Red Tide
RED TIDE... THE REVIEWS ARE IN... Love triangle with unsettling, twisting plot Posted on Tue, Oct. 16, 2007 BY CHRISTINE DOLEN cdolen@MiamiHerald.com Reality rules in South Florida theater, so one definite pleasure of Juan C. Sanchez's Red Tide is the chance to follow the playwright down the rabbit hole and into a world where ''truth'' is fluid, at best. As resident playwright for the Davie-based Promethean Theatre, Sanchez follows his first work for the company -- 2005's Buck Fever -- with an even more unsettling second play. With echoes of Sam Shepard or David Mamet, Red Tide spins a noirish story about two brothers and the woman both are determined to have. Staged with both simplicity and theatrical flair by Margaret M. Ledford, Red Tide runs an intermission-free 90 minutes. And though all the pieces fall into place, and clarity finally rules, some may feel tested by the plot's twists, turns, repetitions, revisions and time travel. But it's worth hanging in there with Sanchez, who has a definite gift, and the three actors. The play's brothers are Gilbert Sullivan (Andy Quiroga), a self-adoring and sexist TV news guy, and his younger brother Alan (Mathew Chapman), a mess of a man with obvious mental problems. The object of their mutual desire is Angelica Maren (Deborah L. Sherman, Promethean's producer), a dark-haired dame who is both manipulative and enigmatic. Anecdotes and memories become malleable in Red Tide. There are suggestions of parental abuse, violence, murder. But who did what to whom? Who is lying? Who isn't lying? Is everything Alan's fantasy? Is anything? So many questions, yet Red Tide eventually gets around to the answers. In the meantime, the actors have to play variations on their characters. All three do so very well -- Chapman becoming both pitiable and explosive, Quiroga condescending and caring, Sherman domineering and seductive. Visually, the production reflects Ledford's simple-yet-rich staging. Set designer Morgan L. Little gives each character a place to ''live'' (Alan a tiny sofa, Gilbert a dressing room, Angelica an obscuring screen that turns her into a giant half-dressed shadow). M. Tate Tenorio's lighting and Adam Cronan's video deepen the play's mood and mystery. Producing any untested script is risky business for a small theater company. Producing one with the surreal logic of Red Tide is even riskier. So, good for Promethean, for playing it not so safe, and for the daring in Sanchez's harsh, unsettling play. ...................................................................... Red Tide thrills By Mary Damiano | Special Correspondent Sun-Sentinel October 16, 2007 A young man sits curled up on a couch holding a bat, trying desperately to remember how the bat got blood all over it. That's how the proverbial curtain rises on Red Tide, a world premiere at the Promethean Theatre by Miami playwright Juan C. Sanchez. From that first scene, Red Tide straddles the line between thriller and comedy, skewering and paying homage to that venerable 1940s cinematic genre, film noir. Sanchez takes the audience on a nonlinear ride through the relationship of two brothers and the woman who figures prominently in their lives. Scenes switch between the past and the present to tell the story of Alan Sullivan (Mathew Chapman), the man with the bat; his brother Gilbert (Andy Quiroga), a narcissistic weatherman; and Angelica (Deborah L. Sherman), a mysterious dame who has encounters with both men. Alan has been on medication since childhood and can't hold a job, so big brother Gilbert supports him with an inheritance from their parents. The strain of this dynamic causes the brothers to become estranged. Enter Angelica, who seems determined to make Gilbert pay for the injustices done to Alan. Red Tide doesn't deal with plot in a traditional way. Each scene offers the audience more questions than revelations: What is Angelica's agenda? Whose blood is on that bat? And what really happened to Alan and Gilbert's mother? Sanchez's script is filled with comedic dialogue that accentuates the dark mood. He seems more comfortable writing for women; Sherman's lines are some of the best in Red Tide, while the brothers' verbal sparring is often stilted. Quiroga is smarmy as a local newscaster and Chapman is convincing as his troubled brother, but Sherman is the one to watch, playing her femme fatale role to the hilt. Clad in Ananda Keator's black and red costumes, Sherman imbues her movements with seduction, her words with venomous sensuality. The Promethean's production is stylish and spare. Morgan L. Little's set conveys Red Tide's sexy, dreamy qualities. A white screen is used to great effect, as a scrim that showcases Sherman's character and for video that illustrates the subtext of Sanchez's ideas. With Red Tide, Sanchez has created a psychological puzzle that might take longer than the play's 90 minutes to fit together. Mary Damiano is a freelance writer in Wilton Manors. ...................................................................... The Border of Nasty At Promethean Theatre, something happens. And then it doesn't. Does this make sense? By Brandon K. Thorp/Broward New Times Published: October 18, 2007 Red Tide The Promethean Theatre's premiere production of Red Tide opens with three actors in a vaguely unnerving tableau, stretching across the Mailman Theatre's small stage. Mathew Chapman is sitting to your left, waving a baseball bat around his scummy little apartment, freaking out about some dream he just had. Is there a body in his bedroom? Did he kill somebody last night? He wonders about these things, and you've got to wonder about them too. Murderer or no, the dude's way unstable. "Did I really say, 'I hope you die, you fucking whore bitch?' " he asks himself, horrified. "Oh! She'll never go on a second date with me!" Who "she" might be, we don't know. Meanwhile, Deborah L. Sherman is standing behind a scrim center stage, dealing with her own species of freakiness. Applying lipstick, wearing fuck-me pumps and a slinky black dress, resting one elevated foot on something you can't see (my guess was a toilet seat), she seems to be made of nothing but sexy calves, curves, and husky come-hithers. She's musing to herself about her youth as a lonely, homely girl and being snubbed by the boy she had a thing for. "I filed a sexual-harassment complaint and got him fired," she says, and you laugh because she's not ashamed. While this is going on, Andy Quiroga's to your right, practicing his smile in a dressing- room mirror. He's a TV newsman, and he's preparing a bit about red tide. He tells us what shellfish is safely edible and what shellfish isn't. "Don't go for that moonlight swim," he advises. Then he goes through it all again. He looks and sounds like a used-car salesman, and his repetition of the bit, with changed emphasis, rearranged eyebrows, and the intimation of a Jack Nicholson grin, bespeaks an archetypal megalomania so outsized that it's lovable. What the hell do these people have to do with one another? Not much, really — though Quiroga plays Gilbert Sullivan, the regrettably named brother of crazy Chapman's character Alan Sullivan, the circumscribed lives of the men do not intersect so much as bounce off of one another, and the same goes for Sherman's Angelica Maren. Gilbert's head is full of ego, Alan's head is full of ghosts, and Angelica's head is full of revenge — with such bulging beans, there's no room for anybody else. Even when the tableau disappears and these people are brought face to face, they're never much closer to one another than they were at the beginning, mulling over their private obsessions in solitude. But they are brought face to face, and their interaction is so weird that the primary question on the audience's mind morphs rapidly from the prosaic "What's gonna happen?" to the much-cooler "What is reality?" It's interesting to wonder if Gilbert is really as big an asshole as he seems when preening in the mirror (and it would appear that he is; when chatting with his little brother about women, he says, "Never underestimate the power of a great set of tits. Never trust the tit. The tit will lick you."). It's vastly more interesting to wonder if one of the brothers might be a murderer, which brother it might be, if all the people onstage are crazy, or if anything you're hearing is true. The greatest virtue of Juan C. Sanchez's play is that it lets you know, from the get-go, that you don't know what the fuck is going on, and it makes your uncertainty exciting. What we think we know is this: Gilbert hasn't seen his brother lately. Alan's too big a flake to pin down — perennially unemployed, prone to hallucination and delusion, brain- pickled by virtually every anti-psychotic, anti-depressant, and pharmaceutical psycho- stimulant known to man. Gilbert, meanwhile, isn't very nice to his little brother. He speaks down to him, belittling his meager aspirations and even more meager achievements every chance he gets. But Angela's a peach. Alan meets her on the beach, where she's apparently gone to freak out after losing her job at a day-care center. A flighty failed actress with an overdeveloped mothering instinct (or so it would appear), she gloms on to Alan's simplicity, neediness, and space-cadet charm. They begin dating. But what happens then? Is Angela a raving harpy? Is somebody a killer? Has anybody even died? The onstage action flashes unpredictably from the linear events of Alan and Angela's courtship to brief moments from the brothers' shared childhood to emotionally constipated meetings of the brothers as adults, when they seem incapable of communication. All of these scenes constitute a slow circling of the trauma that made broken men out of bright children, and as the proceedings get darker, less is certain: The more we learn about what happened to these people, the less we know about who they are, and the character of Angela becomes so mercurial that she ceases to seem like a single person at all. Sherman's portrayal is like a time-lapse video of a nuclear meltdown. She begins by talking about child care in terms of "loving moments of exchange," and by the end, she's a witch, barely human, a creature of screaming nerves and loathing, telling Gilbert that "talking to you is like walking through a tunnel of shit." As you might hope, this seemingly willful strangeness is no mere artsy wank. In fact, it's meta: Describing his life, Alan, in a lost, lonely, little-boy voice, says, "Something happens, and then something else." No causation, no reason; events just twist away from you "like a vanishing point." And that's just the way Red Tide works. There are no connections, and everything is frightfully arbitrary, just like the tragedies that turned the people onstage into these disintegrating monsters without the capacity to explain themselves; just like the red tide that appears out of nowhere in the ocean, killing whatever swims into it. Where is the border of all this foul nastiness? How to get clear of it? Juan Sanchez doesn't know any more than we do, but it's awfully nice of him to ask. ...................................................................... about the play... RED TIDE is an intense psychological thriller examining the relationship between two brothers and the woman that comes between them. Mr. Sanchez's last play Buck Fever was Carbonell Nominated for Best New Work in 2005 and also received its World Premiere at TPT. Red Tide was commissioned by The Promethean Theatre and was written under the mentorship of Leslie Ayvazian as part of Downstage Miami, a program administered by the Miami-Dade Cultural Affairs Council that supports Miami-based playwrights. The play was work-shopped at the Playwrights' Center in Minneapolis this past August under the direction of Hayley Finn, dramaturgy by Sally Oswald, and featured actors Lee Mark Nelson, Brian Skellenger and Maren Bush. TPT's World Premiere is Directed by Resident Director Margaret M. Ledford with dramaturgy by Jane G. Duncan, TPT Artistic Associate. About The Playwrights' Center... Founded in 1971 by five writers seeking artistic and professional support, The Playwrights' Center is now "the biggest and most innovative playwriting center in the country" (Michael Bigelow Dixon, Guthrie Theater Literary Director). http://www.pwcenter.org/ "Any self-respecting playwright [should be involved with] The Playwrights' Center." -Edward Albee RED TIDE By Juan C. Sanchez OCTOBER 12 - 28, 2007 Directed by Margaret M. Ledford Jane G. Duncan, Dramaturg/Artistic Associate with Mathew Chapman, Andy Quiroga and Deborah L. Sherman Belkys Cordero, Stage Manager Matt Corey, Sound Design Ananda Keator, Costume Design M. Tate Tenorio, Lighting Design PLEASE NOTE RED TIDE WILL BE PERFORMED AT: Mailman Hollywood Theatre Located at Nova Southeastern University 3301 College Ave. Mailman Hollywood Center ~ 2nd Floor Davie, FL 33314 LIMITED SEATING AVAILABLE Reservation Information: 786.317.7580 or boxoffice@theprometheantheatre.org Adults $25 Seniors $15 (65+) Students $10 (w/valid ID) (CASH OR CHECK ONLY NO CREDIT CARDS ACCEPTED AT THE DOOR) OPENING NIGHT TICKET INCLUDES RECEPTION IMMEDIATELY FOLLOWING PERFORMANCE WITH SPECIAL 8:30 PM CURTAIN TIME Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00pm Sundays at 2:00pm and 7:00pm SATURDAY MATINEE PERFORMANCE OCTOBER 27TH AT 3PM RED TIDE CONTAINS ADULT LANGUAGE AND SEXUAL SITUATIONS AND IS NOT SUITABLE FOR CHILDREN http://www.myspace.com/theprometheantheatre |
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Deborah L. Sherman and Andy Quiroga
Mathew Chapman and Deborah L. Sherman
Deborah L. Sherman