Sonnets For An Old Century
Sonnets For An Old Century
By Elizabeth Maupin
SENTINEL THEATER CRITIC
If you had one moment to sum up your life, what would you say?
Maybe you’d be like the woman who must apologize for not helping a man in need. Maybe you’d be like the man who has nursed a grudge for years. Or maybe you’d be like others in José Rivera’s elliptical Sonnets for an Old Century — those who have something important to say, but only they know what it means.
Leander Suleiman
A strong cast at Mad Cow Theatre doesn’t always cut through the ambiguities of Sonnets, which premiered in 2000 as a collection of 30-some monologues but has been pared back to 17. Under John DiDonna’s direction, some offer vivid glimpses of character, but others prove too evasive to reverberate as they should.
The scene is a long, high passageway — an otherworldly subway platform — where one character after another appears to say what he or she must say. Each of the six actors plays multiple roles, and each of them has moments to shine.
Jill Jones plays a quiet girl who speaks of her bonds to her mother, and Trenell Mooring a young woman trying to explain the extraordinary experience she had as a girl. Leander Suleiman is a young woman who tells of being attacked by a group of boys, and Avis-Marie Barnes a mother of 16 who is taunted by her husband’s lover.
Michael Sapp
Ron McDuffie places one character in the myth of Icarus, who flies too near the sun to escape his father’s perfection. And Michael Sapp tells of discovering his love for his baby son — and shows his anguish that his son doesn’t worry about him after he’s gone.
Sapp, who is new to Mad Cow, makes his characters glow, and the rest of the cast is fine. Barnes, especially, finds the humor in the piece, most of all in the woman who declares what she has found out about life: “Baseball is a game, not a metaphor,” she proclaims.
But DiDonna and his actors don’t overcome the play’s essential stillness, and too many of these brief glimpses almost demand not to be understood. The title is all too apt, it seems: Sonnets does have the grace of poetry, but it’s often poetry that we in the 21st century shun.
Elizabeth Maupin can be reached at emaupin@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5426.
Theater review
‘Sonnets for an Old Century’
Where: Mad Cow Theatre, 105 S. Magnolia Ave., Orlando.
When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays, through July 6 (also, 8 p.m. July 2).
Cost: $22 general, $20 seniors and students, $15 July 2.
Call: 407-297-8788.
Online: madcowtheatre.com.
Photos by Tom Hurst for Mad Cow Theatre: Top, Leander Suleiman. Middle: Michael Sapp. Bottom: Jill Jones.
Archikulture Digest
Sonnets For An Old Century
By Jose Rivera
Directed by John DiDonna
Mad Cow Theatre
Jill Jones
It’s not easy to find a thread through this disparate collection of monologs about urban life, but each of the individual stories are gems. The ensemble of tellers represents a slice of Los Angles inhabitants, some funny, some sad, and all are about Life, however you define it. Michael Sapp performs two of the best – a dad and his son playing tourist and accidentally wearing on some gang colors, and finding similarities been slaughtering live stock and a black man dealing with the LAPD. Jill Jones tells the story of choking on the brown air of LA until one night she saw the most fabulous sunset, and meets the love of her life who’s been living next door for the past 3 years. Ron McDuffie argues with God over his working class sins, and Trennel Mooring agonized over sending her child to a safe, caring mostly white private school or to exposing her to the full fury of the Angelino educational class struggle. Avis Marie Barnes played a Spanish woman who supported her loser husband while popping out 16 consecutive bambini, and Leander Suleiman tearfully described bullying and near rape in the school yard.
There’s little to tie these stories together other than location and a loose time frame, although the dramaturgy notes refers to author Rivera’s belief that writers “Writing outside their culture,” a worthy attitude that clashes with the “it’s a Black Thing, you wouldn’t understand” view so often taken when whites write about minority cultures. If Mr Rivera sets out capture other’s worldviews, he’s done an admirable job, and if Mr. DiDonna strives to make us think outside of our condos, he also has excelled.
For more information on Mad Cow, please visit http://www.madcowtheatre.com
