Fuente given premier at Barrington Stage Company

July 7, 2005 performance, reviewed by Pat Nichols

Barrington Stage Company has presented the world premier of Fuente on Stage 2 at the Consolati Performing Arts Center in Sheffield. Plawright Cusi Cram is one of the new writers with powerful voices and the ability to communicate emotions suffered by others. Fuente received the 2004 Herrick New Play Prize over 1,000 entrants.

The story set in a nondescript town in the southwest of America, reveals how people yearn for a better life, but don’t know how make it happen.

The play unfolds on a minimalist set which depicts dry clayey soil, worn benches scattered around the stage. The characters, especially the women, wrestle with desire and need, want a chance to be more than they are, hunger for a different life.

Chaparro (Michael Ray Escamilla) enters and is not sure of where Fuente fits in the scheme of towns and cities. He admits it isn’t a bedroom community or a seaside resort or any other common town.

For him, Fuente is Soledad and “she is all mine, all mine.” However Soledad (Lucia Brawley) appears and disagrees. She wants more than Fuente has or can give her, much more than Chaparro will ever have or want. She wants a change, she wants the briny smell of the ocean.

She blames her unrest on her hairspray which she hoped would straighten her hair, but instead scrambled her brains. She wants new shoes, she wants to be Alexis Carrington of Dynasty fame, she has a noise in her head and she wants to learn to drive. She wants to be somewhere else and Chaparro doesn’t cleave to her words.

She tells him she wants new shoes. Her sandals haven’t taken her anywhere. He leaves to find them, sure it will make her happy. Enter Esteban,(Paola Endino) a family man with two children and a third on the way who admits that the bad guys have more fun and he and Soledad set out in his truck to find the ocean.

Esteban’s wife, Adela, and Chaparro find minimum consolation with each other. Adela confides in him, allows that when pregnant, she sees more than others do. The benches turn into different pieces when the lights go out as members quickly form them into new shapes, a store counter, a truck, a table.

Stories of murder, of witches with strange visions, of dreams surface through the play. Memories of murder come to the fore. The force and effect of religion is tested.

The cast takes this account of the confines of a small town to a gut level where characters grow or go. Soledad knows she must leave. She leaves and makes her new life, not without pain but with understanding of her desire to be the person she wants to be.

Chaparro’s intense but limited need for Soledad, her own larger vision of another life which he can’t understand or accommodate has a familiar feel to it.

Omar, (Piter Marek) blinded by hairspray in a moment of misguided anger, carries on a changed life in a thoughtful way. He portrays a man with no vision as if he experienced the actual event.

Jeanine, as Adela’s daughter Blair-Maria, hits the perfect mood of teenager reacting to her own vibes and visions as she swings above everyone else, the new order.

Some characters grow over the years to new capabilities. Adela, Esteban’s wife, finds her true vocation as a successful business woman who has compassion for Omar.

This play is meant for an adult audience. The language is appropriate for the story but strong.

Fuente - World Premier
Barrington Stage Company: barringtonstageco.org
Box office: 413-528-8888.