Marga Gomez Plays to a Tough Audience (Her Parents, for Starters) in ‘Los Big Names’
— Charles Isherwood, New York Times
By CHARLES ISHERWOOD
Mom was a dancer from Puerto Rico who performed as Margarita – no last name required – and styled herself like Kim Novak. Dad was a comic from Cuba, with a pencil mustache and the manufactured name of Willy Chevalier. Is it any wonder that the offspring of this pair grew up with showbiz in her bloodstream, with a need to seduce affection from audiences when none was regularly available at home?
In her friendly new solo show, “Los Big Names,” which opened last night at the 47th Street Theater, Marga Gomez, the sole child of Margarita and Willy, measures out affection and gentle mockery in equal doses as she recalls her upbringing on 169th Street in Washington Heights, where her parents were minor celebrities who lived a splashy life on a small scale in the circumscribed world of New York’s Latino culture in the 1960’s.
Ms. Gomez pairs stories of their performing careers at local teatros with comic tales of her own struggles to pursue success in the entertainment industry on a wider scale. She broke out of the box of Latino culture by cultivating a downtown following as an openly lesbian comic “B.E. – before Ellen,” known for her half-dozen solo stage shows.
But as her wry anecdotes about auditioning for Kathleen Turner and appearing in a cheesy sci-fi movie vividly illustrate, achievement in show business remains a precarious proposition. Break through in a dud like the 1998 movie “Sphere,” and the plug can be pulled quickly on a Hollywood career. Back into the box, please.
Clad in a Chaplinesque ensemble of clunky shoes, black pants and a man’s vest incongruously bedecked in silver sequins, Ms. Gomez performs with a zest that gives a jolt of theatrical electricity to even her weaker material. Her wiry body assumes mannishly angular poses when she impersonates her father, a traditionally macho Latino male despite his unusual career, and glides into a curvaceous slink when she plays her mother, who took pride in her sexual allure and regarded being propositioned by Robert Mitchum as a badge of honor.
Little Marga played a significant role in her parents’ marriage only when an emotional pawn was necessary, and was relegated to bit parts in their comedy routines. (In her stage debut, she was the butt of a joke involving a dog.) In one of the grimmer but funnier tales here, she recalls being asked point-blank by her parents which one she loved more. Margarita wins out; Willy shrugs. The prize for Marga is an attempt at an “all-American picnic” that fizzles when elaborately dressed mother and frustrated daughter arrive in Central Park “a little before nightfall.”
Ms. Gomez’s recollections of her parents’ volatile marriage and divorce are stitched together somewhat haphazardly here, perhaps partly because she has already drawn on this material for at least two earlier shows devoted to Willy and Margarita. Intriguing photographs of them in their prime projected on a screen behind Ms. Gomez accentuate the sense that she is shuffling a little too casually through an album of memories.
The director, David Schweizer, doesn’t seem concerned about establishing a cohesive emotional arc for the show, either. The decision to interrupt the proceedings for Ms. Gomez to hand out 8-by-10’s from her early years in Hollywood, when she was trying to squeeze her idiosyncratic persona into a stereotypical straitjacket for easy employment, drains the evening’s momentum, although it gets the audience into a cheery lather.
But if Ms. Gomez never fully illuminates the connections between her fight to establish herself as an emotional presence in her parents’ lives and her attempts to find satisfaction in a mainstream showbiz career, her most engaging anecdotes can stand on their own. The show’s climax is a hilarious re-enactment of a scene from “Sphere,” a Barry Levinson-directed bomb starring Sharon Stone, Dustin Hoffman and Samuel L. Jackson – a trio so ill assorted that box-office doom was surely inevitable.
Ms. Gomez recreates the underwater demise of a character played by Queen Latifah, who was cast alongside Ms. Gomez as a computer expert. (“We both die in the first half-hour,” she recalls.) With a flimsy plastic helmet on her head, Ms. Gomez lumbers slowly across the stage, reciting the inane dialogue from the movie as blue balloons are tossed onto the stage, standing in for an army of fatal jellyfish.
It’s a wonderfully loopy image that could serve, too, as a minor metaphor for the larger themes Ms. Gomez is exploring in her show. Scattered as it is, “Los Big Names” strikes a poignant note as it evokes the clumsy rhythms of professional and personal life. Ms. Gomez’s fumblings will inspire compassionate smiles from anyone who has ever had to negotiate a graceful exit from an awkward passage, whether it’s a humiliating audition, a dying marriage or a bruising childhood.
Los Big Names
Written and performed by Marga Gomez; directed by David Schweizer; sets, lighting and projection design by Alexander Nichols; sound by Mark O’Brien; production stage manager, Scott Pegg; vocal recordings, Gordon Bowman-Jones; associate producers, Adam Friedson, David Friedson, Melvin Honowitz and Eva Price; general manager, Cesa Entertainment. The Jonathan Reinis production presented by the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater and Miriam Colon Valle, co-producer, in association with Jamie Cesa. At the 47th Street Theater, 304 West 47th Street, Clinton, (212) 239-6200. Through May 14.
Running time: 1 hour, 30 minutes.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
