Comedy in the Name of the Father
By JOY GOODWIN
April 10, 2006
Marga Gomez has that rarest of virtues among stand-up comics: She’s funny. And she’s not just funny – she’s spontaneous, whimsical, and goofy. Audiences feel good around her.
Which is not to say that “Los Big Names,” her new autobiographical one-woman show, is a puff piece. Though “Los Big Names” is in many ways a valentine to Ms. Gomez’s parents – stars of the Latino teatros of the 1960s – it is more bittersweet than sweet.As Ms. Gomez alternates among spot-on impersonations of her glamorous mother, her puffed-up father, and her childhood self, each character makes the kind of harsh, hawk-eyed observations that could only come from a family member. Closeness hurts.
But this is no soap opera. Ms. Gomez, who is both author and narrator of “Los Big Names,” is an affectionate, wry storyteller. Her comedy is bathed in a daughter’s mature love for her flawed parents, tempered by a realistic assessment of how the world works, and misted over with memories of a lost era.
Using evocative language and her gangly body, Ms. Gomez paints Latino New York in the 1960s. She summons the sounds and sights of old Washington Heights, where busybody neighbors and officious nuns gossiped about her parents. She conjures up the glitz and grit of the teatros, where kids running down the aisle got smacked and audiences went wild for a little girl who cried at the end of every song, “even though,” the narrator reports, “they had their own crying children sitting right next to them.”
Here at the teatro,Marga’s semifamous parents regaled the crowds with a skit called “El Divorcio Gramatico,” in which they divided their property according to the gender rules of Spanish grammar. (She got la casa, he got el bebe.) And it was here, too, that little Margita got her first taste of showbiz, which led to dreams of being a movie star, which led to a part in the Hollywood flop “Sphere.”
Ms. Gomez’s hilarious riff on filming “Sphere”is one of the best things in the show – using all the best of what she has. Her low-budget set and props (images on a big video screen, bouncing balls, a big mask) are used to hilarious effect. Her appealing personality shines through, and all the capital she’s built with the (largely partisan) crowd throughout the evening kicks in. Her talent for turning a standard routine into something unexpected and quirky is there, as is her ability to shift from funny to stone-cold sober in a matter of seconds.
Ms. Gomez is a great performer with offbeat charm, a rubber face, and tomboyish glee. She projects not so much showbiz neediness as warmth and welcome – reflecting the showbiz values of her father,a master of ceremonies at the big teatros. She has a lot of the outsize, goofy imagination of her parents, who kept fake blood in the medicine cabinet. But she also has a mouthy, impolite side. She’s a contemporary comic, after all, a struggling performer who was openly gay “before Ellen,” and who lives in a studio in Williamsburg.
That “Los Big Names” – in its fastpaced 90 minutes – manages to depict both Margita’s childhood and Marga’s adulthood so vividly is a credit to Ms. Gomez’s exceptional writing. She writes these characters so well and shows their many sides so effortlessly that you forget how hard it must have been to create so full a picture of people she knew so well. She sprinkles Spanish phrases in so cleverly that both speakers and non-speakers enjoy them. Ms. Gomez
URL: New York Sun
