The Goodman Theatre couldn’t possibly have known how much Puerto Rican identity would be in the news when it scheduled José Rivera’s Boleros for the Disenchanted (see Albert Williams’s in-depth review at chicagoreader.com) and the Teatro Vista/Collaboraction coproduction of Migdalia Cruz’s El Grito del Bronx for overlapping runs. But with Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, the unique role of Puerto Ricans in American life—U.S. citizens in law, colonial subjects in reality—has taken center stage.
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There are some glancing similarities between the plays, mostly in the way they contrast their characters’ early lives and dreams with where they finish. But Cruz’s unwieldy script doesn’t make that trajectory clear for Lulu (Sandra Delgado) and Papo (Juan Villa), who share a hellish childhood in the Bronx under their given names of Magdalena and Jesus. The Colón family, headed by abusive patriarch Jóse (Eddie Torres) and passive saint Maria (Diane Herrera), falls apart after Jesus, an aspiring actor, takes bloody revenge on his monstrous father with a hammer. Apparently unaware that her son committed the murder, Maria remarries and takes the kids to Ohio, where the adult Papo begins a rampage, eventually killing 18 people and ending up with AIDS on death row. There, he flirts with the solicitous inmate in the next cell (an impressive Warren Levon) and fights ghosts from his past. (Prison guards double as victims, and Jóse hangs around in the background as well.)
Papo’s murders seem less like the organic result of abuse than arbitrary metaphors for class- and race-based resentment, and his victims are little more than crude stereotypes of Pennsyltucky rednecks. Papo’s modus operandi seems to be to needle a cracker into making an ethnic slur, then tear open his face. His ritualistic mutilations illustrate a depthless rage, but Cruz seems to have made him a serial killer for the sheer theatrical shock value of it.
Through 8/2: Thu 7:30 PM, Fri 8 PM, Sat 2 and 8 PM, Sun 2 PM, Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, 312-443-3800, goodmantheatre.org, $15-$30, money-back guarantee.
