Easy to lose yourself in the intense drama of ‘Espejos: Clean’
Some theater experiences waft over you like a breeze on a warm beach, just wanting you to relax and feel better. Others toss you in deep water and require you to concentrate, focus, and add your own thoughts and skills to the endeavor so you can get the most out of it. “Espejos: Clean,” at Hartford Stage through Feb. 5, is definitely in the latter category. Don’t check your brain at the door and you’ll be rewarded, but it can also be a tough slog through a lot of verbiages.
“Espejos: Clean” is set at a highclass resort hotel in Cancun. The set consists of clean, sparkling tile platforms plus a couple of wellmade modern hotel beds. It’s a comfortable, welcoming environment, but events turn from fun in the sun to isolation, depression and rainy darkness.
The play has only two characters. Adriana (played by Emma Ramos) lives in Cancun and manages the cleaning staff at the hotel but still likes to get her hands dirty doing the work herself. She doesn’t mind making the occasional bed. Sarah (Kate Abbruzzese) is staying at the resort for her sister’s wedding. She describes herself as the black sheep of the family.
Adriana speaks mostly in
Spanish, while Sarah basically only knows the Spanish phrases she can call up on her phone. “I wanted to learn some Spanish,” she divulges, “but I’m so bad.”
At first, Sarah is the type of hopeless tourist Adriana is all too familiar with: She’s drunk at the bar, messes up her room, loses track of time and is unable to take care of herself. After a few chance encounters push the women to learn more about each other, they communicate more deeply. They try to reach out to each other while, in some ways, remaining defensive themselves.
There are long inner mono
logues but also abrupt flashbacks and dreamlike adventures that are told in other ways. Everything is wordy, though, and in two languages.
It’s easy to lose yourself in these winding tales of dangerous relationships, personal struggles and psychological revelations. It’s also easy to just get lost. Melissa Crespo’s East Coast premiere production (a co-production with Syracuse Stage in New York, which is getting it in mid-february) can sometimes be soothing in the wrong ways, causing you to lose focus.
Amid all the depressive thoughts there can be plenty of lightness. The mere mention of wedding rehearsal dinners gets chuckles from the audience. Abbruzzese, who wears a swimsuit and appears disheveled for most of the show, brings a lot of brash humor to Sarah, but not so much that it undercuts the tragedy in her life. Ramos takes the opposite tack for Adriana, professional and composed while clearly harboring dark secrets.
The whole show is rendered in supertitles that flash above, and sometimes beside, the actors, spelling out everything in both languages. (The Spanish translation is credited separately to Paula Zelaya Cervantes.) There are also impressive projections and sound effects that amplify the descriptions of rushing water, road trips and latenight
parties.
The pristine, high-tech environment is reminiscent of many shows done at Hartford Stage back when Darko Tresnjak was its artistic director. The set is remote, multi-platformed and so tidy it seems otherworldly. But the play’s energy comes from a different place than Tresnjak’s trademark immaculate style. Besides its female cast, “Espejos: Clean” has a female director and design team. It makes a difference. In other hands, the character’s dilemma could come off as less natural and less real or the sharp contrast between the clean hotel and the messy lives wouldn’t be as pronounced.
As well done as many of the individual scenes can be, it’s all a lot to take in. “Espejos: Clean” is a fine show for those who like to mentally multi-task. Your eyes can wander to Adrianna and Sarah, to the vibrant visuals around them and to all those words on the walls. At the end of its two-and-a-quarter hours (including intermission), you may feel like you’ve not just seen a play but read a novel and visited an art gallery as well.
Sensory overload can obviously be a hazard here, especially with a show that’s telling two life stories it really wants you to understand. The confrontation and confession scenes are clear and direct, but some of the underlying exposition doesn’t get the same attention.
You can imagine a production of “Espejos: Clean” that is much less technical, on a bare stage with raw emotions. You can also imagine one that goes even further with the multi-media, multi-layered approach. This one falls in the middle, providing the literal text of the script in two languages but otherwise using largely abstract images to convey the action. There’s a big splashy video finish that doesn’t exactly sum anything up but provides a sharp crescendo to all the emotional turmoil.
If you keep your wits around you, you’ll find “Espejos: Clean” to be a deep, meaningful drama that takes two cultural cliches — the industrious worker who keeps her private life private and the unruly hotel guest who’s a walking disaster — and humanizes them, enriches them, comforts them and explains them. It is a play that’s defined by language but reads between the lines and finds the emotion.