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by Guillermo Verdecchia, directed by Jim Warren

Soulpepper Theatre Company, Young Centre, Toronto

May 11-June 12, 2011

It’s odd and a bit unpleasant when seeing a show for the first time elicits a sense of déjà vu. Yet, that’s exactly what happened when I saw the premiere of Soulppeper’s production of Guillermo Verdecchia’s 1993 hit Fronteras Americanas.  I missed seeing the show in 1993 and somehow managed to miss its subsequent remounts.  Knowing that it won the 1993 Governor General’s Award for Award only heightened my anticipation, but my reaction was split two ways.  On the one hand, I could see how the play would have excited audiences in 1993 for its innovative style and its frank exploration of questions of identity and ethnic stereotyping.  On the other hand, the sheer number of plays written since then that have explored the problem of binationality or bi-ethnicity makes Fronteras not seem as special anymore and its format as a self-referential autobiographical lecture has now also been repeated to the point of tedium.  Sometimes a seminal play can withstand the burden of its successors, but sometimes, as strangely in this case, it does not.

Every season in Toronto there are plays about characters with conflicted identities: gay but conservative Italian in In Gabriel’s Kitchen (2006) by Salvatore Antonio; gay but a Native Canadian in Agokwe (2008) by Waawaate Fobister; Jamaican but white in Jamaica Man (2005) by John Blackwood; East Indian in a mostly Caucasian school in Fish Eyes (2005) by Anita Majumdar; not to mention the more radical Québecois plays about identity like The Dragonfly of Chicoutimi (1995) by Larry Tremblay, where the central Francophone character finds he can speak only in English, or  L’Homme invisible (1981) by Patrice Desbiens where the same man is played by two actors--one speaking French, the other English.  Given the wealth of Canadian plays about people with dual identities, Verdecchia’s situation of being born in Argentina but growing up in Canada does not stand out.  In fact, in Toronto, where half the present population was not born in Canada (including your reviewer) a dual background has almost become the norm. 

Verdecchia, however, presents his story as unique and even posits and us-versus them role for his relationship to the audience--Hispanics versus what he calls “Saxons”.  His personal story is, of course, his own, but he could at least suggest that others might share a similar situation.   His story concerns growing up in Canada and planning a trip “home” to Argentina, only to find that Argentina does not feel like “home” either.  Interspersed with this tale are lectures on geography and popular culture with demonstrations and  deconstructions of Hispanic stereotypes like the Mexican bandito or the South American drug lord or the Latin lover.  The difficulty with this is that all his examples are based on American popular culture and advertising and are thus more a critique of the narrow habits of thought in the United States.  If he assumes that Canadians uncritically accept American stereotyping of others, he should then point to one aspect of the identity problem among English-Canadians. 

Funny though his exploding of stereotypes may be, it all now seems too obvious and too easy.  While Verdecchia finds the shooting death of a man in front of his hotel in Chile alienating, there are conflicting aspects even with the Argentine identity that Verdecchia never mentions.  Argentinians have always thought of themselves as more “European” than their South American neighbours because the settlers there did not intermix with the native populations as they did, for example, in Brazil.   Verdecchia’s family name indicates that at least part of his family, like so many in Argentina, came from Italy--a second aspect of his dual identity he doesn’t explore, although the American playwright Lilian Groag does exactly this in her own autobiographical play The Magic Fire (1997).

Someone who had seen the original production informed me that the audiovisual side of the show had been considerably beefed up since 1993.  The abstract parchment-like screen behind Verdecchia becomes the scene for PowerPoint presentations, animations, slide shows and movies.  This makes the show so slick and production-heavy it loses its alternative cachet.  Even if the show includes his personal story, the show is literally a lecture to the audience about the nature of borders.  Verdecchia doesn’t stop there.  Rather than presenting us with the problem for us to contemplate as would happen in a good play, Verdecchia changes the lecture into a sermon by spelling out quite clearly the “solution” to having two identities, i.e. to embrace the border. 

The lecture-as-play format has now been use by Rick Miller in his HARDSELL (2009) and by Daniel MacIvor in This Is What Happens Next (2010).  In those cases, as in Fronteras, the performer periodically displays his self-awareness by pointing out theatrical procedures he is following.  Thus, Verdecchia has a bell ring at the 50-minute mark to indicate the point at which audiences typically begin to get restless.  This sort of hyper-self-consciousness had already become tiresome by the time of HARDSELL, so it is difficult to look past that to see how new it must have seemed in 1993.  In any case, Verdecchia surely does not want his show to be viewed as an historical document.  Otherwise, he wouldn’t have bothered to update his references to include Javier Bardem and Penélope Cruz, although he still leaves in one to Sean Connery in Medicine Man (1992), a film few now would have seen or would remember.  Nevertheless, he hasn’t updated his content enough to mention “racial profiling” by name and there is no mention of the virulent anti-immigrant legislation aimed at Mexicans that conservative state legislatures have passed.

Despite all my reasons for finding the show less than interesting, there is no doubt that Verdecchia is a fantastic performer.  His ability to distinguish several gradations of Spanish accent from authentic to phoney is a feat in itself and his delivery and sense of timing are impeccable.  At two hours, though, Verdecchia begins to repeat the same points and some of the digressions, like that into Hollywood actors of Latin American birth, become so long we forget what they were meant to illustrate or how they relate to Verdecchia’s personal story.  Since Fronteras Americanas won’t tell any educated, urban audience anything it hasn’t already learned--except, perhaps, for Rita Hayworth’s real name--the main reason to see the show is to see Verdecchia in the performance that made him famous.  And that is a pleasure in itself.                          

©Christopher Hoile

Note: This review is a Stage Door exclusive.

Photo: Guillermo Verdecchia standing in front of the word “pachuco”.

©2011 Cylla von Tiedemann.