Thanksgiving in America Presented at the Denver Arts Center
American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose
By: Susan Hall - Nov 24, 2011
American Night: The Ballad of Juan Jose
by Richard Montoya
The Denver Performing Arts Center
Directed by Sam Woodhouse
Cast: Richard Azurdia, Kacy-Earl David, David De Santos, Daphne Gaines, Sam Gregory, Ruy Iskandar, Rodney Lizcano, Dena Martinez, Libby West.
American Night is a production of the Denver Center Theater Company. The play was developed by Culture Clash, a Los Angeles based theater collective and captures the comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen mixed with Lily Tomlin. So outrageous are its sketches that you hurt from laughing until you realize that you hurt because they are so true.
The opening scene is wonderful, but somewhat misleading. Walking endlessly across the scrub Sonora desert, Juan Jose, a Mexican cop, is actually studying for for his US citizenship test. If he started as illegal, Juan Jose is on his way to becoming a newly minted American.
Studying for his test, Juan hallucinates about characters that crop up along the way in US history. Through a haze, the nine actors perform 40 roles, which means changing costumes about 5 times each in an hour and a half. No mean feat when it appears not to effect their brilliant performances in the least.
The take on the arrival of Cortes brandishing guns, the signing of the Treaty of Guadaloupe-Hidalgo, a Spanish flu epidemic, the internment of Japanese during World War II and Emmitt Till's murder all smack of historian Howard Zinn, and seem to leap off the pages of his contrarian People's History of the United States with all of its ferocity and black humor.
The group works splendidly as an ensemble, but several performances stand out. Daphne Gaines as a nurse trying to stem a flu epidemic and in other equally dynamic turns, and Richard Azurdia, new to the group. Azurdia has a more stylized presentation than the other actors. It works well in a piece not grounded in reality but rather erupting from black comedy.
We aren't what we seem to be in the US. We're not as nice, or as generous, or as honest as we are often taught in elementary social studies. Mayor Bloomberg of New York launched a surprise post middle of the night raid on the Occupy Wall Street protesters, cut off the press, used police in riot gear waving canisters of tear gas and banned press helicopters from the skies. A numbers cruncher at Bear Sterns decided that bundling mortgages even if they were issued to people with no income and no assets was not a good, but a brilliant idea. She brought down the economy while Washington regulators slept.
But let's face it. Whatever our flaws, America is as good as it gets. Why else would the Juan Joses of the world tramp across the desert, avoid the water stops for fear of border patrols, and end up in Emergency Rooms where the US government authorities and hospital executives vie to get rid of them and the tab they are beginning to run. The tab, of course, begins in Mexico where drug lords take prospective emigres' money, and then hire escorts who take every last cent the emigres have on them.
This outside the box look at immigration from playwright Richard Montoya is admirably mounted and performed. Whether you are pro, con or mixed in the current debate, most of us living in the country are immigrants and we have made the country we see around us, for good or bad.
I for one am thankful this Thanksgiving for an American culture in which provocative playwrights, talented performing artists and institutions like the Denver Performing Arts Center, all committed to entertaining and educating, erupt like the Rockies, casting our life in wonderful amusements and dramas.