'References to Salvador Dali' Is Hot and Cold

UPDATED: October 27, 2015, at 4:59 p.m.

In the opening moments of “References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot,” this year’s iteration of the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club Visiting Director’s Project, all of the play’s most compelling strengths and most serious challenges were on full display. Outstanding acting and lushly gorgeous set design vied with faltering pacing and occasionally maudlin staging and delivery, with predictably mixed results. This production of a new and unpublished adaptation of Puerto Rican playwright Jose Rivera’s work, which ran Oct. 16-Oct. 24 in the Loeb Mainstage, did strike honest and deep emotional chords about love, loneliness, and growing apart at its best moments but too often fell victim to an overwrought, self-conscious abstractness.

“References” tells the story of Benito (Eli K. Rivas ’16) and Gabriela (Juliana N. Sass ’17), a married couple in their late twenties separated by Benito’s deployment to the Persian Gulf War. Having fallen in love as teenagers, they are unsure whether they still love—or even know—each other. Following the rich Latin American tradition of literary magical realism, the play also includes an animate, outspoken moon (Connor S. Doyle ’19), a bad-boy coyote (Derek P. Speedy ’18), and a lithe, slinky housecat (Laura J. A. Trosser ’16). Thomas W. Peterson ’18 rounds out the cast as Martin, a 14-year-old neighbor with more libido than sense.

The Visiting Director’s Project is one of the biggest HRDC productions each year and tends to attract exceptional talent. This year was no different: The acting in the show was, almost without qualification, superb. Sass in particular was phenomenal, creating a Gabriela who was at some moments tender and at others cold, whose intellectual curiosity, emotional vulnerability, and heartbreaking loneliness felt thoroughly real and human. In Sass’s hands, Gabriela’s repeated tangents into the finer points of astronomy seemed not forced but natural and meaningful, and she depicted Gabriela’s inner conflict between love for Benito and aversion to him with nuance. Onstage throughout the entire two-hour-and-15-minute run time, Sass physically and narratively anchored the play through sheer ability and unflagging commitment to her character.

Although Sass was excellent throughout, her Gabriela was most compelling when matched against Rivas’s Benito. His performance hummed with a tense energy; he perfectly conveyed the sense of an outwardly stoic man pushed to the brink. In the play’s most climactic scene, a fight between the couple leads Benito to confess to calling in an airstrike that wiped an entire Iraqi village off the map—all because his fellow soldier’s hand had been injured in a rocket strike. Rivas navigated the scene with incredible sensitivity, transitioning effortlessly from anger to sorrow to frustration at Gabriela’s response, and he did it all with an easy physicality that made him a commanding presence on stage.

The supporting cast also delivered strong performances, but in a more stylized manner that obscured some of the emotional content of their characters. For instance, Speedy (as the coyote) snarled, growled, and barked his way through his lines; the result was entertaining but often felt overdone, especially in some of his character’s more vulnerable moments. The other three supporting characters—the cat, the moon, and Martin—while similarly embroidered, felt less stilted, perhaps because Trosser, Doyle, and Peterson were supremely suited for their roles. Peterson perfectly embodied Martin’s smirking bravado-mixed-with-insecurity, lending his character a believability and depth not necessarily inherent in the play’s script. Director Kat Yen’s choice to have the supporting cast play their characters at the extremes of the spectrum was effective in enhancing the artistic aesthetic of the show, but it came at the cost of some of its emotional relatability.

That artistic aesthetic—fantastical, sumptuous, ethereal—may have hindered the actors to some extent, but it was wonderfully manifested in Alison B. Reed ’17 and Kat Yen’s stunning set. Benito and Gabriela’s house, which took up center stage, had walls and doors outlined by simple lines of brilliant golden lights. Inside, the house was split into two levels by the addition of a platform with a few steps; nothing was actually blocked off or separated, and yet the house had an incredible physicality that was further accentuated by the perfectly timed sound effects of doors opening and closing. Far behind the house, a jagged mountain range scratched at the bottom of a gorgeously expansive sky that lightened, darkened, and changed color as needed. The set was not there just to provide the appropriate props and backgrounds for the play’s actors; it was its own work of art.

“References” combined excellent acting, peerless set design, and experienced directing, and yet it struggled at many points because of the script itself. This production was not of the original play but an adaptation—created by the original author but unpublished and until now never-produced—but it nevertheless felt in want of further changes. The start of the show was draggingly slow and should have been cut down, and the characters’ lines were overworked, more concerned with flair and linguistic fireworks than genuine clarity and connection. At some points, the superlative efforts of the cast and crew won out, but at others, the show floundered due to nothing more than the script’s own unwieldy nature.

“References to Salvador Dali Make Me Hot” was clunky and cumbersome, and yet it possessed a beating and very human—or perhaps feline or canine—heart provided by its actors’ performances, above all those of Sass and Rivas. Despite the play’s weaknesses (it even broke the Chekhov’s gun principle in a very literal way), the dual pairs of Sass and Rivas and Trosser and Speedy managed to convey a moving meditation on times when love becomes pain—when two individuals are driven apart by a wedge as vast and impermeable as a war, a difference in species, or even death. Skillfully executed and beautifully designed, “References” showcased some of Harvard’s best theatrical talent; if it was not a great production, the fault lies neither with the cast nor with the crew.