67. MY MAÑANA COMES
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Spoiler
alert: I’m about to gush, uncharacteristically, about MY MAÑANA COMES, a
thoroughly engrossing new play by Elizabeth Irwin at the Peter Jay Sharp Theatre.
I was aware that it had received widespread kudos when it opened a week or so
ago, but I’m always skeptical until I see for myself. Sure enough, the play scores
10s in all categories: writing, acting, direction, and design.
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| From left: José Joaquin Pérez, Jason Bowen, Brian Quijada, Reza Salazar. Photo: Matthew Murphy. |
Ms. Irwin, whose
play is being produced by the Playwrights Realm, devoted to supporting the work
of early-career playwrights, writes in the program that her years of working in restaurants
in various jobs exposed her to the way restaurant employees in the “back of the
house” develop family-like relationships, with all the positive and negative
elements such bonding brings. Her purpose in writing MY MAÑANA COMES was to reveal
the everyday lives of the people whose circumstances make up the subjects of Op
Ed articles, Senate debates, and university discussions. The play, set in the kitchen
of an up-scale restaurant off Madison Avenue in the 60s, examines the daily
routines, friendships, and struggles of four busboys. It’s a story of
aspiration and determination, of sacrifice and betrayal, of pride in one’s job
and business exploitation; ultimately, it’s about the desperation of the
underclass and the tragedy of illegal immigrants. As Ms. Irwin notes: “This
play is about what happens to that part of the restaurant’s family when the
outside world seeps in.”
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| From left: Jose Joaquin Pérez, Jason Bowen, Brian Quijada, Reza Salazar. Photo: Matthew Murphy. |
The busboys are Peter (Jason Bowen), African American;
Jorge (José Joaquín Pérez), Mexican and illegal; Pepe
(Reza Salazar), here three months, another undocumented Mexican; and the newest of the batch, Wahlid (Brian Quijada), Mexican American, bilingual but with little connection to his Mexican roots. Peter
and his girlfriend have a five-year-old daughter who’s the love of his life, and
for whom he slaves at his job in the hope that he can give her a better life,
even to where he can take pride in her owning her own restaurant.
Jorge saves every penny and may have put away as much as $30 thousand to fulfill
his promise to return home after four years and buy his family a house.
Pepe, however, broke as he is, can’t resist the temptation to spend what little he earns
on a nightly Heineken or a pair of Nike sneakers. Wahlid, outwardly ambitious, is studying to take the EMT exam, although his commitment becomes increasingly doubtful;
MY MAÑANA COMES documents the
intricate daily work practices of these four men as they go through their
kitchen duties in perfectly coordinated fashion, folding napkins, wiping
counters, serving dishes, clearing tables, slicing fruit, and so on. They share
their dreams and goals, rib each other (with lots of ethnic gibes), bitch about
the vagaries of their abusive French managers, negotiate shifts, and bring to
the workplace the daily hassles they must endure because of their low wages, a
combination of “shift pay” and tips. Anything that disturbs the equilibrium on
the narrow economic tightrope they must walk, like the $100 fine Peter must pay
for a fare-beating incident, can create chaos; similarly scary is any threat to the status of Jorge and Pepe, like
a visit of Con Ed to check a gas problem in the building one of them lives in.
For all the obvious
naturalism of the plot and performance, however, the audience must accept the
fact that the playwright has kept everyone else that might be involved out of
the picture. We hear about the managers, but never see them, nor do we
see the chefs who place the food on the counter, or the wait staff that would
presumably appear in the kitchen at some point. There’s also a considerable
amount of Spanish spoken, although dialogue that would ordinarily be spoken by
one Mexican immigrant to another in their native tongue is in English, albeit
lightly salted with Spanish. For the most part, Ms. Irwin has handled the difficult problem of seesawing
the languages well enough to be more or less convincing, including having
even Peter, the black, non-Hispanic busboy, be fairly conversant in Spanish,
but there are times when you’re aware that you’re suspending your disbelief so
that the dramatist can get on with her job.
The episodic, 95-minute,
intermissionless play progresses by incrementally deepening our knowledge of
these people, establishing the parameters of their personal and work-related issues,
with time taken from the sequence of events to give each character a single
expository, yet emotionally rich, monologue
delivered to the person’s closest relation (unseen). Ultimately, building on
the multitude of tiny personal dramas there arrives a climactic one affecting
everyone when the management behaves in an unconscionable way and the workers,
with all their individual doubts and fears, must determine how to react. The powerful
conclusion will knot your stomach.
In Chew Yay, MY MAÑANA COMES has found the
perfect director. He has brilliantly coordinated the nitty gritty activities of
the four busboys, making them consistently watchable, while drawing from each
actor a sharply edged, subtly shadowed, three-dimensional characterization that
never ceases being fully theatrical in terms of timing, emotional variety, and vocal/physical interest. Mr. Yay must also be credited for inspiring the design team
to work wonders in bringing their combined skills together to create a visual
and auditory world that holds you in its clutches from the very first to the
very last moment.
MY MAÑANA COMES is, literally, a work of
kitchen sink realism. Wilson Chin’s white and red set recreates the restaurant’s back room with
amazingly detailed authenticity, with swinging doors at stage right leading to
the dining room, and a stainless steel counter at stage left on which the unseen
chefs place dishes to be served. A wall down left rotates so that it can bring
lockers into view to suggest a change of locale. Overhead, fluorescent lights
hang, but designer Nicole Pearce makes what seem the limitations of
her available instruments in this naturalistic environment do far more than one
might at first think possible. Mikhail Fiksel has composed compellingly
rhythmic interstitial music for the scene breaks in this episodic drama, and
his sound design during the action is enormously helpful in creating
atmospheric tension. Costume designer Moria Sine Clinton’s black busboy uniforms
provide the perfect touch to let us know just what kind of restaurant we’re in,
and the everyday grunge her characters wear as mufti, from their T-shirts and
jeans down to their shoes and sneakers, is perfectly chosen.
This is essentially
an ensemble work, with each actor having roughly the same amount of stage time
and dramatic importance. Still, because of his leadership position among the
staff, Peter stands out as the central character, and his performance by
Mr. Bowen is a star-making one. Tall and
physically appealing, he brings an abundance of intelligence, frustration,
affection, humor, and anger to the role. In the final scene, after Peter has
been forced to make a painful choice, he stands alone on stage, slicing fruit, managing
an expression of such anguish and self-disgust that it will take a long time
before I forget it. Nearly as colorful is Mr. Quijada, the energetically
happy-go-lucky guy who, despite his family’s Mexican background, expresses his contempt
for the Mexican origins of Jorge and Pepe in smartass wisecracks. These get
under the skin of the tightly controlled Jorge, careful to keep his seething feelings
close to his vest for fear of rocking the boat; he's given a smart and
thoughtful performance by Mr. Pérez. Rounding out the ensemble is Mr. Salazar’s
Pepe, boyishly foolish and eminently likable.
My recommendation is not to wait
until tomorrow to get seats. Then again, although I wouldn’t
chance it, it’s good enough to warrant an extended run, so maybe you’ll have
time to do so after your mañana comes.