Listening closely, you can discern the drama, comedy, and humanity inherent in Josefina López’s “Real Woman Have Curves” at Bristol Riverside Theater.
You can glean the play’s potential, but you don’t see it realized in director Leyma López’s listless, spiritless production that leaves “Real Women” hanging in some theatrically inert limbo from which it doesn’t break free.
The show’s opening night at Bristol seemed more like a mid-process rehearsal than a ready-for-primetime work. Everything that happened on stage, every potentially interesting subject discussed from immigration worries, frustrating deadlines, giving birth, childrearing, seeking love, enduring lovelessness to building a business, creating an identity, and living as independently as possible, come off as ordinary to the point of remaining bland and even boring.
Josefina López provides opportunities for texture, personality, and emotional levels, but Leyma López keeps matters on too even a keel. Josefina’s play drifts along as a situational slice of life because Leyma’s production hasn’t found a way for it to exude life. Bristol’s “Real Women” had the right dramatic ingredients, but lacks enhancing spices and juices. In spite of able performers, it never graduates from being a talkfest to eliciting any regard for Josefina’s characters or concern for their various dilemmas. Even when Regina Carregha supplies some fun by growling out a punch line while using her hand as if was a puppet’s mouth or Paulina De La Parra brings to the brink of getting involved with a character’s individual plight, Leyma’s staging never brings “Real Women” past second gear. It proceeds unfulfilled. It turns a daisy to a dud.
The worry is the Bristol production will not have the time nor the theatrical impetus to gather more pep or spark by its closing date, Sunday, June 14. The ingredients for an engaging production do not seem to be in place. No scene or character pops outs at you and commands attention, not even Luana Psaros’s youthfully ebullient Ana, who breaks the fourth wall to comment directly to the audience, ostensibly about a book she’s writing.
The word ‘flat’ echoed repeatedly in my head, even as I was concentrating to see Josefina’s script beneath Leyma’s staging.
What Leyma’s production lacked was curves. And levels and emergence of five distinct personalities, instead of dull amorphous group.
Leyma and her obviously able company kept all pedestrian. Even breakout scenes, designed to alter the tone or energy of “Real Women, “failed to invite people to care much about what the characters were enduring in their individual lives and as co-workers in an East Los Angeles sewing shop that makes dresses for boutiques and retailers via contract.
Such a contract sets up the first trauma in the play. Estela (Regina Carregha) owns a storefront dress factory that has an order for 200 dresses, gowns requiring beading, trim, and a sense of elegant formality it has too little time to complete no matter how fast the five women Estrela employs strain to do it.
Add to that Estela’s fear her small shop will be raided, rendering her vulnerable to deportation because she is without naturalization papers, or even a green card, although her mother and sister are full U.S. citizens. Consider also the dodgy nature of the factory’s rented equipment, an important worker getting ill as the contract deadline appears to be reachable, imperfect work that has to be done over, mother-daughter squabbles, sister-to-sister squabbles, Estela’s love interest, a birthday celebration, and lots of frank talk about being a woman.
That list shows you see all the ammunition Josefina gives Leyma to work with. I scratched my head pondering how most of it remains so squandered.
Even sequences that seem surefire lead nowhere. When Estela and her staff believe immigrations officers are heading toward their door, they duck en masse under sewing tables or hide behind six-foot-high spools of tulle. The women’s sudden dives for cover should be funny and the overall situation chilling and fraught with empathy, yet neither the comic nor serious nature of the moment come through. The motions to hide quickly are too sudden and choreographed to elicit laughter. A feeling there’s no real worry from the raid neutralizes the scene to just another calamity that might occur. The actresses’ instincts are right, but the idea has no effect. It brings home neither immigration, a hot topic among Latina women, nor the fear or desperation in their responding to a perceived threat. The idea is registered. It is not lived or made serious.
Estela snags a date with her unseen Don Juan from across the street. We know the date is a disappointment, but it takes ages for Estela to tell her friends, including her mother, and us why it fizzles. Her withholding is the opposite of dramatic or enticing. By the time Estela speaks about it, the incident seems unimportant old hat.
Opportunity after opportunity, plot twist after plot twist arrive, and they’re played comme il faut, as if no one wanted to do the work that would enliven them.
Let me tell you something that becomes clear. Regina Carregha, Adela Romero, Pauline De La Parra, Luana Psaros, and Ava Sofia Mattox have the acting chops to enliven anything, given the chance. They seem unencouraged to break out and individuate their characters. They become mired in storytelling instead of blossoming into the full women the script leaves room for them to be. (Bristol co-artistic directors Ken Kaissar and Amy Kaissar should step in, unions willing, while “Real Women Have Curves” continues to run. They’d know how to get the rhythm of comedy and pathos going,)
One reason I say Bristol’s looks like a rehearsal is you can see what Leyma López is aiming for. You see attempts at comedy in embryo. On opening night, they weren’t worked out or fluid enough to pay.
What you don’t see is the five women in Estela’s shop establishing some kind of presence. “Real Women Have Curves” works on the “Steel Magnolias” model. Robert Harling’s play seems bulletproof, but it can be a masterpiece in the hands of a sterling cast, such as the one that performed it at Malvern’s People’s Light in March, or be just another play.
“Real Women Have Curves” is not as deep or varied as “Steel Magnolias,” but it can entertain better than it’s doing at Bristol Riverside,
What’s missing there is oomph. Even dance numbers provide little life. The last half of the second act, especially the final scene, give clues about what Leyma was going for, but by then, it all becomes a matter of too much too late.
I put the onus on Leyma López because she couldn’t animate a cast that reveals ready talent or mine Josefina López’s script to find the gold waiting in plain sight. Directorial ideas were sparse. Rhythm and cohesion never materialized. Even the opening scene, in which a stubbornly defiant younger daughter makes her mother go out to buy the bread she’ll need to make lunch for the shopworkers, has no defining tone. You can’t tell whether it’s supposed to be comic or if some spoiled brat is using false logic about her needs to refuse her mother’s wishes.
Who could know “Real Women” would not recover from that scene, that the static ball game would end there?
Regina Carregha gets an “A” for effort. While she never makes you care about Estela, her immigration status, her business, her lusts, or her deadlines, she shows Estela’s drive and desire for independence and success.
Estela, at least, has ideas about how to enjoy the American dream. She is the entrepreneur. She risks all, economically, psychologically, and romantically, to realize a better life, and not only for herself. Carregha finds variations that begin to bring you towards Estela.
She certainly helps both Lópezes by making you understand her.
Paulina De La Parra doesn’t have much to do until late in the play. When given a chance, she deftly separates her character, Rosali, a woman who needs income and company enough to jeopardize her health to assist Estela, from the rest of the “Real Women” pack.
Rosali might be the weakest of the ‘Real Women” characters, but De La Parra finds a way to make her moving. Rosali, late emergence or not, becomes a character you root for.
Adela Romano makes you want to know more about Carmen, the mother of Estela and the uncooperative Ana. Listening to her experiences with men, going back and forth to Mexico, and maternal instinct — She has eight children, six of whom you hear nothing about. — gives the impression there’s depth that neither López the gumption to explore.
Luana Psaros is a likable if bratty Ana, a teen who takes notes that will lead to book about Estela’s sewing factory. Her bubbliness emphasizes her youth yet seems out of kilter with other performances. A scene involving a porn magazine and attempts to keep it from Ana is particularly deadly.
Ava Sofia Mattox rarely brings Pancha, the most grounded of the characters, to the core. Mattox aces her chance when she finally has a scene she can sink teeth into.
Lenì Méndez’s busy set of sewing machines, fabric bolts, and workplace debris is the most complete part of Bristol’s “Real Women.”It is enchanted by Xuewei (Eva) Hu’s industrial lighting, which also makes use of a lone window.
Linda B. Stockton’s costumes capture the ugliness of factory-worker garb while coming to life as Estela accelerates her vision and inaugurates a fashion line of her designs. Ryk Lewis provides the street and factory noises that being East L.A. reality to this production.
“Real Women Have Curves” runs through Sunday, June 14, at Bristol Riverside Theater, 120 Radcliffe Street, in Bristol, Pa. Showtimes are 7:30 p.m. Wednesday and Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday, 2 p.m. Wednesday and Saturday, and 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets range from $63 to $53 and can be obtained by visiting www.brtstage.org or calling 215-785-0100.
