There's a new stage production in town, and it's a good hombre. Theater critic Robrt Pela has more:
"La Esquinita USA" is nothing if not timely. Beautifully acted and neatly staged, Arizona Theatre Company’s latest breaks no new artistic ground yet fits perfectly into the bleak malaise felt by many liberals these days. Written and performed by Rubén C. González, this smart Off Broadway, one-act suggests the nightmare America a Betsy DeVos administration might leave behind, filled with failed factory towns and under-educated dropouts.
La Esquinita represents both a once-booming American border town and the esquinitas, or “little corners,” in which the poor and under-educated find themselves trapped—those places between prosperity and failure. Now destitute after the tire factory has shuttered, this mythical town is home to a desperate community of disadvantaged blacks and Latinos, many of them inspired by people the author met while teaching at-risk high school kids.
There’s Lencho, a creepily omniscient narrator who’s witnessed the devastation of this town and especially of Daniel, a 19-year-old meth addict who wants to kick so he can graduate high school, join the Marines, and hopefully get killed during wartime maneuvers. There’s a sadistic cop named Whitey; a junkie named Wilo; a cheerful barber who lost a leg in Vietnam. There are women, too: a bag lady whose one remaining hope is that everyone in Esquinita will come together for a party in the abandoned tire factory, and there’s Daniel’s girlfriend, Grace, whose cautious good wishes transform La Esquinita’s vibrant ugliness for Daniel as well as for those watching this troubling story.
This fast-paced and often funny play transforms González’s students’ words into a series of intertwined monologues, each of them brought vividly to life with a minimum of costuming or contrivance. Gonzalez has created people whose truth-talking is infused with street slang and cautious profanity. Once we grow accustomed to all the posturing and jargony Spanglish, we hear the endless anguish behind it all.
We forgive Gonzalez all this dark despair not only because he enacts it with such grace but also because he’s resisted a tidy “Let’s make lemonade!” approach to the harrowing death of the American factory town. His is a story drenched in fear and hopelessness, one that brings its beauty, not in promises of brighter days, but in the rich, poetic language in which it’s told.
Robrt Pela’s reviews appear in the Phoenix New Times.
EDITOR'S NOTE: This story has been modified to reflect the correct spelling of Robrt Pela's name.