Versény, Adam

Biodiversity Informatics

66 LATIN AMERICAN THEATRE REVIEW Orinoco in New York (continued from page 56). the Orinoco environment, frequently exceeded the necessary length. Some judicious cutting would have reduced the number of interminable blackouts. The obvious professionalism of P R T T ' s production, however, fails to overcome the creakiness of Carballido's plot exposition. The entire first act of the play exists for no other purpose than to prepare the allegorical references to Latin America that are the subject of the second act. Fifi's recitation of the Liscano poem and her later story, with its moral that the best is yet to come, when merged with Mina 's drunkeness, are supposed to make us view these two rather pitiful lives as generic to contemporary aimlessness. By extension, Fifí and Mina are the sentries on the rudderless boat of Latin America. The obvious parallel here is with Waiting for Godot. However, hampered as they are by Carballido's playwriting, which leaves them in a limbo between realistic exposition and metaphor, Mina and Fifí cannot attain the dignity of Didi and Gogo. In what I assume are textual adaptations, P R T T has changed Carballido's language to reflect Puerto Rican accent and idiom. This not only makes the piece more accessible to a New York audience, but is a laudable attempt to fuse two cultural milieux. The problem is that the vehicle used is a leaky structure. The play's structural deficiencies highlight the richness of the language, tending to make it sound rather overblown and clichéd. For these reasons the allegory itself fails. Instead of arriving at a hopeful state in which we will forge ahead as Carballido plainly intends, we are left as rudderless as his two women. Adam Versény New Haven 

Orinoco in New York (cont.)

The University of Kansas: Journals@KU

https://journals.ku.edu/latr/article/download/597/572/

Orinoco in New York (cont.)

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Biodiversity Informatics

The University of Kansas: Journals@KU