Boleros for the Disenchanted

SPARK BENCH Minoso courts Ledo.

Photo: Eric Y. Exit

The image that punctuates José Rivera’s lyrical memory play carries an undeniable impact, even as it remains undeniably a bit of a gimmick: The actors who portray the youthful Flora and Eusebio (Ledo and Minoso)—characters based on the playwright’s parents—climb a rise in rural Puerto Rico to survey their older selves (Marquez and René Rivera), trapped in a low-rent apartment in Alabama. The moment encapsulates at once the power and frustration of the Goodman’s production of Boleros.

Frustration, on the one hand, because the play traffics in some seriously creaky theatrics, particularly in the second act. To dramatize the stresses that the immigrant couple endured, Rivera resorts to such stratagems as a trumped-up marriage-mentoring session and Eusebio’s premature demand for a “deathbed” confession. Godinez’s stylized staging all too often reinforces the play’s unconvincing elements.

And at the same time, for all its flaws, this production manages to find the vibrant heart of Rivera’s sweetly unsentimental scenario. Early on, Flora’s own mother, Dona Milla (Marquez again), declares of her violent, profane husband, “I love him the way Jesus loved his cross.” The line could serve as the play’s own motto about the absurd and painful necessity of love. In its final scenes, Marquez and René Rivera, brilliantly exploring the vulnerabilities of the now legless, diabetic Eusebio, achieve a vision of this troubled, long-lasting marriage that overshadows the play’s less realized moments.

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