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wherever-i-look-blog · 6 years

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Emma learns the state of Vida’s books as Lyn searches for some answers out of Lupe about life.

Network Starz Director(s) So Yong Kim Writer(s) Tanya Saracho, Santa Sierra Air Date 5/13/2018 Actors Introduced Lupe Elena Campbell-Martinez Tlaloc Ramses Jimenez Nelson Luis Bordonada Cruz Maria-Elena Laas

Mari Got A Lot Going On: Mari

Between her activism, a possible crush on this woke guy named Tlaloc, and the fact her father is on dialysis, don’t take Mari as someone who is just yelling into a void. She has things she is fighting for and probably trying to prevent. After all, who is to say her landlord isn’t days, weeks, or months away from raising their rent and pushing them out. Something which, with her dad sick, Johnny likely being gone soon, and her on her own, means losing her neighborhood beyond gentrifiers, but also because she has to leave it.

Commentary

It’s hard to not appreciate showing Mari as this local activist while also presenting why she is one. It isn’t because she doesn’t necessarily like white people. More so, it’s because, as they are courted and attracted, the old bearers of the neighborhood are pushed out indiscriminately. Which could include her! So, it is immensely personal and since she can’t rattle at the door of her landlord, she cathartically lashes out at the newcomers. Which, I know, many will find to not be right for it isn’t their fault the price was good for them, but such is the issue of gentrification. Something we saw in [tooltips keyword=’She’s Gotta Have It‘ content = ‘ Spike Lee’s modernized She’s Gotta Have It finds the middle ground between shows like Insecure and the TV programming of Lee Daniels and Mara Brock Akil.’] in terms of people coming in, changing things, but taking note that often their change is wiping out a community in the process.

It’s So Hard To Really Let Go: Johnny, Emma, Lyn, Juniper

After a bottom tongue lashing, Juniper decides he wants a break from Lyn and she takes it as a breakup. Which, with it being just a few days after Vida’s death sends her to Lupe for answers. Of which, she ignores a lot of what Lupe is saying about love being home and hones in on Johnny being her true love and him still loving her. Which he does, by the way, problem is, he has a fiancé, is soon to be a father, and the way he looks at her, it isn’t blissful love.

Looking into Johnny’s eyes, that love has so much fear and trauma that you can tell, even as he has sex with her again, it’s because there is this desperate need for her. Why? I can’t really say. Especially since he makes it seem he was always the reliable stand by while she found men like Juniper who seemingly financed whatever life she wanted at the time. But let’s see what happens. Also whether Mari tells Johnny’s wife to be about the multiple instances of cheating.

Switching to Emma, it seems her noting Vida being a hypocrite is starting to be explained through Emma’s relationship with Cruz. If not, the one she could have had and Cruz seems ready to begin or continue. For there is something about Cruz and Emma which all but says, “We could have been something magical if you just took the leap with me.”

Yet, between Vida’s words or actions, alongside Emma deciding to get the hell out of the neighborhood, what could have been the love of Emma’s life seemingly got put on pause.

Commentary

“You always let me buy you orejitas after school.”

I feel so bad for Johnny and his fiancé. His fiancé because, well, he is smashing another girl almost at a consistent basis at this point. Yet, also for Johnny because, clearly he wants no parts of Lyn, even if his anatomy says otherwise. It’s just, there seems a part of him that maybe didn’t get closure and so, he is being messy.

Sort of like how a lot of women get to be in shows like this, the one that got away comes back and the timing is all wrong, but the feelings are still there. And no matter how bad you recognize they are for you, they still have this thing which makes everyone else seem like someone you’re settling for. Just because, as Johnny has felt, and Lynn has seemingly searched for, you can’t be with the ideal.

Pushing the question of whether it has always been money, in terms of the reason Lyn would leave Johnny for someone else.

Switching to Emma, now that Lyn and Johnny are pretty much established, I want more on her and Cruz. Especially in terms of their relationship in high school since it seems Cruz had a bit of a spell on Emma. Making you wonder, when it came to leaving the neighborhood, was Cruz a factor or one of the reasons Emma wanted to quickly handle her business and leave? Could it be, maybe somewhere, deep-down, she wanted Cruz to fight for her to stay?

Because, it is kind of being pushed that Vida not being pro-Emma being queer was a strong factor in her leaving but what if it was because Cruz refused to come out? So, with that in mind, she figured her mom won’t accept her, her girlfriend doesn’t want to be open and out, and combine that with Lyn who she isn’t all that close to and she found the strength to leave. Much less, not contact Cruz by phone, social media, or nothing. Just a clean break.

Standing Against Adversity: Emma, Lyn, Eddy

As Emma has said, she isn’t trying to stay. So, she sees Nelson and ends up learning her mom was on her second mortgage and that she was given a predatory loan by Nelson. Terrible situation but just cleaning her hands of her mom’s property seemed like an option. However, as Nelson starts working his hand from Emma’s knee to mid-thigh, it becomes war. No matter the debt, Emma is going to get her mom’s properties out of it and prevent the impending foreclosure. How exactly? Good question but something tells me that rent which hasn’t been raised in decades will be going up.

But, alongside the information passed on from Nelson comes learning part of the bar’s issues came from Vida coming out and that killing business as well. So, with properties which are deeply in debt, Eddy a hard worker who knows nothing about the books, and Lynn who is… well Lyn, it seems Emma has her work cut out for her.

Commentary

“You gave my mother a predatory loan.”

I’m already anticipating Mari’s wrath when Emma raises rent and starts moving in people not from the neighborhood. It has to be done right? Rent has stayed the same since Vida’s dad passed on? That is decades! No adjustments for costs and inflation. Never mind new amenities in the neighborhood and Vida seemingly even having the inside of the building remodeled. Though, and maybe this is just me watching too many dramas, something tells me between Lyn’s actions and maybe local homophobia, someone is going to try to commit arson or there is going to be some incident around the property.

That thought aside, I feel like the more I think about this show the more ways I can see Mari getting involved with everything. There will likely be an Emma fight, then her approaching Lyn and calling her a slut, and then comes the question of how will Mari interact with Eddy? For, with Eddy likely having no one but the girls, I can foresee her becoming very protective. Maybe even her background gone into.

After all, Eddy is a bit of a curious person. Clearly the girls didn’t grow up with her, and she is the key to understanding Vida being queer. Was it something she rejected in herself and tried to suppress in Emma or was it, as thought of in the first episode, simply something to keep Eddy in the country? And just speaking of Eddy specifically, what was her upbringing like? Was she someone who came out later in life or tried to be hetero but then decided to pursue love like Vida? Heck, where did they even meet?

There is a love story there I want to hear and hopefully, we don’t have to wait too long to hear. After all, this show only has a handful of episodes. Like it’s a web series.

Question(s) Left Unanswered

So, will we see the spirit of the neighborhood, the girl in the dress, again?

Highlights

Mari being shown as a rebel with a cause.

Johnny and Lyn’s relationship dynamic being laid out.

The possibility of Emma and Cruz renewing their romance.

Eventually learning more about Eddy.

Mari may be having a love interest.

Emma perhaps being ready to go to war with Nelson and maybe not just saving her property but working to help the whole neighborhood. Since, clearly, while people know how to run the day to day of a business, book-wise? Seemingly there are few who get what they are doing.

Addressing homophobia in the Latinx community – especially in regards to lesbians. Gay men are usually the focus of homophobia, coming out, and etc. So showing it isn’t just a guy thing is [tooltips keyword=’refreshing.’ content = ‘Which I say acknowledging there was The L Word, and programs since which has addressed this.’]

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Check Out Other TV Recaps

#Vida: Season 1/ Episode 2 - Recap/ Review (with Spoilers) Emma learns the state of Vida’s books as Lyn searches for some answers out of Lupe about life.

#Elena Campbell-Martinez #Santa Sierra #So Yong Kim #Starz #Tanya Saracho #Vida: Eddy #Vida: Emma #Vida: Johnny #Vida: Juniper #Vida: Lyn #Vida: Mari #Vida: Season 1

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newyorktheater · 4 years

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The 65th annual Obie Awards will be streamed on June 4th, with host irreverent and scrawny comedian Cole Escola. “I am honored the American Theatre Wing made the mistake of asking me to host the Obies,” said Escola. “I am so excited to celebrate the great work Off- and Off-Off-Broadway, and to see my name on the Obies Wikipedia page on a list of hosts that includes Elaine May and Shelley Winters.”

#Stageworthy News of the Week.

Ten weeks after the governor shut down all theaters in New York City, signs point to widespread expectation that they won’t reopen until Spring 2021. Some of these signs are subtle, such as the announcement that, on June 7th, the night that had been reserved for the 74th Annual Tony Awards before it was canceled, the Broadway League and the American Theatre Wing have decided to go ahead with an hour-long “event” – a celebration and a fundraiser – that will be streaming on TonyAwards.com and the new platform BroadwayonDemand.com — as if to acknowledge that it is not plausible for the actual Tonys to be rescheduled in 2020.

(In other award news, the American Theatre Wing just announced that the Obie Awards will be a pre-recorded ceremony that will stream on the Wing’s YouTube channel on June 4th.)

Another sign of a delayed reopening of physical theaters in New York is the interview that Broadway League president Charlotte St. Martin gave to The Daily Beast, declaring that her “optimistic” date for Broadway’s reopening is January 2021 – which is four months later than the League’s latest official end-date of September 6 for the Broadway shutdown (announced earlier this month.) And the phrasing heavily implies that the more realistic date is at least a year after the March shutdown. “We can’t socially distance the cast and crew in these 100-year-old-plus buildings,” St. Martin said. “And we can’t afford to socially distance the audience.”

This is more or less the assessment (with just a few exceptions) of the concert promoters, theater presenters, heads of orchestras and of dance companies who talked to the New York Times (The Fall of Autumn: Live Performance Producers Are Giving Up on 2020)

Online Theater IS Theater

Meanwhile, the redefining of theater is proceeding apace. Symbolic of the advances is the announcement just now that Play-Perview, a platform created during the shutdown which has been presenting original, live one-time-only readings online, will present Will Arbery’s Pulitzer finalist play “Heroes of the Fourth Turning” online June 13. And it’s not alone in suggesting what online theater can be (See reviews below, especially of “Mad Forest” and “The Sentinels.”) Just the fact that so many more theater companies are scheduling original plays online in advance is a

Itamar Moses

sign of changing attitudes.

As playwright Itamar Moses told me earlier this week: “Sure, people are trying to figure out ways of presenting theatre, remotely, over screens right now, but it isn’t the absence of a screen that makes something theatre. “Theatre is when something is performed, in real time, for an audience that is also watching it in real time, while gathered in the same space — and all that’s really happening right now is an expansion of the definition of what we mean by ‘space’ to include virtual space….It’s our awareness of the aliveness and presence of the actors and our fellow audience members that makes something theatre and if being present together in a virtual space is the form this moment demands then we will, by necessity, develop techniques for maximizing the power of that form, maybe allowing it to become a legitimate off-shoot of theatre in its own right.”

Week in Online Theater Reviews

Is This a Play Yet by Marco Ramirez performed by Utkarsh Ambudkar

Homebound Project 2

Mary-Louise Parker introduces us to the second edition of The Homebound Project, an hour-long online collection of 11 new short plays, by explaining that the theme this time is “sustenance,” and lists “the many ways we sustain and fortify ourselves…. shelter, our vocations, charity, activism, and also food.”

She doesn’t mention the arts.

And, honestly, this second batch of plays in the series, with just a couple of exceptions, didn’t generally provide as much sustenance for me as the first edition. In place of the first edition’s frequent sense of playfulness, as well as relatively straightforward stories of connection and longing, there are darker and less accessible works reminiscent of the spare and despairing plays of Samuel Beckett. Mad Forest

Bard’s splendidly glitchy production of “Mad Forest,” Caryl Churchill’s fascinating avant-garde drama about the 1989 Romanian Revolution, is the first live play I’ve seen since the shutdown that attempts a full staging via Zoom. Rather than just reading the stage directions, the twelve actors enact them – a mother slaps her son; friends share a piece of chocolate, and lie down together on a lawn; a couple hug one another; the members of a wedding party get into a massive group brawl — although each of the actors, all undergraduates at Bard, are performing remotely from locations across the country where they are sheltering. Presented live and free Theatre for a New Audience in collaboration with Fisher Center at Bard (with another one scheduled for Wednesday at 3), the show was a revelation, and something of a revolution itself, suggesting new paths forward for online theater.

Love Letters

Bryan Cranston and Sally Field performed live on May 21, 2020 in A.R. Gurney’s two-character play about a man and woman writing to one another over half a century, starting at the age of seven. This was the third in a series of new live-streamed productions of old plays produced by Broadway’s Best Shows.

The 1988 play seems ideal for online theater. Even when it was on Broadway — as it was twice, the last time in 2014 (my review)– there was no scenery or costumes, and the actors stayed seated at a table the whole time and read from scripts without ever looking at each other. It still managed to be terrifically entertaining and surprisingly moving.

The Sentinels

“The Sentinels,” a new 9/11 play by Matthew Lopez, was worth your time — well-acted, touching, appealing in part because of its very modesty — and it demonstrated a few things to me. A play can be well-directed, in this case by Rebecca Taichman (Tony-winner for Indecent) even when presented neck-up via Zoom.

Megan Hilty and the Yankees

Watch Bombshell the Concert The first-ever streaming of the 2015 concert of “Bombshell,” the fictional musical about Marilyn Monroe that the characters were putting together in the first season of “Smash” plus a Zoom reunion of the cast.

Watch Covenant House Concert Highlights

Book Review: Playwrights on Television: Conversations with Dramatists.

Hillary Miller, an assistant professor of theater at Queens College, City University of New York, has put together 18 Q and A transcripts, arranged alphabetically, from interviews she conducted between October 2018 and April 2019. The playwrights she selected reflect “a broad definition of diversity” – including in the balance between their onstage and onscreen experiences and identity, from Madeleine George, who at the time of Miller’s interview with her in December 2018 had been a playwright for 25 years ( The Curious Case of the Watson Intelligence, Hurricane Diane), and a TV writer for ten weeks, to Tanya Saracho, showrunner for Starz TV series “Vida,” who tells Miller “ I have left the theater, consciously” (or Tanya Barfield, who tells Miller: “Maybe after my kids go to college, I’ll go back to playwriting. That’s a while off.”) Surely, a few of them would have something to say about our sudden era of online theater. In one way, then, Miller’s book is the victim of unlucky timing. But in another way, some of the issues that the author does explore are as good a prompt as any to thinking about the current crossbreeding of media and what may be in store.

Other Theater News

Off Broadway Alliance Award Winners: A Strange Loop, Life Sucks, Unsinkable Molly Brown

The First Annual Hal Prince Lifetime Achievement Award, newly created by The Drama Desk, , will go to….Hal Prince, posthumously. when the Drama Desk announces the winners of its competitive awards on May 31

Jeremy O. Harris and The Bushwick Starr are partnering to give $500 each to 152 U.S. playwrights. Applications start May 29

This from @RealmTheatre Instead of funding productions, they will give “at least $750 to each Realm playwright who has expressed financial and professional need…” pic.twitter.com/yCOa5licay

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 21, 2020

A musical based on Smash TV series is aiming for Broadway, with Steven Spielberg one of the producers, Shaiman and Wittman the songwriters, Bob Martin & Rick Elice the book-writers. File this under Department of Exciting News, Division of Grain of Salt.

HBO plans to turn Martyna Majok’s play “queens” –– about struggling immigrant women sharing a house — into a series.

How to Caption Shows on Zoom, Instagram, Audio Theater, Facebook, YouTube etc.

.@CharlesMcNulty asks 25 theater people to imagine post-pandemic landscape. Some can’t. Others say “streaming is the new normal”@LynnBrooklyn: we’ll rethink how & where we bring theater to audiences@PattiLuPone: cleaned, sanitized and fumigated. https://t.co/YLKj3iQPbS

— New York Theater (@NewYorkTheater) May 19, 2020

Rest in Peace

List of NYC healthcare workers who have died because of COVID-19, updated on Memorial Day

Celebrating Theater (Obies on June 4th, “Tonys” June 7th.) Redefining Theater. Aiming To Reopen in Spring 2021 #Stageworthy News of the Week. Ten weeks after the governor shut down all theaters in New York City, signs point to widespread expectation that they won’t reopen until Spring 2021.

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