John Leguizamo’s new play is a sober family drama inspired by some of the same people and places from Leguizamo’s past that powered “Freak” and the five other solo stage comedies he has written and performed over the past 35 years. But those shows were marked by his off-the-wall energy and wildly comic impersonations. “The Other Americans” is an ambitious play more in the mold of Arthur Miller’s tragedies about the failure of the American Dream. If the script aspires to more than it ultimately achieves, the production is solid and satisfying even before any of the seven cast members step out on stage: Set designer Arnulfo Maldonado has recreated a traditional middle-class home, intricately detailed with polished wood floors, a working kitchen, fancy iron latticework, an elegant Tiffany-style window.
This is the house in the wealthy Queens neighborhood of Forest Hills to which Nelson Castro (Leguizamo) owner of a string of laundromats, moved his family, to escape what he calls “ghetto ass Jackson Heights,” where he (and Leguizamo) grew up. By the end of the play, everybody except Nelson realizes that the move was a tragic mistake.
A sign of the care with which Leguizamo constructed this play is how much he is able to pack into a first, brief exchange, planting seeds that sprout throughout what follows:
“You’re late,” Nelson’s wife Patti (Luna Lauren Velez) says to Nelson.
“Si, pero, it’s not my fault,” Nelson replies.
Nelson has been off desperately wheeling and dealing on the telephone to get a handle on his sinking finances, while Patti has been anxiously preparing for the homecoming of their college-age son Nick. They are a Latino family, first-generation Americans, and their culture is expressed in the frequent use of Spanish words and phrases, the meal under way (chicharon de pollo and Pernil), the music they listen and occasionally dance to, even the way they interact with friends and family. Veronica (Sarah Nina Hayon) arrives with a covered dish of her lasañon, a platano lasagna, Nick’s favorite, and gossips and reminisces with Patti about the old neighborhood, where she still lives.
Nelson teases and taunts Eddie (Bradley James Tejeda), who’s known the Castro family his whole life and is now engaged to marry Nelson and Patti’s daughter Toni (Rebecca Jimenez.) Nelson is not happy about that: “Marry a guy from the Upper East Side, I says to her. They got money, good breeding, and they better the blood and shit…but, nah kids never listen.”
If Nelson’s relentless striving is at first played for laughs, it becomes part of an increasingly harsh portrait of a man who is always hustling, looking for the big score. He says that he’s doing it for his family, but we come to understand he’s still trying to prove his worth to his disapproving, long-dead father, from whom he inherited the laundromats. His sister Norma (Rosa Evangelina Arredondo), a successful businesswoman who put her own inheritance from their father to better use, seems to exist in the play primarily to suggest that Nelson’s financial struggles are a result of his own mismanagement and impractical ambitions, and that he has always found something or somebody else to blame for his own incompetence.
Nick (Trey Santiago-Hudson) finally shows up, and is immediately smothered in hugs and kisses. He is clearly uncomfortable. There is a distance between him and his family that is expressed in various ways. He tells them he’s become a vegetarian; his mother reacts by starting to throw out all the food she had prepared. His father has built a pool for him in the backyard because he was captain of the swim team in high school. But that was in Jackson Heights; when they moved to Forest Hills, he didn’t even make the team.
We soon learn that Nick has just spent time in a mental hospital, after experiencing a severe depression during his freshman year in college; eventually we are led to believe that his depression was a delayed reaction to a traumatic incident in high school, when some white kids from the new neighborhood viciously attacked him.
The play’s grand title encourages us to view the Castro family as emblematic of the Latino experience in America – or perhaps of all post-immigrant families. But this is undermined by Nelson’s behavior, which struck me as too idiosyncratic and disturbed to stand in for Everyman. There is a climactic revelation, which I won’t spoil, except to say that it revolves around Nelson’s not-always-plausible actions and provokes a series of events leading to a tragedy that does not feel fully earned. “The Other Americans” is set in 1998, but there is something more old-fashioned about it, a nod to a world half a century earlier, during the era of the plays that it emulates.
Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson has assembled a cast (including his own son as Nick) that largely does justice to the authentic-feeling rhythms of Leguizamo’s characters, especially Luna Lauren Velez as Patti and of course Leguizamo himself. Although one wishes that Leguizamo the writer had been kinder to his character, Leguizamo the actor makes him more likable and charismatic than he deserves.
The Other Americans
The Public Theater through October 26
Running time: 2 hours and 15 minutes including an intermission.
Tickets: $30 – $120
Written by John Leguizamo
Directed by Ruben Santiago-Hudson
Scenic design by Arnulfo Maldonado, costume design by Kara Harmon, lighting design by Jen Schriever, sound design by Justin Ellington, hair and wig designby Anika Seitu, prop management by Natalie Carney, fight direction by Thomas Schall, intimacy coordination by Ann C. James, choreographyby Lorna Ventura, dramaturgy by Jack Phillips Moore
Cast: Rosa Evangelina Arredondo as Norma, Kimberli Flores (Understudy), Sarah Nina Hayon as Veronica, Jaime José Hernández(Understudy),Rebecca Jimenez as Toni,John Leguizamo as Nelson, Trey Santiago-Hudson as Nick, Bradley James Tejeda as Eddie, Luna Lauren Velez as Patti, and Juan Francisco Villa (Understudy)
Photographs by Joan Marcus
