AMERICAN DREAMS. To 11 June.
London
AMERICAN DREAMS
by Lydia Parker
Union Theatre 204 Union Street SE1 0LX To 16 April 2005
Tue-Sat 7.30pm
Runs 2hr 35min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7261 9876
Review: Timothy Ramsden 1 April
then New Wimbledon Studio The Broadway SW19 31 May-11 June 2005
Mon-Sat 7.45pm Mat Sat 3pm
TICKETS: 0870 060 6646
www.newwimbledontheatre.co.uk
Easy to buy into these pictures of selling today.Lydia Parker's double-bill explores the interaction of America and its neighbours in satirical looks at the States' Behemoth, the retail trade. Gringo creates a farcical whirl of events around Scott, apple-pie representative of an aggressive chain-store buying up the Puerto Rico market. American Dream has a US-based Colombian teacher seduced into exploiting his students in a selling-scam.
Over Here Theater Company's publicity sums up the point. A Che Guevara image is set on a Tupperware bowl; anything can be reduced to marketing ideology, in homes or abroad. In Gringo the locals try out their own con. Lacking expertise, things go wrong, leading to a remote, rain-drenched mountain where an elderly tax-avoiding resident (fired by Scott's employer) provides shelter.
A loud-mouthed local fixer, who treats the local economy and women with similar dismissive intentions, is seen off in the Puerto Ricans' amateur scam, while Scott's naivety takes a bashing, setting him off down the track of the American loosening collar and ties abroad.
Post-interval idealistic Colombian Paul finds himself entombed in a pyramid-selling operation. Manipulated sexual desire weighs in the scales again while the US flag, furled during the first play as if waiting to engulf the land, is spread out as a quasi-religious altar-cloth. God is incorporated within America in hot-breathed illusory optimism which turns the dream of transforming debt to profit through ever-greater selling into a nightmare of misery.
The stage of the Union isn't ideal for Christopher Klein's thrust-set productions, its narrow depth constricting larger-group moments in the second play. And the underlying pulse of the action could be upped a notch or two in places, with some surface mannerisms cleaned away.
Parker makes things over-easy by providing a clear-eyed commentator in American Dream, making over-evident where we should be standing. Still, these are neatly-drawn pictures of the US today with especially good work from Eduardo Negrete's simple-hearted Colombian seeking love, and from two more ambivalent characters. Laurence Bouvard is immaculately deceptive in Gringo and John Haggerty, persuasively reveals how close the heartily upbeat can lie to the sinister and heavy in American Dream.
Gringo
Lottie: Laurence Bouvard
Nacho: Leonatd Fenton
Jimmy: John Haggerty
Scott: Mark Holloway
Waiter/Fanta/Joe: Oliver Miceli
Freddie: Eduardo Negrete
American Dream
Martha: Nancy Baldwin
Jack: John Haggerty
Wally: Mark Holloway
Linda: Hilary Lester
Paul: Eduardo Negrete
Tibby: Maureen Oakeley
Mandy: Lydia Parker
Director: Christopher Klein
Designer: Jorge Dieppa
Lighting: Steve Miller
Dramaturg: Maureen Oakeley
2005-04-02 13:04:05