Press: Reviews:
Gomez golden in family showbiz tale
- Robert Hurwitt, Chronicle Theater Critic
Friday, July 15, 2005
Los Big Names: Autobiographical monologue. Written and performed by Marga Gomez. Directed by David Schweizer.
"A show should have five people, at a minimum," Willy Chevalier protests at the beginning of Marga Gomez's solo "Los Big Names" at the Magic Theatre. "If I were the producer," he confides, complaining about the low-budget production values ("They work with a gringo designer to save cash"), he'd give us an orchestra and bevy of showgirls. "When I have a Magic Theatre, there will be a magician, I promise you."
There
is a magician in the show that opened Wednesday at the Magic. It's Marga Gomez,
who opens the 90-minute solo as her Cuban comedian father, Willy; closes as
her Puerto Rican exotic dancer mother, who went by the single name Margarita;
and embodies considerably more than five people (including herself, at many
ages) in between. In the process, she also transforms bits of memory and some
of her earlier monologues and stand-up routines into pure theatrical gold.
Funny and poignant, caustic and sweet, "Big Names" is an enriched
reduction of themes Gomez has portrayed before and an alchemical combination
of her skills as a monologist and stand-up comic. It's something of a combination
of old stories: her relationship with her mother, from Margarita's proud, flaunting
sexuality through her descent into the fogs of Alzheimer's ("Memory Tricks");
her father's struggles to make it in American showbiz ("A Line Around
the Block"); and some of the ups and downs of her own career as a Latina
lesbian comic and performance artist.
But it's also something completely new. "Big Names" is the story of a family -- an exceptionally entertaining, idiosyncratic yet oddly universal family -- from Gomez's childhood in Manhattan through the deaths of her parents just before she achieved (sort of) the headline status to which they'd aspired. It's also a lesbian coming-of-age tale, a look at the home life of struggling vaudevillians, a satire on Hollywood stereotyping, a comedy of sex roles, a self-mocking portrait of Gomez's skills and lusts, and a lampoon of the solo format. And it's hilarious.
It's a new version of a show Gomez and director David Schweizer have been working on for some time, in workshops at the Marsh, San Jose Repertory and La Pena, among other places. An earlier version premiered at the Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, but Gomez and Schweizer have extensively reworked the material since. It's being produced at the Magic by Jonathan Reinis in association with Z Space Studio, the combination behind the successful tours of Josh Kornbluth's monologues of late.
It's cleverly staged, despite Willy's objections. Gomez
opens as her father -- in mustache, dress jacket and undershorts -- delivering
the spiel of a practiced comic. Alexander Nichols' set is the lower half of
a large, weathered theater sign and an old-fashioned marquee, slyly used for
a succession of family photos, shadow play and atmospheric projections.
Willy sets up the tone, the format and the principal themes. In patter that
more than suggests the origins of Gomez's style, he introduces the prime importance
of showbiz success, worries over his daughter's stagnant love life (a recurring
subject in her monologues) and warns us about the differences between biography
and autobiographical monologue. "I am the main character," he proclaims. "Don't
believe anything that the mother says," he cautions, adding: "The
narrator, my daughter, Marga, she tends to confuse fantasy with reality."
Which
she does, in ways that may explore truths in more depth than fact. Gomez works
most of the rest of the show in black pants and a glittering silver vest, dispensing
with further costumes changes. She doesn't need them.
One moment she's herself, nervous and smitten as she auditions for a sultry-toned
Kathleen Turner (a wicked caricature). The next, she's her always- on showman
dad, her purring and preening sex-object mom, the bodega loafers and cop-on-the-make
coming on to her mother or both herself as an eager-to- please child and a
celebrity-besotted neighbor grilling her for dirt on her parents.
Gomez's wickedly sharp comic timing and easy connection with the audience are as keen as ever. Her writing has grown more sure-handed and complex, as "Big Names" continually shifts time frames from her Hollywood efforts back to stages of her childhood and adolescence, until she lands her nonstereotypical role in a major motion picture -- the infamous bomb "Sphere" -- while her mother is dying far away.
Her acting becomes more deft with each new show. Gomez is a chameleon, shifting quickly from broad, funny lampoons of her "Sphere"-mates -- Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah succumbing to killer jellyfish -- to subtly nuanced portraits of her parents as they age. As comically self- absorbed as Willy and Margarita are, there's a growing poignancy in their breakup and their declines. In an odd way, the child who so desperately wants a "normal" family gets her wish. As Margarita says, "We are just a typical family with a dream."
URL: http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2005/07/15/DDGKGDNPF71.DTL
