John Leguizamo‘s sources improve as his new play moves from an unfocused first act to a very powerful, uncompromising second. “The Other Americans” opened Thursday at the Public Theater after its world premiere last year at D.C.’s Arena Stage.
A Latino family has moved from Jackson Heights to the far more upscale Forest Hills in Queens. Nelson (Leguizamo) has even installed in the backyard a swimming pool, something that he never saw in their old neighborhood. His daughter, Toni (Rebecca Jimenez), is getting married and it promises to be quite the blowout. More important, his son, Nick (Trey Santiago-Hudson), is returning home from a long stint in a mental hospital.
You may already be thinking of Paddy Chayevsky’s “The Catered Affair” or Frank D. Gilroy’s “The Subject Was Roses.” At first glance, it’s all pretty soggy kitchen-sink stuff, and even the usually brilliant set designer Arnulfo Maldonado appears to have succumbed, decorating Patti (Luna Lauren Velez) and Nelson’s house from the nearest outlet furniture store. That swimming pool is central to the story and should never be out of sight. And yet Maldonado, under the not-always-steady direction of Ruben Santiago-Hudson, often allows this status symbol to be obscured by a very messy kitchen in need of drastic renovation.
Fortunately, the seeds of a far better drama are planted in this sketchy first act. Nelson’s plans to save his laundromat business don’t really come into focus until Act 2 when Leguizamo takes something as mundane as the “mats,” as Nelson calls his business, and gives them all the weight of Joe Keller’s World War II munitions factory in Arthur Miller’s “All My Sons.” That’s quite a theatrical feat, and equally effective, Leguizamo never softens his fierce performance to paint the harsh contours of Nelson’s rigid world view.
Trey Santiago-Hudson makes the son’s pain palpable from the moment this character’s parents resort to old mistakes. And one can’t fault the other portrayals, of Nelson’s future son-in-law (Bradley James Tejeda), his sister (Rosa Evangelina Arredondo) and a neighbor (Sarah Nina Hayon). How unusual it is nowadays for a playwright to eschew the two-hander format and deliver a full extended family and community on stage!
Where Leguizamo and director Santiago-Hudson run into trouble are a number of scenes that deliver tiny capsules of drama from the characters’ fraught past. There’s a reason playwrights like Miller, Tennessee Williams and Eugene O’Neill took at least three hours to tell their stories of troubled families. It takes time to develop these complicated, often panic-stricken lives. “The Other Americans” clocks in at two hours and fifteen minutes with intermission. Short scenes that gives us Nelson’s own traumatic childhood and Toni’s inferiority complex are introduced and resolved only minutes later. What’s needed is a setup in Act 1 and then a slow festering in the second act.
What Leguizamo achieves, fortunately, is far greater: a true American tragedy.
