At the beginning two young men stand back to back and, to prerecorded guitar accompaniment, begin to dance the dreamlike drama of a recollected unrequited queer infatuation that unfolds in Pondering About My Memories. The two performers, whom I’ll call the rememberer (Pablo Guillen) and the crush (Joshua Cole Lucas), have a lyrical physical synchronicity (they’ve both spent time with Synetic). But it is the emotional translucence they bring to their characters combined with playwright-director-choreographer Rodin Alcerro’s achingly affecting storytelling that makes this Capital Fringe Festival entry extraordinary.
When the two actors speak, the text Alcerro scripted (in Spanish, translated into English by Oscar Quiroz) can feel torn from the soul. And when seamlessly the actors are moved to move, their choreography (by Alcerro with Joshua Lucas) speaks a language beyond and beneath words. Surreal lighting effects by Hailey LaRoe and a sound design by Brandon Cook that sometimes musicalizes their tender and tortured pas de deux with organ, guitar, and sax — and sometimes delivers sudden rumbles and sonic booms — further serve to unify the performance into what seems an artform all its own.
We first meet Max (the crush) and Manasés (the rememberer) in a boyhood game of pitch and catch. Max teases Manasés for having his head in the clouds all the time. It must be a birth defect, Manasés jokes. Then, huddled together on a black set piece graffitied with multicolor expressions of love, Manasés asks, “What do we live for?” “I guess we live to be happy…,” Max answers — prompting what becomes between them, and between the play and us, a throughline existential reflection.
The narrative is dramatized in bits, like bytes of memory accessed briefly. Among the incidents that impact the story is the death of Max’s older brother by hanging, having been shamed by their father for wearing women’s clothing.
Max’s ensuing family gender drama gets told as…a comic puppet show. Manasés then recalls (or imagines) holding a dress and telling his wished-for boyfriend, “Maybe if I look like a woman, we could be together.”
Another turning point is Max’s disclosure to Manasés that he has a real-life girlfriend and they’ve been having sex and…she’s pregnant. I won’t reveal where that leads, but suffice to say: what happens thereafter is heartstopping and heartbreaking.
I remember thinking when I first read the title Pondering About My Memories that its preposition seemed superfluous, like an awkward mistranslation. Having seen the show, I realize I was wrong. The rememberer doesn’t simply ponder his memories (of his lost first love); he ponders about them; he ponders what they mean. And the result is a work of theater that is utterly charming and disarming.
Running Time: 65 minutes
Genre: Drama
Dates and Times:
- July 18 at 8:35 PM
- July 20 at 1:40 PM
- July 21 at 3:55 PM
Venue: Bliss, 1122 Connecticut Avenue NW
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Pondering About My Memories