(Photos by Dean La Prairie)
Including
a game in a play or film can be a really awful mistake. Inherently predictable
and cheesy, a game never achieves the edge-of-your-seat anticipation the author
would like it to. If a knife onstage can no longer scare an audience, how can
we expect the same of a tennis racket? The audience understands all too well that
the maneuvers, the skillful twists, and the end result of a game have long been
predetermined by the playwright and are precisely choreographed by the director.
Following suit, the stakes in the simple win-lose situation are dramatically middling.
In a play, from-the-belly-up fulfillment is typically elicited not from where
you arrive, but how you get there.
Fish Men, a collaboration between Teatro
Vista and The Goodman Theatre, which opened on Monday night, takes a complex
and highly unexpected journey of character, thankfully avoiding the tired old game
trap. A warm and deeply sympathetic new play by Cándido Tirado about a summer afternoon
in the life of chess hustlers, Fish Men
is not really about chess. Sure, you’ll leave the
theatre with a bolstered appreciation for the game and its obsessive cult following,
but that is only the mint on the pillow.
I’d
never even heard the term “chess hustlers”
before I read it in the program notes, and ever since then I have been stifling
a mild chuckle. But Fish Men is not
another offender in the endless lineup of onstage Hoosiers variants. Tirado, a highly-rated chess master by the
United States Chess Federation, knows enough about the sport to use it
habitually rather than as an overdone imposition.
They
play, directed with an inclusive neighborhood vibe by Edward Torres, is about
eight fish men, chess hustlers (chuckle, chuckle) who play, not for pennies,
but for a whopping twenty bucks a pop. Each day they arrive at dawn to claim
their tables ahead of their ‘in it to win it’
competitors to maintain their earned honor. But on this extraordinary day, Rey
Reyes, a newcomer and seeming chess novice, encounters them with the story of
his uncle, a man who lost all of his money playing chess against the hustlers –
and his craving for vengeance. Other than some important twists and turns, that
is the chess plot.
At
times, most prominently in the first act, Fish
Men's humor does get slightly lame and repetitive, reliant on one culture’s
observations on another. Much of the first act is, indeed, spent on the sport -
and chess games, when played at a table, are just as exciting as one would
expect, even if played energetically. Later in the play, chess is explored with
movement in a dangerous manner reminiscent of Sam Shepard. Early exposition,
however devotes many minutes to making the audience reconsider characters they
would otherwise ignore on the street.
But
in the second act, the play shifts to an unnerving place. It is immediately recognized
that these eight characters are each of a different culture - Guatemalan,
Jewish, Native American, Russian, African American, Asian, etc. –
a surreal choice that seems, at first, only there to allow for diversity among
the cast. But the casting is more meaningful than the first act lets on.
It
turns out that chess serves as a therapeutic escape for these eight men who have all been victims of
deadly crimes of prejudice – the most difficult of which to
discuss, genocide.
Chess
is a curiously appropriate backdrop for Tirado’s story about
genocide's effect on the individual. Think about it. Faceless pawns manipulated
and destroyed without the slightest concern for their identities, their
desires, or those they love.
Perhaps it is a tad silly to juxtapose chess to a thing as gargantuan as
genocide, but what cause are you fighting for in chess other than to wipe your
opponent off the board?
The
play does not limit itself to genocide either. The diverse cast of eight paints
a picture of a prejudiced world with pockets of calm and acceptance –
like the park in which the play is set.
This
is where the real meat of the play resides. Instead of becoming wound up in a
paint-by-numbers, playoff game scenario, the story turns a dark and risky
corner. It’s flanked by resoundingly personal
monologues in which a character spiritually departs his surroundings and
transports the audience to a formative experience, two of which detail direct
involvement in a major world genocide.
As
Ninety-Two, a Holocaust survivor, Howard Witt has, by far, the most gut-wrenching
story, taking the other characters and the audience back to his childhood days
in a German concentration camp. Witt’s subdued
reservation and unstoppable glass-half-full disposition flesh out a familiar man
on a bench, sitting for hours, contemplative, with his head down.
The
entire cast give likable performances, and the multi-generational characters
fuel an important back-and-forth. Raúl Castillo’s fresh-faced Rey Reyes appears the
picture of innocence, but in actuality carries the burden of rooted agonizing
pain. Pee Wee portrayed by Ken E.
Head is the funniest of the group, and Cedric Mays as Cash delivers one of
those lovely and terrible monologues with searing power.
Fish Men is well situated as a, perhaps
inadvertent, companion piece to The Goodman's upcoming production of The Iceman Cometh, opening in early May.
Both plays realize harsh, masculine worlds of trapped souls. The Owen, Goodman's
movable stage, is situated in the round for Fish
Men. On Collette Pollard’s set, we see four sides of a chessboard,
four sides of Manhattan's Washington Square Park, divided by seemingly
impenetrable walls to the buzzing world. People do come, and people do go, but
the core characters remain onstage for the whole play. It is their safe haven.
Why would they want to leave?
Fish Men resolves itself a touch too speedily
and more than a touch too happily, tying up loose ends in a skeptically
convenient way – but the cherished segments are those
gorgeously constructed monologues. The end may be overly sweet, but the journey
is well worth it. -Johnny Oleksinski
