Solo show gets lost in characters
The best character in Tina D’Elia’s “Overlooked Latinas” isn’t a Las Vegas Rita Hayworth impersonator with the hots for a married woman, Angel. It isn’t Angel’s wife, Lena Anne Horne, who, in addition to embodying the great singer, wants a baby so badly she carries around a turkey baster, lest she should encounter a suitable sperm donor on the street. And it isn’t a contemporary actor so obsessed with Ramón Navarro, the Mexican American film actor, that he adopts “Ramón Navarro” as a stage name, never makes an entrance without his arms aloft
and performs his namesake’s hate-crime murder as an audition piece.
Rather, the best character in the solo show, which opened at Brava Theater Center on Saturday, Feb. 16, is a squeaky, squat, genderambiguous butch lesbian who responds to the name “Mr. Carla,” who pads about in tiny steps as if she’s wearing slippers, who surreptitiously scarfs down cookies as if she’s drowning and they’re air.
The premise of “Overlooked Latinas,” which is directed by Mary Guzmán, is that Angel and Mr. Carla create a TV show about Latin movie stars of yore — Dolores del Rio, Rosaura Revueltas, Lupe Vélez, among others — as Angel’s own life looks increasingly like a souped-up movie plot, with her wife and her former lover both on set, vying for her affections.
So it’s telling that the character who registers the most clearly, the one who most delights, who bleeds least into the other nine that D’Elia embodies isn’t one of the glamorous, melodramatic performers but a ho-hum, adorable best friend who hovers anxiously behind the scenes.
For now, “Overlooked Latinas” feels like it’s still in a workshop phase. D’Elia doesn’t always establish her characters clearly or differentiate their voices and facial expressions crisply when she’s switching back and forth in dialogue. Conflicts remain half-baked, or put in the oven only to be forgotten about for some new set of stakes that suddenly insist that they’re what’s actually important.
The show has such a pervasive hunky-dory vibe, with Angel and Carla always telling each other that they’re best friends or their TV show rocketing instantly from unlikely pitch to greenlit pilot to 16 seasons, that any urgency for this story to be told evaporates.
Even the supposed conflict between Lena and Angel’s old flame, Carmelita, generates little heat, probably because they get so few scenes together.
Still, D’Elia creates many moments of scrumptious showbiz excesses and foibles that suggest the potential of “Overlooked Latinas.”
When Carla and Angel first meet with NBC big cheese Bill Moskowitz, he indelibly refers to them as “the diversity grant people” and wonders why, instead of celebrating Latino film stars and being frank about their sexuality, they can’t just do a show “like, ‘Hey, look, it’s Latinos!’ “
When Carla works to break the truth to Angel about what Lena’s up to with that turkey baster, the high jinks are worthy of a classic screwball comedy, making glorious use of a basement-floor unisex bathroom, a hotel towel lit on fire, and an elevator that won’t stop playing the Backstreet Boys.
With more assured timing, assiduously honed characters and ruthless clarity about the purpose of each scene, “Overlooked Latinas” could be as delicious and addictive as those snacks Carla keeps gobbling down.