EACH DAY DIES WITH SLEEP
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As in The Promise, seen earlier this fall at Lifeline Theatre, Rivera uses a specific Latino-American sensibility as the vantage point from which to display a universal vision. Blurring the line between the “magic realist” style of some modern South American writers, European absurdism and surrealism, and the crude camp ridiculousness of such satirists as novelist William S. Burroughs, playwright Charles Ludlam, and filmmaker John Waters, Rivera exaggerates the grim realities of life in the Puerto Rican underclass to simultaneously comic and horrific effect. Each Day Dies With Sleep is filled with references to houses overrun with squalling brats and dangerously hungry, disease-carrying animals; to women reduced to the most basic functions of housekeepers and whores by macho men who take pride in their ability to spawn babies and then ignore them; to poverty, alcoholism, incest, child abuse, adultery, and murder; and to an unhealthily jumbled spirituality tenuously rooted in both Christianity and pagan occultism that profanes both systems. But Rivera’s Long Island Puerto Ricans, like John Waters’s white Baltimore bohemians, embody a corruption unconfined to any particular class or race or religion.
Each Day Dies With Sleep begins and ends with a lone woman. She is Nelly, the middle daughter of 21 children, and her struggle for independence is the crux of the play. Her life is dominated by two men: her father Augie, a malevolent cockroach of a man determined to keep her subjugated at all costs, and her husband Johnny, a vain weakling whose beauty and innocence are both his blessing and his curse. Having already given Nelly a pack of nieces and nephews by her older sisters–“What can I say? I love this family,” he confesses–he woos Nelly, whom he finds crawling around on all fours and speaking in baby talk. In his arms, her child’s squeak turns into a low, sexy purr; and her ambition–to find a space, and a life, “not covered by members of my big family or animal droppings”–fills him with the illusion of purpose. With money won from the lottery after Nelly prophetically dreams the winning numbers, the newlyweds head off to California, where a tree growing in the middle of their living room sprouts aphrodisiac oranges. There they open up a celebrity garage (“We’ve jump-started Marlon Brando and realigned Jack Nicholson,” Nelly gushes at one point). But the sense of security and pride that Nelly finds in the old-fashioned work ethic eludes Johnny, who’d much rather be a male model and a rock singer; Johnny also harbors a yen for Nelly’s younger sister Gloria and dreams of the day she “turns legal.”
