Teatro de la Luna's last play of this season is probably its weakest... although the acting and directing were first rate. "COMO SI FUERA ESTA NOCHE" ("As If It Were Tonight") (To 6/11) is a combination memory and surrealistic play by Gracia Morales that tells the story of a young girl who loses her mother when she is nine years old. Her life is spent in trying to understand marital/partner relationships so occasionally there is a flashback when she reacts with her mother to earlier events occurring in their lives. It is difficult to play since the script is confusing as both actresses, Andrea Aranguren and Karen Morales-Chacana both move around a sewing room doing their own things for most of the 75 minutes of playing. If there is a dramatic moment it is when the mother admits to being abused by the father which relates to the fact that the girl is being abused by her boyfriend... the oft told tale that girls always try to chose a lover/husband of the same ilk as their fathers. So the only true redeeming features of this production is the fine acting shown by the two actresses and the successful direction by Mario Marcel who manages lots of stage business to overcome the static nature of the script. Again, there are surtitles in English for non-Spanish speakers.

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As If It Were Tonight (Como si fuera esta noche)

Spanish playwright Gracia Morales transports us into a dream world so magically real, so filled with painful love, you have to remind yourself to breathe. A dressmaker and her daughter allegorically undress slowly until the raw truth of their lives is exposed. For Teatro de la Luna, this poetic play is more than an apt finale for the season’s theme, “Embracing Dreams.” Delightfully tragic and enjoyable to watch, this perfect storm is much more than a sensitive tribute to a loving daughter’s memory of her mother. An American premiere, As If It Were Tonight transcends time and cultures to show us how the spirits of the dead are kept alive by surrounding memories we cannot escape. Artistic Director Mario Marcel is known for taking chances with a variety of styles. In 2008, in Eduardo Rovner’s hilarious romp, She Returned One Night (Volvió una noche), a mother-son relationship was lightheartedly explored. In 2009, Emilio Carballido’s satire Two-Scented Rose (Rosa de dos Aromas) exposed the abandonment of unsupported wives and illegitimate children. In 2010, Dino Armas’ Heartstrings, delved into the taboo of familial incest. Now Marcel deserves high praise for skillfully set designing and directing this sharp-edged little gem, As If It Were Tonight (Como si fuera esta noche), a close-up of a mother-daughter, held by another kind of bond. Read more The Examiner PRESERVING THE PAST: TEATRO DE LA LUNA There are plays about mothers and daughters that are sentimental. There are plays about mothers and daughters that are comedies. There are plays about the mothers and daughters where women of the older generation try to give women of a younger generation serious advice. But few mother-daughter plays contain all those elements. Gracia Morales' "Como Si Fuera Esta Noche" ("As If It Were Tonight") at Teatro de la Luna is an exception, tying together emotion, comedy and wisdom, expressing them in a unique brand of lyrical drama. The notion of time in "Como Si Fuera" is never fixed, but is a fluid concept that illuminates and shapes the lives of the seamstress mother, Mercedes (Andrea Aranguren), and her daughter, Clara (Karen Morales-Chacana). There are times when Mercedes and Clara share moments and memories. At other times, Mercedes inhabits the world of the past, while Clara inhabits her present world. References to death and life abound, although the boundaries between them are blurred. Although "Como Si Fuera" is focused on the relationship between Mercedes and Clara, it is also about the rest of their family, especially Mercedes' husband. That part of the play takes "Como Si Fuera" into the realm of domestic violence, from a dramatic, not a sociological, point of view. Morales' vision of Clara's father and his drunken rages convincingly explains the ability of some women to "forgive and forget," in order to sustain the hope that things will change. Aranguren and Morales-Chacana are extremely versatile actresses who succeed at bringing out the distance and the closeness, the differences and similarities between two generations. Intelligently directed by Mario Marcel, they work well together to reveal the huge world that the two women shared before Mercedes' death. The set for "Como Si Fuera" is a jumble of furniture designed by Marcel. It is Mercedes' dress shop where mannequins are hung with unfinished clothes and swaths of cloth overflow baskets and tables. Off to one side is an outdoor balcony where Clara retreats to use her cell phone. The balcony is an area of modernity, away from all the clutter of Mercedes' old-fashioned life, a place where Clara goes, unsuccessfully, to connect with her boyfriend. It's difficult to make poetic texts work onstage, particularly when they are full of symbol and elusive references to the past. But Aranguren, Morales-Chacana and Marcel manage to make "Como Si Fuera Esta Noche" a double-barreled dramatic success: a realistic vision of a singular mother-daughter connection, and also a general tribute to loving relationships between mothers and daughters everywhere, in every generation. http://washingtonexaminer.com Washington Post “Heartstrings,” exerting a quietly strong pull Its carefully tailored dramaturgical gimmick notwithstanding, there’s an irritating off-the-rack quality to “Como Si Fuera Esta Noche (As If It Were Tonight),” the latest offering from Arlington’s Teatro de la Luna. Spanish writer Gracia Morales’s play about a seamstress and her daughter deals with issues such as the unreliability of language and the psychic benefits of housecleaning, but it’s fundamentally a dysfunctional-family story and not a particularly new or interesting one, despite the key plot twist Morales constructs around a pair of scissors. (The play is performed in Spanish with English surtitles.) Admittedly, the two actresses in director Mario Marcel’s 75-minute production — billed as a U.S. premiere — turn in portrayals that are spirited and appealing. Andrea Aranguren shoulders the role of Mercedes, a gentle wife and mother who earns money by plying a needle and who sometimes turns introspective, puttering meditatively around her sewing shop or huddling in a rocking chair and gently rocking. Karen Morales-Chacana plays Mercedes’s daughter Clara, a young woman with boyfriend trouble and more vibrancy (she does a cartwheel at one point) than confidence. The gimmick is that while the two protagonists appear to occupy the same physical spaces — including a dwelling and the sewing shop — they are living at different points in time. As they talk to themselves or to other characters who are invisible to us (or, in Clara’s case, none too plausibly, to a tape recorder), their remarks form a kind of conversational crosshatching, sometimes overlapping thematically (when they recall a family experience from different perspectives, for example) and sometimes diverging (when Clara is talking about her love life and Mercedes is making a grocery list). The different-eras conceit does create a certain poignancy: It becomes clear, as the drama proceeds, that Clara is coming of age in the aftermath of Mercedes’s death. When the young woman reminisces lovingly about her mother, remembering the scent of bleach that clung to the overworked seamstress’s hands, for example; or when the two characters, still separated by the years, playfully wrap themselves in the same large piece of fabric, “Como Si Fuera Esta Noche” becomes a rumination on loss and the remorselessness of time. Underscoring the wistfulness is the cluttered retro look of the set, with its rocking chair, sewing machine, wedding dress on a mannequin and heaps of cloth and clothes on every surface. (Marcel devised the set and also the sound design, mostly consisting of a “Besame Mucho” recording used as underscoring.) Unfortunately, the bittersweet tone can’t compensate for the lack of momentum or for the cliched story line, whose revelations you can see coming a mile away. Indeed, once the novelty of its split-screen time frame has worn off, “Como Si Fuera Esta Noche” feels a little threadbare. Wren is a freelance writer. Como Si Fuera Esta Noche (As If It Were Tonight) by Gracia Morales. Directed by Mario Marcel; lighting design, Brian S. Allard; costumes, Rosita Becker and Nucky Walder. 75 minutes. In Spanish with English surtitles (translation by David Bradley). © 2011 The Washington Post Company http://www.washingtonpost.com