WHAT CHARACTERS

posted by James Reel

    In the latest Tucson Weekly, I review two plays that are worth seeing despite certain flaws—and in terms of strengths and weaknesses, the productions are mirror images of each other.
    Arizona Theatre Company has a beautiful hole-in-the-center show:

    Jon Jory's new adaptation of Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, being launched at Arizona Theatre Company before moving on to other theaters, does almost everything right.
    It creates a fast-moving, involving stage work out of a beloved prose piece (not so difficult in this case, because Austen wrote a lot of dialogue). Jory gets the entire story told without either cramming the script with detail or omitting anything crucial. His clean, clockwork direction keeps everything clear and logical, even when a dozen people are swirling through the ballroom scenes. The cast conveys Austen's intelligent witticisms neatly, without resorting to physical or verbal pratfalls. The costumes are lovely; the simple set proves sufficiently versatile, and the sound and light design support it all effectively, without becoming distractions.
    This would be a fabulous production if it weren't for one thing: The depiction of the central character is absolutely wrong.

    In 1982, a woman, bundled in several layers of odd clothing, is caught Dumpster diving in Kansas City. When the cops get her to say anything at all, it's some incomprehensible babble. Maybe she's Mexican; maybe she's Korean. But all that really matters at the moment is that she's obviously just one more homeless lunatic wandering the streets. After all, this is about the same time that Ronald Reagan has thrown open all the asylum doors and relocated America's mentally ill to the gutters. This woman ought to be put back where she came from.
    Except--as officials learn only after this woman has been institutionalized for a dozen years--she didn't come from some asylum. She's a Tarahumara woman from the mountains of northern Chihuahua. She doesn't babble; she simply speaks her native tongue, the Rarámuri language, and no other.
    This woman, who was not released until 1994, is the real-life subject of Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda's trilingual play The Woman Who Fell From the Sky/La Mujer Que Cáyo del Cielo. Tucson's Borderlands Theater first presented the play five years ago, and has now revived it with its original star, the phenomenal Mexican actress Luisa Huertas. As before, Barclay Goldsmith directs.
    Running for 90 minutes without a break, The Woman Who Fell From the Sky still suffers from a few dry stretches, and offers only the sketchiest characterizations of the three people with the greatest impact on this woman's life, two doctors who drug the humanity out of her and the man who accidentally comes to save her.