If my boyfriend ran away with a mysterious identical copy of me, whom I may
have created by accident because some thrift store in Norway sold me a
typewriter with a hex on it that could do such things, I would have several
options. I might very well pull a María (Steph Vondell). Specifically,I
might hound the bastard and his demon lover across North America, finally
giving up only when I realized that the meaning of life—or at least the
prospect of way better sex than I had grown accustomed to with that
feckless, gullible idiot of an ex—resided in a garret above a squalid
jarana shop in the form of that cute Guatemalan luthier I banged on my way
out of Mexico.
Were I to go the María route, however, heaven forbid I find myself trapped
inside this heinous excuse for a play, presented by Something Marvelous,
which would obligate me to stoop to such unverisimilar follies as having to
say the words “I throw the typewriter” before gingerly handing it offstage.
Christ guard my delicate soul from having to narrate fake cunnilingus in
real-time, first-person present tense. That’s not a play at all. That’s not
even play-by-play, since what “happens” fails to happen as described.
That’s just someone who would rather be acting talking to listeners who
would rather be watching. That it goes on unabated for 90 minutes is
everyone’s misfortune, including Vondell’s, who at least manages to endow
her flood of bilingual narratorial verbiage with a certain crispness. v
Through 7/15: Thu-Sat 7:30 PM, Sun 3 PM, Athenaeum Theatre, 2936 N. Southport, 773-935-6875, somethingmarvelous.org, $22.
