Frío/Cold went up last weekend in Little Theater, bringing out the interaction between performers and the audience in a remarkable way. The play uses contrasts and comparisons between languages to explore the way people perceive the world.
Antonio López Peña’s Frio is a one-act play at its purest, a vignette that presents the characters and walks them along an arc through a conflict to a conclusion. Junior Jennifer Dominguez translated Peña’s script into English and then directed the two ‘versions’ back to back. All told the piece(s) ran about a half an hour.
The production opened to sounds of lilting music. It was accompanied soon after by a couple conversing rapidly in Spanish, talking and gesticulating animatedly. Members of the audience who could keep up with the pace laughed and nodded knowingly while others who did not have the same skill smiled in confusion while furrowing their brows in concentration trying to make sense out of familiar words. The scene followed two young lovers who walk through a park one chilly afternoon, pause at a bench, and then reveal – quite passionlessly – that they are not in love but, in fact, harbor strong feelings of dislike towards one another. Eventually they sit, resigned to this new reality.
The lights dimmed and the couple walked off stage in what at first appeared to be the play’s sudden conclusion. A few minutes later the scene opened once again to the same soothing music. And again the melody was accompanied soon after by the same couple conversing rapidly – this time in English. Again, their vivacious conversation was accompanied by gesticulations. As they spoke, looks of comprehension and understanding began to dawn on the once bewildered half of the audience. While the English portion of the play followed the same sequence of gestures and motions, the reactions were markedly different.
Little Theater, located behind Hall Auditorium, lends itself to intimate performances and this one was no exception. Keeping the audience close allowed for a subtle, generally realistic acting style and helped accentuate the details in the performers’ movements, expressions and voices. Audience members with varying degrees of familiarity with English and Spanish were given multiple opportunities to pick out and pick apart what the script, the actors and the director had to say about the cold we so often keep inside ourselves.
Dominguez deserves special recognition for her direction and translation as well as for donning a third hat to play the female character, Pilar. Her performance was strong, bringing genuine energy to the bright-eyed, young woman, and shifting effectively into the pointed sections of dialogue where the two characters confront one another. José Martin as Diego was a confident and convincing actor in both of his performances. Managing to convey the sense of irony as he professed his attachment to Pilar with words of irritation and dislike, his main flaw was a less than perfect grasp of English, causing some of his lines in the second run to come out a bit awkward.
The production overall could have benefited from a less static light design and perhaps some stronger blocking choices to further draw out contrasts and better capitalize on Dominguez’s goal of bringing engaging bilingual theatre to Oberlin. But Frio/Cold certainly reflected the effort put into staging it, and went beyond a simple gimmick. Too often college theatre the productions try to take risks, to be new and daring for the sake of being different, without backing up their efforts with talent and technique in order to communicate the new thoughts and the risky ideas to the audience.
Dominguez, her cast and crew neatly avoided this all-too-common problem by keeping it simple. While presenting something that, for many in the audience, was not immediately approachable, they did not overwhelm the audience with heavy-handedness or too many tricks and concepts. Instead they played with the subtleties and variations of the two languages, drew out a few interesting stage pictures and, at times, brought the audience into the flourishes of passion and jabs of pain the couple on stage tossed at one another.
In fact, the juxtaposition of the two languages enhanced this bond between performers and viewer. The use of both languages manipulated the audience members’ reaction to – as well as their interaction with – the actors, providing them with unique and interesting theater experience. Certainly a half-hour well spent.