THEATER REVIEW: Teatro Dallas takes death seriously
By CHRIS VOGNAR / The Dallas Morning News
Here in the States ? where Halloween's morphed into an excuse to carve pumpkins, hand out candy, and wear wacky hipster costumes ? ghosts just don't have a lot of clout anymore. But it's different in Latin America, where the Days of the Dead are still serious business.
Teatro Dallas celebrates el muerte with its annual Days of the Dead production "An Evening of Staged Ghost Stories and Death." The three short pieces and one feature attraction, The Tall Woman, pack minimalist shoestring atmosphere and ingenuity into a nice 75-minute package.
There's nothing too fancy in the proceedings, distinguished more by lighting and sound design than by performance (to be fair, the source materials are dated and they lose a little in translation). After a while, you take the stilted dialogue as one of the show's charms.
The main course, as director and Teatro founder Cora Cardona calls The Tall Woman in her introduction, is a tale of a Don Juan type (Gerardo Davila) haunted by, well, a tall woman (played with a mix of camp, menace and prosthetic nose by Eduardo Guzm?n).
A playboy laid low by the death of his true love, our hero relates his story to a fellow engineer (M. Viktor Walker, who moves his long limbs with a slinky grace), who in turn relates it to a trio of friends during a bucolic afternoon of wine drinking. Ghost stories, after all, are supposed to be told among friends.
Based on a story by Pedro Antonio de Alarcon, The Tall Woman, like the rest of the evening's presentations, benefits from some time-honored and finely honed staples of scary theater. When someone knocks at the door, the thwack-thwack-thwack resonates throughout Teatro's intimate space. Clouds generated by dry ice waft through the room. Bernard Hermann's ominous, Wagnerian streams pour through the speakers and accentuate the anxiety.
The show begins with a brief, abstract dance number, "Death," which manages to incorporate the entire life cycle into a scant few minutes. "Three Knocks on the Door," the most effective piece of the night, evokes fear and supernatural dread with just a few heavy knocks and a tense mood.
The third piece, "Monologue With Death," is over in a blink, but conjures chills with Mr. Walker holding down the fort.
Teatro, around since 1985, excels at doing a lot with a little. Even when some of the storytelling and acting comes off as strained, the end result is satisfying. And, yes, even a little scary.
E-mail cvognar@dallasnews.com
Through Nov. 5 at Teatro Dallas, 1331 Record Crossing Road. Runs 75 mins. $12 to $15, discounts available. 214-689-6492, teatrodallas.org.
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