THE PROMISE
DuckWorks Productions at the Blue Rider Theatre
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In telling his story, Rivera steals a page from novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s bag of tricks, creating a living, breathing fictional world (set in working-class suburban Long Island) made up of equal parts miracle and mundanity, a world where spells are real and enchantment is a daily danger but where the poor are still forced to work at stifling factory jobs and live on the edge of (perhaps toxic) public landfills. Like Marquez’s better novels, Rivera’s play is all the richer because it contains both the empirical truth of realism and the evocative metaphors of fantasy. Whether you see Lilia Guzman as a woman possessed by the soul of her dead lover or as an anguished anorexic trying to control her chaotic feelings, Rivera’s tale is equally spellbinding.
Director Jeremy Wechsler does a great job of seamlessly melding the literal and figurative sides of The Promise, thanks in no small part to Walter Tabayoyong’s unobtrusive choreography (used to signify the play’s several conjuring sequences) and to the fact that Wechsler’s cast reacts to every surreal twist in Rivera’s story as if these things happen to everyone all the time.
Would that Alan Bowne’s one-act Beirut were similarly strong. Sadly, there is nothing that this dedicated, energetic, well-meaning cast of three young actors can do to make the play seem deeper, more carefully considered, and less hysterical and trendy (the play even contains a jab at the Band-Aid charity song “We Are the World”).
