ÁChe-Che-Che! (A Latin Fugue in 5/8 Time)
ÁChe-Che-Che! (A Latin Fugue in 5/8 Time) hangs that Chicago albatross around its neck and drones on for two acts. Ramirez and codirector Meighan Gerachis have managed to highlight most of the flaws and few of the strengths of Cruz’s script by concentrating on her three narrators–Live Che, Dead Che, and Old Che. In this limp cha-cha, the three Ches declaim, mutter, and meander through an assessment of Guevara’s life and politics that ends with Ches imagined burial, as his remains are returned to Cuba and eulogized by a palsied, aged Castro.
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This unfocused performance style is even more intolerable during the dance sequences, in which female cast members invariably and inexplicably wear slips and dance seductively with various fully dressed guerrilla fighters, spirits, or local boys eager for attention. Ironically, these scenes are the most animated, with ensemble members exhibiting a seemingly heartfelt playfulness. Yet playing these parodically unnatural scenes naturalistically serves the opposite of their purpose in Cruz’s delicate theatrical structure. She includes enough clues in the text–particularly in Dead Che’s longing to show the women he’d abandoned how much their unappreciated sacrifices meant to him–to indicate that in her mind these staged dances are more than voyeuristic fantasy. Yet they’re treated as asides, performed without irony or any understanding of their sexism and cultural stereotypes. Unless I’ve misread Cruz’s attempt at creating what she calls “a dark human altar” to Guevara, she has a more complex vision of the sexually charged world of revolution than the simple sexual voraciousness and vulnerability portrayed here. And without a clear performance of the surrealistic link she seems to be drawing between machismo and female submission/aggression, her deconstruction of Guevara’s iconic sweaty, stone-faced, manly-man arrogance becomes a vaguely troubled celebration of the seductive power of Latin men and the unquestioned sexiness of revolutionary ideology.
