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Photos by Art Carillo Top: Brian Sidney Bembrige's set and Jesse Klug's lighting captures the image that appeared at the Fullerton Avenue underpass in April, 2005. Tanya Saracho's docudrama captures the phenomenon it evoked. Middle: Juan Gabriel Ruiz .Bottom: Charin Alvarez.
You know the people of Our Lady of the Underpass. Well. The good, the bad, the heartbroken and the cluelessly, internally ugly – Playwright Tanya Saracho has captured a deep and dazzling cross-section of humanity from the sacred to the profane. Yes, we know; “Humanity” is a vastly overused noun in theaterland, the promise of its illumination touted in virtually every press release and mission statement theaters issue. Teatro Vista’s Our Lady is among the rare few that deliver on that promise. Our Lady veers - just like real life- from laugh-out-loud hilarious, to gut-wrenching to enraging to contemplative.
Directed by Sandra Marquez, the 90-minute production also manages to transcend the bumbling human condition. In this docudrama of an urban altar, there’s a glimmer of something arching above and among the people who come to pray and gape and scoff and mock the image by the highway. The devil, so conventional wisdom has it, is in the details. But in Our Lady of the Underpass, it’s something on the other end of the spiritual spectrum. Something that defies the endless mundane tragedies of the everyday and hovers, defiant and hopeful, between the asphalt and the eternal.
To compose the power-monologues that comprise this piece, Saracho hung out at the Fullerton Avenue underpass, tape recorder in hand, for over a year starting in April 2005. That was when – a week a after the Pope died – Obdulia Delgado saw what she believed to be a manifestation of the Virgin Mary in the discolored cement near Logan Square. The photos are still up all over the Internets, a softly curving image that does indeed look like an archetypal image of the Madonna. Or a bad patch job. Or a giant vagina. All of these interpretations arise in Our Lady.
Marquez makes all the disparate elements of this ensemble piece resonate. She’s got a powerful cast – Charin Alvarez, Chris Cantelmi, Ilana Faust, Suzette Mayobre, Rosie Newton and Juan Gabriel Ruiz play various interview subjects with layer upon layer of believable individuality. Moreover, they gracefully navigate the piece’s treacherous structure. Our Lady is made up of one-sided conversations, as Saracho’s interviewees leave the audience to fill in the gaps as they respond to questions from an unseen, unheard woman. It’s a feat of both art and technique that there’s no stiltedness to these one-way talks. And while you don’t see or hear her, Saracho becomes an intriguing character nonetheless. You get to know her – a curvy Mexican-American born into a comfortable amount of money and gifted with an artist’s passion and creativity – and to admire and like her.
It’s impossible to discount the startling degree to which Saracho got complete strangers to spill their darkest, most desperate secrets, telling stories that – in many cases – they had never shared with a single living soul. Pondering whether that phenomenon is the hand of God at work or a testimony to Saracho’s mad interviewing skills adds another layer to Our Lady’s immensely enjoyable intricacies.
Our Lady begins with Ruiz as Tony, the self-appointed guardian of the shrine. Ruiz sets the bar, smashing the sublime into the smutty with terrific impact. An aspiring Deacon,
Tony is deeply devout - except when he’s not.
His spiral from prayerful respect to wild-eyed confessions of three-ways with “monstrous” women is a stellar example of comedy founded on a deep undercurrent of agony. It is also indicative of Marquez’ keen ear and able direction. Like so many of the people Saracho interviews, Tony could come across a one-note weirdo zealot. He’s not. No matter how outrageous as he gets, he never becomes a complete buffoon – not even when you’re laughing at his whack theories as to the inherently evilness of modern women.
That tri-chotomy - reverence, humor and deeply moving pathos - defines most of the monologues in Our Lady. Among others, we hear from Matt (Cantelmi), a racist, homophobic and sadistic jogger who is flat-out hysterical simply because he is so utterly unaware of what a supreme example of assholery he presents.Cantelmi has this cretin down – he’s utterly hateful and completely pathetic. When he finally jogs off in his match-matchy Nike togs, you want to stop the show with applause. Which is the response virtually all of the monologues elicit.
Alvarez is luminous as the guardian of a profoundly disabled child whose shocker of a story ends with a harsh moral about God’s attitude toward spiritual ugliness. As a Polish-American nurse, Faust delivers a harrowing tale about chocolate pudding and housecleaning for a Glencoe gorgon. Newton provides a tearjerker as a Santeria-believing Jew who believes in a destiny that’s been denied her. Mayobre offers a story of a woman completely alone deep in the bowels of a gut-gnawing trap.
Brian Sidney Bembridge’s set is a museum-quality replication of the underpass. Combined with Mike Tutaj’s projections, Ray Nardelli’s soundscape of prayers and traffic and Jesse Klug’s crucially important lighting, “Our Lady of the Underpass’’ is worth a trip for the spiritual, the secular and everyone in between.
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