Spoilers ahoy!
For those who don't know, i.e. most folks who aren't actively involved in live theatre, a "two hander" is a play with only two characters.
The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon is such a play, which handles the issues of building an entire full length work consisting almost entirely of conversations between two people with impressive skill.
Rebecca Aleman (there is an accent on the last vowel but I don't know how to make that) is both the playwright and lead--a woman journalist named Paulina in a Latin American country not at all welcoming of either. I don't know if her name comes from the character in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale, but...maybe. We meet Paulina as Rodrigo (Eric K. Roberts), a younger Anglo-seeming man, brings her into a bedroom via wheelchair. He smoothly and expertly helps her into bed, goes through exercises to help her remember how to read and speak. She can barely use one hand. The all but silent first five minutes of the play sets the atmosphere and rhythms with which we will spend the next ninety. Every gesture, word, glance, almost every breath seems to convey meaning as we try and figure out the story here.
That story is heart-wrenching.
Seamlessly the play jumps over time--well, not so much jumps as almost seamlessly glides. Paulina gets better, amid dreams and fragments of memory we hear but do not see--with Laura Crotte, Sofia Ybarra, and Miguel Nunez providing voices of these shreds of history bubbling up to the surface.
All the while the back walls of the set project simple but beautiful images which offer hints--as well as text! Every line in Spanish appears as an English subtitle (or maybe uptitle) above the action, while every line in English appears in Spanish! Honestly, I loved that, on so many levels, and not just for allowing me to precisely understand every line (honestly, I've attending bilingual shows before now--and it is startling how understandable things became). Paulina is a writer, first and foremost. Seeing the play not only spoken but written proved a startling as well as moving event, one which still makes me shiver.
Ultimately, this play chronicles not just a seriously wounded woman clawing back to her own memories, her own self (on so many levels) but re-discovering and even re-defining her relationship with Rodrigo--including why she is here, in a private home, rather than a professional health facility.
Hint--for her own safety.
All that she discovers we anticipate, but never completely. Surprises abound, some touching, others horror-soaked, others complex, and some breath-taking. It amounts to a profound tour-de-force of storytelling, a concentration that seems totally theatrical as opposed to cinematic in any way. Its topicality adds to the power of this production, a tall order since half the time I was holding my breath and feeling genuine terror about what the truth of this story would prove to be.
The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon plays Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at 8 p.m., and Sundays at 4 p.m. until May 25, 20.25 at The Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles CA 90013. It is a joint production by the Latino Theatre Company here is Los Angeles and the Water People Theater in Chicago.
