The GALA Hispanic theatre is currently presenting the U.S. premier of Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro's "Las Paredes" ("The Walls") as part of its celebration of female authors.
In its 31st season, the GALA troupe makes its home in the recently renovated Tivoli Theater in Columbia Heights. The theater is modern and historic, with an air of intimacy brought by the theater's pleasant staff and its size.
This intimacy played well into the hands of Director Gabriel Garc¡a, who used the room's smallness to draw his audience into mutual confinement with the play's protagonist, a young man known to the audience only as "Muchacho" (Carlos Castillo). As the walls of the room he is trapped in begin to close in on him, Muchacho suffers a mental collapse caused by his unknown, impending fate.
The character's situation is as real today as when Gambaro penned it, and the drama unfolds as a representation of what occurs in one's mind as Muchacho tries to hold onto hope in the face of secrets.
Gambaro's only other characters, an attendant (Cynthisa Benjamin) and an investigator (Manuel Cabrera-Santos), known in Spanish as Ujier and Funcionario, respectively, use a search for the young man's identity as the pretext for his imprisonment. Garc¡a places them, when not directly involved in the play's dialogue, above the set, typing at their computers.
"I created two different levels in the set in order to highlight the confrontations and the distance between the persecuted and the persecutors and as a way to distinguish the ceremonial and the everyday actions," Garc¡a said.
The set also changes throughout the play, with the young man's room becoming noticeably barer after intermission. The starkness of his room reveals the changing mentality of his captors and the degree of hope the young man should have in regards to his freedom.
Each of the actors successfully plays his part, convincing in each of the degrees of sanity the play requires of him. While the fear that drives Muchacho is abundantly clear, the audience is much less sure of the motivations of the Funcionario and the Ujier, making their realism even more impressive.
As usual for GALA, the actors perform Gambaro's work in its original Spanish, with English subtitles projected above the stage. Though usually helpful for those who either speak no Spanish or do not speak it fluently enough to follow along, the subtitles for this play tended to not be timed quite correctly, and in rare instances they included Spanish words or were mistranslated.
Gambaro's script does not provide many answers in any language, leaving the play's viewers to discern her message from the scraps of information afforded them.
This, however, is not a shortcoming of behalf of either GALA or Gambaro, who challenge their audience to think and react to the far-reaching implications the theatrical work has for the world today.
GALA's presentation of "Las Paredes" opens the human mind to its viewers and welcomes them to question their relationship with the world around them, making it an unassumingly compelling show.
