DC Metro Theater Arts

‘LAS QUIERO A LAS DOS’ AT TEATRO DE LA LUNA

The bright blue walls and bold geometric shapes of Mario Marcel’s set for Las Quiero A Las Dos give it a heightened, almost cartoonish feel, which proves fitting for Teatro de la Luna’s hundred-minute romantic farce. Marcel’s staging of Ricardo Talesnik’s award-winning Argentinian play feels like a cross between a telenovella and an episode of I Love Lucy, but the slapstick humor ultimately doesn’t justify the trite and conventional story. The play begins with Miguel (Peter Pereyra) packing for a business trip with the help of his wife, Julia (Yovinca Arredondo Justiniano). When she overhears him making a very un-businesslike phone call, she locks the door and hides his keys, preventing him from leaving the house and, therefore, presumably, their marriage. Miguel’s efforts to escape, and Julia’s to keep him home, involve disconnected phones, a politically incorrect seduction attempt, and numerous animal impersonations, but they grow repetitive long before Isabel, the mistress (Karen Morales-Chacana) arrives to move the plot along. Like the costumes (by Rosita Becker and Nucky Walder), the actors are energetic and attractive but don’t do much to tell the story. They throw themselves with vigor and agility into the physical absurdities of the staging, and their timing has the crisp precision farce requires. Morales-Chacana has a throaty sensuality that gives authority to her role as the eternal Other Woman, and in the play’s one serious scene, Justiniano is poignant in her steadfast refusal to hear the truth about her husband’s affair. As the crucial central character of Miguel, however, Pereyra is more hapless than dashing, and I wondered more than once why two such clearly intelligent, capable young women remained so resolutely attached to him. The play is performed in Spanish, with English surtitles, and the language barrier is perhaps more of a hindrance in a comedy than it would have been in a serious play. The surtitles cannot always keep up with the fast-paced spoken dialogue, which spoils the timing of some of the jokes. At times Quiero veers encouragingly close to satire, most notably in an early moment when Julia tries to hide Miguel’s keys in her cleavage and they fall straight through her negligee and onto the floor, forcing her to stash them in a potted plant instead. It’s a nice piece of direction, even if it arises from a questionable choice of costuming. (In a play centered around a wife-mistress conflict, why have the wife prancing around in lingerie right from the start? It undermines her later transformation). But although Talesnik sets up some interesting dynamics, the script continually favors jokes over character development, and both Marcel and his cast embrace the comedy at the expense of exploring what a real-life modern marriage — populated by three human beings rather than three caricatures — might look like. Running time: One hour forty minutes with no intermission. Las Quiero a las Dos plays through June 2, 2012 at Teatro de la Luna at Gunston Arts Center Theatre 2 – 2700 South Lang Street, in Arlington, VA. For tickets, purchase them online. http://www.dcmetrotheaterarts.com

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Las Quiero a las Dos (I Want Them Both)

Ricardo Talesnik is the Neil Simon of Hispanic Theatre. But look out, Talesnik’s humor can throw you off-guard. A multi-award-winner for Argentine television comedies and for Las Quero a las Dos, which has been staged in New York and adapted as a movie, Talesnik explores conflict and pain in human relationships in a matchless way. He provokes us to ponder why loyalty, honesty and communication in marriage are so important. The classic love triangle revolves around Miguel (Peter Pereyra, whose expressive face is a wonder to watch), a philandering husband. He is packing for a business trip, although in reality, he is leaving the country with his mistress, Isabel, (Karen Morales-Chacana) who is waiting at the airport. The wife, Julia, (Yovinca Arredondo Justiniano) gets wise, locks the front door from the inside, hides the key, and disconnects the phone. Because they live on the eighth floor, Miguel can’t escape out the window. The traditional Roman farce has five doors to open and slam shut. And director Mario Marcel, who has designed a stunning, efficient set, with sea-blue walls, stages Las Quiero with four exits and a window, that allows Miguel to imagine himself Tarzan of the jungle, who makes hysterical attempts to escape with knotted bed sheets. Read more Rich Massabny Producer/Interviewer/Reviewer “Arlington Weekly News TV” COMCAST CHANNEL 69 FIOS Channel 38 www.richmassabnyreviews.blogspot.com TEATRO De La LUNA  “I Want Them Both” (Las Quieros A Las Dos”) The local Hispanic theatre company, Teatro De La Luna, for over 20 years, has been providing the Washington area with stage drama and comedy. Its current show, “I Want Them Both” (“Las Quiero A Las Dos”), playing at Gunston Arts Center, is well, simply, a laugh a minute. Three fine, local actors, Peter Pereyra, Yovinca Arredondo and Karen Morales-Chacana, provide a ate to this play which runs through June 2. Mario Marcel directs this gem. Don’t Miss It!! For tickets and information to “I Want Them Both,” call 703-548-3092 and check the website at www.teatrodelaluna.org. The Examiner Be careful what you ask for ... Argentinian playwright Ricardo Talesnik is a master of farce, as his "Las Quiero a las Dos" ("I Want Them Both") at Teatro de la Luna makes clear. A play about the roles people play in life and how well they do or don't adapt to the parts they have created for themselves, "Las Quiero a las Dos" is the story of a businessman, Miguel (Peter Pereyra) who is married to Julia (Yovinca Arredondo Justiniano). Yet Miguel has wanderlust and when, in the first scene of the play, he appears to be packing for a business trip, it turns out that in fact he is packing to meet his mistress, Isabel (Karen Morales-Chacana). Talesnik lets Julia know what her husband is up to right away, when she overhears him on the telephone with Isabel. So Julia locks the front door, hides the keys and disconnects the phone so Miguel can't call a locksmith. The first part of the play is deliciously entertaining, as Miguel grows more and more frantic, knowing that Isabel won't wait forever and perhaps fearing the worst: that she will come to find him. And that of course is exactly what happens, which triggers the even funnier scenes of the second half of the play. When Isabel arrives at the apartment, Julia has had enough deception and invites Isabel in. Isabel it turns out, is tired of her status as mistress. She wants to be the wife. But when Julia hands her some sewing to do and retires to the bedroom with Miguel, Isabel is unhappy with that role, too. Cannily directed by Mario Marcel, "Las Quiero" starts off going fast, then continues to gain momentum, barreling ahead until the play's last moment. And although its characters are ordinary people, the play incorporates extreme examples of absurdity and silly behavior in order to make its points about how irrational and outrageous human nature can be. Marcel wisely cast a trio of actors who are adept at comedy and can handle not only the speed but also the lightness of touch this text requires. The plot snaps back and forth in curious, unpredictable patterns, but Pereyra, Justiniano and Morales-Chacana are equal to its twists and turns. A lesser playwright would have made this into a moralistic tale about the inequality of sexual roles. But Talesnik gives his play broader scope, aiming his comedy at the very act of lusting after total freedom, suggesting the anarchy any characters will confront when they try to build unattainable bliss into the structure of their lives. http://washingtonexaminer.com Washington Post Teatro de la Luna’s ‘Las Quiero a las Dos’: Argentinian farce about love “Bring me a towel.” These words are not, ordinarily, guaranteed to send the hearer into paroxysms of ecstasy. But they have that effect in the world of “Las Quiero a las Dos” (“I Want Them Both”), the Argentinian comedy cavorting strenuously across an Arlington stage courtesy of Teatro de la Luna. When a foxy young woman named Isabel begs her married lover, Miguel, to talk to her as if they were spouses, he obediently tosses out a few phrases redolent of connubial bliss — lines such as “I’m hungry!,” “Did you buy me deodorant?” and the aforementioned request for a towel. This kind of mundane domestic chitchat is new to Isabel: Hearing it, as she lolls on a sofa, she writhes and sighs in near-orgasmic bliss. The moment is just one of the aggressively waggish twists in Ricardo Talesnik’s farce about love, marriage and the flouting of social norms. Staged in boldfaced-and-underscored comic style by Teatro de la Luna Artistic Director Mario Marcel, the 90-minute show (in Spanish, with English surtitles) portrays characters who clown around with wigs, take turns wearing an apron emblazed with enormous hearts and engage jokingly in role-playing borrowed from the Tarzan saga. At one point, Miguel’s wife, Julia (Yovinca Arredondo Justiniano), leads Miguel (Peter Pereyra) around by his tie, as if he were a dog on a leash. The tomfoolery may strike some theatergoers as exaggerated; but the play provoked regular gales of laughter from an audience at Gunston Arts Center’s Theater Two on Saturday night. That response is in keeping with the comedy’s track record: According to Teatro de la Luna, “Las Quiero a las Dos” has been widely staged in the Spanish-speaking world and has been the basis for a film. At least partly justifying that popularity is the intelligent subtext that Talesnik has woven into his jocular plotline. After Julia foils a getaway that Miguel and Isabel are planning, the mistress shows up at the spouses’ apartment with a suitcase full of lingerie: Attempting to resolve the awkwardness, the three adults wedge themselves into situations that, while goofy, comment implicitly on social conventions and on the double standards that can govern male and female behavior. Miguel thinks he’d enjoy a menage-a-trois, for example, but when Julia and Isabel put his idea into practice, he finds that the lifestyle grates against some of his assumptions. Arredondo Justiniano’s interpretation of Julia can seem a little hammy (early in the show, the character flops on the sofa, fakes sleep, then surreptitiously opens one bulging eye to spy on her husband). Pereyra’s Miguel has an aptly flummoxed air. The production brightens a good deal when Karen Morales-Chacana waltzes on as the willful and exceptionally glamorous Isabel, clad in boots, leggings and a hot-pink blouse. (Rosita Becker and Nucky Walder devised the show’s costumes; Marcel designed the middle-class-apartment set.) At one point, assigned the task of hemming Miguel’s trousers, Isabel sews and caresses them at the same time. What is a dreary household task for one person may be a sensual thrill for another, “Las Quiero a las Dos” archly suggests. Romance, rather like comedy, is in the eye of the beholder. Wren is a freelance writer. Las Quiero a las Dos (I Want Them Both) by Ricardo Talesnik. Director and sound design Mario Marcel; assistant director, Marisol Flamenco; light design, Brian S. Allard. In Spanish with English surtitles (English translation by David Bradley). 90 minutes. Through June 2 at Gunston Arts Center, Theater Two, 2700 S. Lang St. Arlington. 703-548-3092. www.teatrodelaluna.org. © 2012 The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com