Episode I: Beauty of the Father

Hey there,

Welcome to our blog, although I had to drag Sam (the 'plate' portion of this blog) kicking and screaming, a bit, into the blogosphere. Hope you enjoy our escapades throughout DC.

After dining at RedRocks Firebrick Pizzeria, our first adventure took us to see a production of Beauty of the Father / La belleza del padre by Nilo Cruz, at the GALA Hispanic Theatre, the National Center for Latino Performing Arts. GALA is an acronym which stands for Grupo de Artistas Latino Americanos. It's website is in both English and Spanish. We managed to get there just in time, before the house lights went out and the show started, mostly thanks to the proximity of RedRocks & the theatre.

The Tivoli Theatre is located in Columbia Heights. It's an area that has been a site of revitalization or gentrification, depending on how you want to look at it, and who you are talking to. Either way, the GALA Hispanic Theatre as been a cornerstone in the neighborhood since it made the move to the Tivoli in 2005.

GALA Hispanic Theatre's current Associate Producing Director, Abel Lopez, directed this production of Beauty of the Father / La belleza del padre. He has been a cornerstone in his own right, both as an essential part of the GALA family and the arts and Latino communities at large. In 2001, Americans for the Arts gave him with the Selina Roberts Ottum Award, given annually to recognize "outstanding contributions in the local arts agency field". Among the multiple organizations he has been involved with in various capacities, he currently sits on the board of the National Association of Latino Arts and Culture.

Many of GALA's productions are performed in Spanish with English supertitles, but for this production, the languages were reversed. And although I didn't need to, I tried to see how much of the Spanish I learned in high school and college I remembered. The bilingual environment is an essential part of the culture and community GALA has cultivated with its work.

Beauty of the Father / La belleza del padre takes place in Granada, and tells the story of a modern family, a painter who tries to reconnect with his daughter after being separated by time and distance, a daughter who tries to deal with the death of her mother and the father she has never really known, a man who doesn't know what he wants or from whom, and a woman who does what she can to make the ones she loves happy. Oh yeah, and there's a dead guy, García Lorca, who befriends the painter as he wanders among the living, and makes things really interesting in the second act.

Issues of culture, class, race, sexuality, fidelity, and family are all addressed in an engaging tale with Lorca providing a sense of levity and gravity all at the same time. What was wonderful about seeing the production with Sam was that the young man, who is a bit of a sexually confused character as he ends up charming the daughter of his older sometime-lover, is from Morocco and speaks Arabic at times. In general, even with the English vs Spanish translation, it's interesting to see the artistic liberty taken with some of the word choice, but this additional lingual layer and Sam's personal translations in my ear made the experience that much more interesting.

Wonderfully directed and performed, with an excellently selected score and soundtrack, one other wonderful element was the set, designed by Elizabeth McFadden, one of my favorite scenic designers in the area. A simple set portraying a beach which covered the entire down stage, there was a boardwalk which started center stage and, while the beach and the set ended on the sides, went to the upstage wall and curved up until the boards became a depiction of the sky, painted a baby blue with patches of white, and even the outlines of clouds cut into the backdrop. Downstage elements included a well which doubled as a fire pit for part of the second act and two boxes with actual sand which characters dug their feet into in a couple of scenes.

On a side note, Elizabeth McFadden was the DC PAL of the month, November of '09; the DC Performing Arts League, a group I started almost 3 years ago, is merely a means to recognize the work of individual artists, and use Web 2.0 tools to further raise awareness of DC's thriving performing arts scene.

Anyway, I'd definitely recommend this show. The complexity of its characters and the story seems to appeal to multiple communities and people on different levels, from various perspectives. But the theme that I ended up being engaged with, both in the Lorca character, and in dealing with the death of the mother, is really taking a look at how we respect and remember our dead. And how we honor their memory with the lives we live and the people we've become because of their presence in our lives, however long or short that might have been.

That being said, if you're on Facebook and you are engaged by what you've read, become a Fan of GALA Hispanic Theatre, and if you have time check out the show before it closes on Feb 28th.

And small world...when Sam had first moved to DC he stayed with a wonderful, hippy family and the mom's brother was at last night's performance. He ended up introducing me to Victor Shargai, Chairman of the Helen Hayes Awards, and Jaylee Mead, Vice President of the Mead Family Foundation, a staunch supporter of the arts in the area. I was hoping to say hi to Abel Lopez, whom I had met merely hours earlier at a Spring Colloquium that AU's Arts Management Program (which I'm in) hosted on Boards & Governance, but sangria called and the other Arts Management Majors were already gathered in the lobby. A special thanks to Laura, who is in the program and interning at GALA, for organizing the evening and getting the tickets!!

Oh, also check out Michael O'Sullivan's Washington Post review from Feb 5th on the production.

Until next time :-)