‘Elevada’ a higher form of romcom
Sheila Callaghan is like the Houdini of playwrights. Throw her the skull of a deer, a dandruff problem, a pole dancing sequence, the smell of lunch meat and a bald woman with a hole cut in her chest, and Callaghan will write her way out, fashioning a romcom with notes of buddy comedy and surreal guerrilla corporate hacking thriller.
Two characters who really ought to hate each other? Muahaha, by the end of this scene, they’ll love each other! A public relations consultation gone horribly awry? Well, what if it’s also an adorable first date? It’s abracadabra dramaturgy; it’s writing that turns by magic crank.
“We don’t do plays like this very often,” Shotgun Players artistic director Patrick Dooley said in his Thursday, Oct. 24, opening night curtain speech
for Callaghan’s “Elevada.” He didn’t mean any of the weird stuff; the lunch meat and genregrinding are all squarely and wonderfully within Shotgun’s wheelhouse. He meant the love story part. Shotgun is allergic to sentimentality. It rejects feelgood cliche. It wants you to leave the theater with a “Whoa!” or “What?” rather than an “Aww.” In “Elevada,” that aesthetic manifests as a search for what’s honest beneath the familiar and the comforting.
A drop or two of treacle still oozes into “Elevada,” which twirls and tangos through the accidental romance of Ramona (Sango Tajima), who has cancer, and Khalil (Wes Gabrillo), a “digital vigilante” who’s selling his identity to a corporation.
Callaghan includes a couple of lines like, “I’m not scared of living. I’m scared of living without him,” and Ramona makes a few unfortunate swerves into manic pixie dream girl territory. She’s fond of funny accents and impulsive adventures, like buying ugly new couches and taking dance classes, in a way that’s supposed to melt Khalil’s workaholism. Add in her sickness, and she starts to sound a lot like Natalie Portman’s character in “Garden State.”
But on the whole, the romcom structure of “Elevada” makes for fitting scaffolding for Callaghan’s daredevil imagination. You know how the beats of romcoms go without knowing how you know them. What’s supposed to happen in the meetcute scene, the bossy older sister scene, the disastrous party scene, the airport scene — all these are written in your DNA. You could mute the sound of “Elevada” and know exactly what’s happening, which gives Callaghan the platform to make her dialogue do somersaults, careen off cliffs and soar.
“In the immediate oneonone I tend to, like, forget that I have a body,” Khalil says.
“I’m tracing the edges of your gaze with my own. I’m signaling to the superman across the superchasm,” Ramona says.
Director Susannah Martin (who also helmed Callaghan’s superb “Women Laughing Alone with Salad” at Shotgun last year) wrangles these almostmisfires into a first date’s flirtation. Each spasm of speech is a tentacle hesitantly reaching out for connection. In Callaghan’s anxious universe, corporate and consumerist argot means we barely know how to talk to each other any more.
“Um, you know, brand positioning, campaign brainstorming, competitive research,” Ramona says, explaining her work to Khalil. “That, sort of.” What? Yet he nods along, just as the rest of us would.
Our communication might be handicapped, Callaghan implies, but American capitalism hasn’t yet quashed our throbbing urge to keep trying anyway, our human feelings. Occasionally a grand theatrical gesture amplifies those feelings, as when a dance troupe (choreographed with wit and grace by Natalie Greene) floods the stage to blow up characters’ nightmarish worries and transcendent joy alike.
Khalil’s activist scheme, as well as his and the play’s attitudes toward it, remains hazy and convoluted, and Ramona’s selfhatred — which makes her adopt a destructive approach toward her disease and her love life — feels like blueprint or graftedon afterthought. Tajima’s Ramona takes so much joy in everything around her — a cuddle, a foot massage, a game of role play, a hideous plush sofa. How is it possible that this beam of sunlight ever loathed herself or didn’t want to live?
That’s but a quibble, though. Tajima frequently deploys a beguilingly open expression that seems to hold within it both all the world’s hope and all the world’s despair. Her countenance searches for and welcomes and acknowledges all possibilities. She epitomizes receptiveness, making this love story tremble with danger and magic.
The real star turn in “Elevada,” though, comes from Soren Santos as Khalil’s deadbeat roommate, Owen, who falls for Ramona’s uptight sister, June (Karen Offereins). Santos marshals his every nerve ending toward his purpose. If the human body had 10 thousand antennae, all his would be beaming at her. If he has an excuse just to glance at his new crush, he will feast on it, and he’ll empty his arsenal of tools not to have to break it. Besieged by the idea of her, he pulses and springs, anticipating her needs, thoughts, whims.
It’s enough to make you believe a romcom could be real.