THEATRE REVIEW
Seamus Dever, Luisina Quarleri, and Denise Blasor in The Abuelas (Photo – Jenny Graham)
Dramaturg Ryan McRee opens his notes for Stephanie Alison Walker’s The Abuelas with this chilling fact: “To this day, there are billboards in Buenos Aires that read: If You Have Doubts About Your Identity, Call the Abuelas.”
By Melanie Hooks
Glendale’s first-rate Antaeus Theatre Company opens their season double bill with this probe into the ongoing aftermath of Argentina’s ‘Dirty War’ – infants stolen at birth from their political prisoner parents and raised – most to this day – with no knowledge of their own pasts. As researcher and Abuelas’ contact Hector Rombola told a recent after-show crowd, the people who raised those children generally had military connections. Most knew about, and some even met and selected, the babies’ murdered mothers. In fact, those ‘adoptive’ parents have been given a new name by the Abuelas, the organized group of grandmothers still seeking the children of their desaparecidos (‘disappeared’) from the military junta years of 1976-83. They call them appropriators.
Playwright Stephanie Walker has Argentinian family, has lived and worked there and has already written one play, The Madres, about three generations of women seeking justice for their slain relatives. The Abuelas, she states, is not about revenge or justice. It’s about living with the legacy of war – more, being the legacy of war.
In fact as the play opens, cellist Gabriela (Luisina Quarleri) has a completely different battle on her mind: an extended visit from her overbearing mami Soledad aka ‘Sol’ (Denise Blasor), who is ‘helping’ with the new baby. Husband Marty (Seamus Dever, Det. Kevin Ryan of Castle fame) tries – often vainly – to diffuse the fireworks caused by Sol’s jabs at Gabriela’s faults. He’s the one baking Sol’s birthday cake; throwing her small party; shielding Gabriela from the worst slights of Sol’s classist and patriarchal world view. Gabriela rises to her mother’s bait more than she wants to, frustrated that she can’t get any concentrated practice time in the apartment amid the constant scrutiny, despite needing it more than ever since being promoted to First Chair in Chicago’s Symphony Orchestra.
Irene De Bari and David DeSantos in “The Abuelas”at Antaeus Theatre Company (Photo – Jenny Graham)
They are the very picture of a loving couple. Marty dotes on Gabriela, and at the party, she brags to visitors César (David DeSantos) and Carolina (Irene De Bari) that she fell for Marty as soon as she heard his voice. She perches on his lap. He nuzzles her ear. The strangers from Argentina are duly impressed with the perfection of these two lovers and their lives…which they have come to unmoor.
How would you tell someone their mother might not be her biological parent? And more, that she might have known all along and hidden from you, the real identity and tragic story of your tortured and killed parents? Maybe even participated in it? Whatever your method, it probably wouldn’t be how Carolina and César break it to Gabriela – before the offending woman’s cake gets served – and things go from tense silence to flat-out explosion by intermission. Terrible party etiquette, but great drama.
Partly developed in Antaeus’s own Playwright Lab with its resident company, “The Abuelas” flexes serious performance muscle. Far from feeling like the West Coast premiere (and only second staging), the drama strides across the beautifully designed Chicago apartment set (Edward E. Haynes, Jr.) with zero bobbles, fraying family bonds snapping left and right.
A topic being examined from many angles in our culture right now, the question of personal identity, in this case Gabriela’s, throws the entire family’s into question. Who is her mother? A possible war criminal posing as a rich suburban mom? Or a political prisoner thrown 37 years ago from a plane after being chained to a steel slab during birth? And if Gabriela isn’t who she thought she was all this time, how can she know if she still loves Marty – Marty, who it turns out, isn’t exactly who they both worked so hard to portray to the world either.
It’s no accident that their apartment looks out through large windows at the ever-changing Lake Michigan – first placid, then grey with snow, then still after the storm. Projection Designer Adam R. Macias incorporates thematic elements beautifully, bringing the turbulence and chill of a Chicago winter inside. Sometimes Lighting Designer Andrew Schmedake bathes the actors solely in its light; sometimes they’re framed by candles and small holiday lights, sometimes the midnight kitchen bulb. All these elements work with the graded stage levels to create a feeling of loneliness within the city vs. the bright, easy warmth of the party, and just as easily morphs to scenes fraught with sexual tension: Gabriela and César alone on the roof as she rejects her entire past; Gabriela and Marty on their couch, desperate to reconnect.
Luisina Quarleri and Denise Blasor in The Abuelas (Photo – Jenny Graham)
Too often plays about married couples emphasize the brokenness without also considering the work real couples do to stay together. Walker, Quarleri and Dever, and director Andi Chapman capture the real fire of love – both long-term and fleeting – within this production, reason alone to watch.
But the hardest, perhaps truest, moment comes later between Gabriela and Soledad. Could you actually walk away from your mother, perhaps forever? The woman who raised you? Both Quarleri and Blasor make their imperfect, sniping, all-consuming love palpable, like an actual rope tying them together. As we consider that it might be severed while they both still live and love, we realize loss might be just as harrowing as the torture chamber.
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