(Photo by Mark Williams Hoelscher)
Combining puppets, live musical theater, and dance, Pointless Theatre’s Don Cristóbal is a surprising, raunchy production that manages to say something meaningful amid the silly chaos.
An adaptation of Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1931 puppet show El Retablillo de Don Cristóbal, Pointless Theatre’s bilingual version maintains the crude humor and caricaturish violence of the original while sprinkling in some nods to the 2018 audience. The show is a play-within a play, beginning with an argument between The Director (Thais Menendez) and The Poet (Paz Lopez), who are disagreeing on whether Don Cristóbal is bad, as The Director insists, or good.
When the curtain rises on the box set of the puppet theater, we see the aging Don (Matthew Sparacino) at his very worst. He beats up his patient The Enfermo (Scott Whalen) for money, negotiates with The Madre (Adrianne Knapp) for the bride price of her daughter, and finally tries to get it up for his big-bosomed new wife Rosita (Vanessa Chapoy). Each puppet, intricately designed by Francisco Benavides, requires two puppeteers to operate—one for the body and another for the giant hands—and rather than crouching down below, the puppeteers stand in full view of the audience. Though only one of the two operators voices their character’s lines, both get into the facial expressions, and this literal two-facedness of each puppet alludes to one possible answer to The Director and The Poet’s opening question.
The real directors of the show, Rachel Menyuk and Eric Swartz, break down the fourth wall between audience and actors but don’t stop there: Before long, Rosita’s overcharged sex drive leads her to ignore the play-within-a-play’s own fourth wall between puppets and puppeteers. It’s a slippery slope from there, and soon The Director finds herself cast among the real-life, newly nuanced versions of the puppets she so urgently tried to typecast.
Don Cristóbal is fast-paced and hilarious, but its strength also comes from its beautiful details. Frank Labovitz’s costume design deserves a special shout-out for its subtly symbolic brilliance. Cases-in-point: Rosita’s removable bra, and the lapels of the ‘Guardias’ jackets which together form two halves of a single eye. The dance choreography is also embedded with thematic clues. Watch Menendez’s body closely and you’ll see that her movements are not totally her own; it’s almost as if her limbs are being pulled by invisible strings.
Because there are no supertitles, non-Spanish speakers may not catch every line of the script, particularly the lengthy appeals of The Poet, but that is indeed part of the point. “It gets tiring,” The Director explains, “Translating yourself constantly.”
For Pointless Theatre, though, these translations are wholly worthwhile: From Spanish to English, puppet to live actor, ‘bad-to-the-bone’ to ‘it’s complicated’, 1931 to 2018, this show contains layer upon layer of them. The result is a performance that entertains in the moment but keeps unfolding hours after one leaves the theater.
Don Cristóbal is playing at Dance Loft on 14 at 4618 14th St NW through September 8. Tickets are $30, available here.
