A CHILD OF CIVIL WAR MAKES SENSE OF LIFE
Looking For América Mermaid Arts Centre , Bray
★★★★★
El Salvador-born Federico González is an Irish citizen who’s been living here for more than 20 years. He has a story to tell in this one-man show that links his own life to the family disruption and tragedies caused by civil wars that have been a part of Latin American and European history right up to Ukraine today.
González has an attractive personality and there are touches of humour along the way. Most of the dangerous things that happened to his family occurred when he was very young and, as he says himself, children seem able to accept tough times as part of life and only make sense of them in later years.
His family had to flee El Salvador because of the civil war and constant government harassment when he was just a five year old. His totally unpolitical Palestinian grandfather, who had fled to El Salvador in the 1940s, was assassiher nated because his son Dennis was a guerrilla fighter in El Salvador. Dennis himself was also killed.
González’s father was arrested for treating an injured guerrilla fighter without informing the authorities. He could have spent years in jail but for an extraordinary coincidence. And the incident reintroduces us to the horrible euphemism ‘the disappeared’.
When the family fled El Salvador, they wandered from country to country in Latin America, ending up in Cuba, which became a haven for the young Federico.
América is not just a place, it’s also the name of a female family friend, a former guerrilla fighter with whom they lost touch over the years. But their search for in Cuba on their return there many years later is an unsatisfying diversion that adds little to the main story.
Considerable use is made of projected family photographs and González links scenes with some nimble dance steps to a Latin beat. I think the dances might have looked more natural as part of the projected scenes.
González is new to stage work and didn’t have quite the polished performer’s ability to bring it fully alive onstage. The script, cowritten with Janet Moran, has plenty of fascinating detail but it’s a bit over-written in places and on the night I saw the show it was spoken too fast and without sufficient voice projection. Perhaps a bigger audience might help him to take his time and bring out the best in the story.
And the addition to the story of some of Gonzalez’s Irish experience felt like a bit of a stick-on for home consumption.
April tour dates: Presentation Arts, Enniscorthy, 8th: Pavilion, Dún Laoghaire, 10: Smock Alley, 1314: Town Hall Theatre Galway 16.
The TV sitcom Friends is relegated now to repeats of old shows, but it comes alive onstage shortly at the Bord Gáis Energy Theatre (April 19 – 23) in Friends! The Musical Parody, that ran first off-Broadway and in Las Vegas, poking fun at the misadventures of the characters from the show as they navigate work, life and love in 1990s Manhattan – (not the original cast of course).
Not that the original was afraid to poke fun at itself. After its Dublin production it will take off on a visit to nine towns: Killarney, Cork, Limerick, Kilkenny, Wexford, Drogheda, Mullingar and Castlebar, ending in Galway on May 8.