A beloved book, brought to life
It makes no sense to adapt a beloved novel for the theater. In fact, it’s absurd— basically the same as saying, “I’m going to take this thing you enjoyed, throw out the parts I can’t use, rearrange the rest, maybe add a bunch of other stuff I made up myself, pour it all into a completely different format, and invite you to go see the results out of respect for what it was before I started slapping it around.” And here’s what makes even less sense: We do go see it. And more often than not, we have a fine time.
Latest case in point: Karen Zacarías’s stage version of Into the Beautiful North, a novel by Chicago writer Luis Alberto Urrea, getting its world premiere now at 16th Street Theater in Berwyn. My wife and I both read the book when it came out in 2009 and agreed it was sly, sharp, and pleasing. Like fools, we got excited when we heard about the 16th Street production, and, perhaps just as foolishly, we weren’t disappointed. As codirected by Ann Filmer and Miguel Nuñez, Zacarías’s script isn’t as sly or sharp as the original, but it’s definitely pleas- ing. And it’s faithful in its fashion.
Both the book and the play center on Nayeli, a precocious Mexican teenager who lives in a tiny Pacific coast village called Tres Camarones, where, as Urrea notes, the people are so traditional they voted to disconnect their electricity. The tactic failed decisively, however, when Tres Camarones got caught up in Mexico’s economic crisis. With no work at home, the men went looking for it in el norte, the United States.
The vacuum they’ve left provides an opening for two dirty cops with lucrative sidelines doing “advisory” work for a drug cartel. Inspired by a local showing of The Magnificent
Seven, Nayeli decides to take her own trek north, where she hopes to find seven heroes who will help her kick cartel butt. Not incidentally, she also hopes to find her father, who left long ago for Kankakee, Illinois. The rest is a black- comic picaresque, as Nayeli and friends ( Tres Camarones’s lone gay man, Tacho, and goth girl “Vampi) lead us through the pleasures and horrors of Tijuana, the stalemated war between border cops and bor- der jumpers, the epic garbage dump where they meet their first hero, a would- be ninja named Atomiko, and parts of a North America that feels now like The Grapes of Wrath, now like A River Runs
Through It, and often like the commercial breaks during an NFL game.
The genius of Urrea’s narrative lies in its embrace of the whole. For all its seductions, the United States is neither Satan’s pit nor the promised land. The people who make for it may be deluded or desperate. They may want to disappear or they may simply get lost. They may even wish they could head home.
Filmer, Nuñez, and Zacarías seem to understand this. The River Runs Through It moment, when Nayeli encounters a fisherman in the Colorado mountains, is as quietly tender as the Grapes of
Wrath moments— including an attack on migrant workers— are ugly. The codirectors nevertheless push too hard for an ingratiating cartoonishness at times, leaning more than necessary on the notion of Nayeli and company as ragtag Mexican Power Rangers. They also allow too much of the ragtag to leech into their production values: dropped lines and botched moves are endearing only up to a point.
Still, things work out pretty well overall. Slips notwithstanding, the cast accomplish the essential business of bringing Into the Beautiful North beautifully into the room. Esteban Andres Cruz’s Tacho, Brandon Rivera’s Atomiko, and Laura Crotte’s Irma, Nayeli’s force- of- nature aunt, are particularly engaging, but everybody on Joanna Iwanicka’s clever set contributes energetically to a solid sense of ensemble. v