Last Tango in Boston

North & Sur

North & Sur by Oscar Perdomo Marín, in its world premiere production by Water People Theater, is an engrossing, site-specific evening of theatre about an imagined meeting between a poet from the North, the enigmatic bard from Boston Edgar Allan Poe, and a poet from the South, the Argentine female poet Alfonsina Storni.  

Because Storni (Kris Tori) was born long after the anguished death of the sickly and dissipated Poe (Eric K. Roberts), the two never actually met, but she was heavily influenced by Poe’s work.  The play’s conceit is that this influence was strong enough to lead her to unintentionally invoke a corporeal incarnation of Poe — we first see his reawakened form prone on a table, dressed all in black, like a figure out of a Magritte painting — with whom she engages in a fascinating, and occasionally contentious, meeting of poetic minds across the borders of space and time.  

Staged within the confines of downtown’s Instituto Cervantes, the play, directed by Iraida Tapias and produced by Rebeca Alemán, asks the audience to follow its three actors to three separate performance spaces.  There’s nothing particularly remarkable about the Instituto Cervantes’ interior itself, nor any particular poetry to it, unlike other site specific theatre that I’ve witnessed in abandoned warehouses and crumbling 19th Century mansions. In fact, the play’s somewhat humdrum setting seems largely irrelevant.  What matters is the cadence and the music of the English and Spanish words (all dialogue is supertitled for a bilingual audience), the confluence of — and conflict between — two distinctly different cultures, and the tango-influenced music, provided by the third member of the ensemble, the Porteño actor and classically trained violinist J. Andres Robuschi.

North & Sur is more of an extended encounter and dual character study, in poetic form, than it is a traditional play with a strong plot.  Once Storni unwittingly summons Poe back to life by reciting “The Raven” (a poem that has not lost its power to unnerve), the two engage in a sometimes baffled, sometimes enlightening cultural and poetic colloquy, interrupted at one point by the brief apparition of Poe’s bete noire Rufus Griswold.  It is always salutary to be reminded of the immense influence of Poe, who, in addition to being an esteemed literary critic and a great poet, also was the inventor of several distinct literary genres, including the detective story, and a pioneer in the genres of Gothic horror (there is a passing reference in the play to the “depraved desire to live in a cellar of the human soul”), science fiction, satire, and the short story.  It was also good to be introduced to the work of Storni, a poet I hadn’t heard of before Marín brought her to life in this production. 

Kris Tori has a delicate but steely stage presence that seems fitting for a poet who was excoriated for her feminism, single motherhood and unconventional writing style.  Eric Roberts, entombed in an unimaginably stiff Gothic-style black frockcoat and a concrete-like white collar, makes an impressive Poe, though he is perhaps a bit too robust-looking for the sickly and brandy-soaked author.  At one point, he dances a brief and appropriately awkward tango with Tori that is less comical than it is touching. 

This is, above all, a literary play.  It may not be for everyone, and is lacking in the plot dynamics of many other theatre productions, but for lovers of Poe, poetry, and the music and beauty of the English and Spanish languages, it’s a memorable and evocative evening of cross-cultural exploration. 

Highly Recommended

Reviewed by Michael Antman

Presented by Water People Theatre at Instituto Cervantes, 31 W. Ohio Street

Tickets are available at www.waterpeople.org

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found by visiting www.theatreinchicago.org