A clear and simple message is spraypainted on the New York City set of the Drama department's production of Jose Rivera's "Marisol": "Wake up!"
Intended to cry out against social injustice, this message may appeal more directly to the audience's attention span. "Marisol" follows its title character through a world where apples are extinct, north becomes south and maternity becomes masculine.
But with a plot that's frequently unfocused and ambiguous, "Marisol" leaves audience members awaiting a return to reality.
The play revolves around a raging war between God and the angels who have forsaken him. Life on Earth has become unrecognizable and a seemingly disjointed sequence of events demonstrates society's apocalyptic downturn. The play opens as Marisol's (Eldis Diaz) life is threatened on the subway by a man with a golf club. Marisol then returns home to the Bronx, where out-of-control neighbors nearly pound down the door to her apartment. As she falls asleep, her black leather-clad guardian angel (Teresa Dowell-Vest) visits to tell her the angels are turning against their "senile" God.
The next day, newspapers report that a woman with Marisol's exact name and address was beaten to death by a man with a golf club. For most of the play, it's unclear whether Marisol is still alive or if she exists in some parallel quasi-reality.
Stricken with fear, Marisol and her co-worker, June (Maggie Light), vow to survive society's downturn. But before her character can fully develop onstage, June disappears -- Marisol thinks she was killed by her brother Lenny (Carson Hinners) with a golf club. (Is the frequent use of golf clubs as murder weapons another sign of the apocalypse?)
A highlight of the first act is the relationship between David W. Weiss' realistic scenery and R. Lee Kennedy's boldly effective lighting design. The sets for each scene take up only a small portion of the stage, and each is brightly lit while the rest of the stage remains black. This harsh contrast pushes the audience to concentrate intensely on the dramatic action.
A series of disjointed scenes with underdeveloped characters makes up the second act. Marisol finds herself lost on what should be a familiar street, but the Empire State Building has moved and the sun won't rise, so Marisol is left questioning her own strength and her faith in God.
A random array of new characters enters the scene, each with his or her own horror story of personal struggle. One woman (Jessie Andary) was beaten for failing to pay her credit card bills. Another man's (Cesar Guadamuz) flesh was burned off, and his only solace is alcohol. Homeless people line the street and a skinhead punk burns people alive onstage.
These new characters are vastly engaging for the few moments they appear onstage, but they're not involved long enough in the script to have a clear connection to the plot. Marisol soon recognizes the skinhead as her friend June -- a surprising twist -- but how June survived her brother's golf club blow to become a neo-Nazi is never addressed.
In showing Marisol's journey through madness, the play strives to warn the audience about the ills of society. Viewers are told to assume personal responsibility to avoid sending society further on its downward spiral. This message, though poignant and pertinent, is perhaps not best conveyed by presenting such a surreal society as a possible consequence. By staging the action in such an absurd milieu, Rivera's play undermines its own social commentary.
But the 12-member cast shouldn't be blamed for the audience's alienation. On the contrary, the most unrealistic plot twists become relatively believable thanks to the actors' portrayals. Director Betsy Rudelich Tucker draws performances that convey as much meaning as possible from such a hard-to-follow script.
Even the height of the play's absurdity, when Lenny gives birth to a stillborn child, appears almost natural -- partly because of his frumpy dress, but mostly because of Hinners' intensity onstage. And Diaz's facial expressions and body language effectively portray her fear and confusion at the bizarre world unfolding around her -- if an appropriate level of reaction to such an outlandish turn of events is even imaginable.
"Marisol" intends to challenge your comfort level and stir you out of social apathy, but it doesn't get the message across clearly. The cast conveys the play's themes as directly as possible with Rivera's difficult script, but perhaps Rivera himself should wake up and provide actors and audiences with more accessible, comprehensible work.
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