of these sequences dissipates some of the forward drive of the narrative. And the in-the-round staging, while admittedly an apt choice for a story involving bullfighting, can frustrate a spectator (this one, for example) who loses sight of the actors’ expressions in crucial moments.
While the dialogue is smooth and streamlined and the story compelling, the denouement is somewhat fractured, with three different climactic moments in short order. Perhaps the most important of them is arguably mis-staged as well, with the actors at a distance from each other rather than viewed in striking proximity.
But whatever the problem with its parts, the production as a whole exudes a magic of its own, and a message about one woman’s pursuit of self-realization embodied in an arresting performance.
Outside in Theatre, 5317 York Blvd., Highland Park; Sat., Mon. and Tues., 8 pm, Sun., 3 pm; thru Sept. 30. https://outsideintheatre.vbotickets.com/event/TORERA_by_Monet_HurstMendoza/167887 Running time: one hour and 50 minutes with no intermission.
