From left to right:Carlos Alayeto,
Arturo Fernandez, and Arnaldo Carmouze |
II thought I was impervious. As a critic, I’m always focusing on the man behind the curtain; rarely taken in
by the illusion. Nothing shocks me, right? Last Saturday night, Ground Up and Rising proved me wrong.
The plucky young theater troupe’s production of Israel Horovitz’s 1968 Obie-winning play The Indian
Wants the Bronx disturbed me more than any work I’ve seen for a long time.
The set up is simple enough: two street toughs, Joey (Arnaldo Carmouze) and Murph (Arturo Fernandez) happen upon a Hindu man, Gupta (Carlos Alayeto), who is lost in Manhattan on the first day of a visit to his son, who lives in the Bronx. The two young men are heard before they’re seen, entertaining each other by loudly singing an off-key duet. The older man is clearly nervous, although for non-Hindi speakers, his predicament is revealed gradually.
The mood is revealed gradually as well. The boisterous youths burst upon the stage in great humor. They talk fast and loud, taking obvious delight in their adopted New York accents. They tease the older
man, snatching the card he clutches in his hand where the name and telephone number of his son is
written, then taunt him as he tries to retrieve his only connection to his son.
Yet for the first half of the 60-minute play, the genial relationship between the two young men,
expressed in a West-Side-Story-style “we’re depraved ona count a we’re deprived” juvenile delinquent
patter gives the sense that these wise guys are essentially harmless – reinforced by a passing resemblance
in delivery between Fernandez and Vince Vaughn.
Apart from the vintage dialogue (“broads,” anyone?), the real-time pacing and the spare set – an old school phone booth, a couple of newspaper boxes, and some scattered litter – create the sensation of eavesdropping on real life, as does the minimal lighting and sound. Which makes what transpires all the more horrific.
Director Bechir Sylvain keeps the focus on the actors, zeroing in on the off-hand remarks that suggest
the motivation for the violence that erupts later. When Joey and Murph put each other down by calling
each other’s mothers whores, the insults do not come off as inventions. Elaborating on this sparse hints
of troubled home life, the actors play their characters’ vulnerability beautifully, first glimpsed when
Murph shows Gupta a Christmas card he made with Joey, absurdly flattered by the uncomprehending
man’s attention.
“At least he shows an interest,” he says repeatedly to an impatient Joey.
Later it’s a lack of attention that triggers the first violent outburst, and fear of an imaginary betrayal
that leads to escalation. Each transgression builds on the last, from harmless taunts to bloodletting, as
vulnerability is fended off through aggression. The pacing elicits fresh horror at every stage as the
realization sinks in that while these young men may have been harmed themselves, they are anything but
harmless.
Much commentary, both on the original production and locally on the Ground Up rendition, remarks
on the play’s revelation of universal nature, often expressed as “man’s inhumanity to man,” and of a
supposedly natural human fear of the unknown that leads to violence.
It’s a testament to Sylvain’s detailed direction and the emotional depth of the actors that, in this
production at least, the revelation is much more specific to the particular ways that damage inflicted on
one fragile human being can be deflected with even greater intensity onto another.
The tragedy, for me, lay not in the “universal” proposition that there is a monster lurking in each of
us, but that these two young men, rendered so completely by Sylvain, Carmouze, and Fernandez, should,
at such a young age and with all of their joyful potential, know no other way to nurse their own wounds
than to wound another.
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