Fuzzy ramblings across generations
One of the many story lines of Cherríe Moraga’s “The Mathematics of Love” follows an octogenarian with dementia. Peaches (Rose Portillo) can’t remember where she is, why she’s there, that her kids have long grown up or that Daughter (Sarita Ocón) lost a partner two months ago. Celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary with Poppa (George Killingsworth) in the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, she compulsively scrubs toilets and folds towels, thinking she’s still the hired help she was in her youth at a Tijuana casino.
Portraying a character with memory and cognitive problems is one thing. But as a whole, this world premiere, seen Sunday, Aug. 13, at Brava Theater Center, is just as fuzzy and impenetrable as Peaches’ own ramblings.
“The Mathematics of Love,” which Moraga also directs, is the kind of show you try your darndest to like. Blending eras, it weaves together the many ways indigenous and Latina women, throughout centuries, have been enslaved. Malinxe (Veronica Maynez), an Indian sold into slavery to Hernan Cortés by her mother (also Portillo), goes on to translate for him, helping him conquer the Aztecs, and become his lover.
Time-traveling to the 18th century, when she checks into that era’s version of the Biltmore, Mission Spa and Towers, she has her own slave, Girl (Portillo once again), who jockeys for space on a sleeping mat with Nana (Carla Pantoja), a stinky-footed hotel staffer and the only character to remain roughly the same, no matter the epoch of the moment.
In childhood, Peaches wasn’t exactly sold by her mother to the predatory casino owner, the town’s “bossman, la tortilla and
el frijol para la familia.” But she, too, might as well have been; Amado (Carlos Aguirre) recalls Peaches’ mother watching as she trudges into his clutches. If Daughter seems comparably better positioned — she’s empowered enough to be studying for a nursing exam — she, too, is oppressed. She doesn’t get credit for anything she does for her parents, not even a first name, whereas her unseen brother is called “God.” Her lesbianism and her gender both get scorn.
If the project here is worthy, and very much of a piece with Moraga’s canon of work as a leading Chicana playwright, the text and the direction both lack focus. It’s not just that it’s hard to tell which era or eras we’re in, or which of her many characters an actor is supposed to be playing; nobody seems to actually want to be in the hotel.
Each time characters suggest they care about something — that God might arrive soon, that Nana might tell Girl a secret, that Poppa, recoiling from Peaches’ barbs, has lost his appetite — its importance magically dissolves within a line or two. All that’s holding them there, and making them obliquely tell their stories, is the playwright’s hand.
The talented cast show glimmers of greatness. Pantoja’s Nana can tell someone off just in the way she silently plunks a straw in a glass, and Ocón, in a mostly thankless role, makes hurt into a whole range of experience. But often, actors withhold rather than fully own. With rules and stakes so unclear, they speak as if to tentatively shine a flashlight into the darkness.
Cathie Anderson’s lighting design offers one of the show’s foremost pleasures. The Biltmore’s ceiling beams reflect magentas, bronzes and marigolds against a turquoise backdrop, endowing the world of the play with the faraway, slightly sad and kitschy feel of a well-appointed fish tank.
Those well-chosen hues can’t much mitigate the show’s pace, though. If at first it’s disarming and refreshing to be at a show that lets its characters take their time padding in and out, before long you might get the urge to go Frederick W. Taylor on the play and shave away minutes and minutes of unnecessary silence. But even a more efficient “Mathematics” still wouldn’t add up.
Lily Janiak is The San Francisco Chronicle’s theater critic. Email: ljaniak@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @LilyJaniak