La Turista
A Mysterious Overture
at Breadline Theatre
Shepard does the opposite: he takes important themes–about the search for identity, the yearning for meaning, the contradictions in the American psyche–and buries them in plays with superficially silly or comical premises. Or at least he used to. The 1966 La Turista concerns an American couple visiting Mexico who are trapped in their motel room by bad cases of Montezuma’s revenge. Suicide in B Flat: A Mysterious Overture, written ten years later, begins as a parody of detective dramas: two incompetent flatfoots investigate the mysterious death of a prominent jazz musician. And the plot for the 1971 Back Bog Beast Bait could have come from a bargain-basement Roger Corman horror movie: there’s a strange murderous beast on the bayou, and only our heroes can kill it. (But Shepard’s work today pales in comparison with what he did decades ago. Not nearly as prolific, he squeezes out perhaps one play every two years, and then it’s something like Simpatico: instead of playfully, subversively twisting the film noir genre here, Shepard focuses on the melodrama, producing what seems more self-parody than the genuine article.)
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Likewise the Mexican boy in the first act is one minute a cocky hustler, the next a seductive exotic out to score some gringa flesh, the next a dignified motel employee just trying to help, and finally, after the entrance of a preposterous witch doctor, a kowtowing tour guide explaining everything the shaman does, earnestly or cynically selling his culture. His speech goes through similar permutations: sometimes his English is heavily accented and broken, but at other times, to great comic effect, he speaks American better than the Americans. In the second act, Shepard complicates things further by shifting the scene to Texas and making the same young actor play the son of the local doctor, the American analogue of the Mexican boy in the first act.
Ranch Theater Company’s Suicide in B Flat is less successful. The play starts solidly enough with a standard-issue mystery-novel story. Niles–a jazz musician in the Charlie Parker, Charles Mingus, John Coltrane mode–has been found dead on his apartment floor. Was it murder or suicide? Halfway through the investigation, however, Niles himself enters, wandering through the apartment with a female companion. Is he a ghost? Are he and his companion, Paulette, visiting from another dimension? (There’s a hint that she has occult powers.) Or has Shepard superimposed another scene from another time and location on Niles’s apartment?
