Quiara Alegria Hudes, a two-time Pulitzer finalist who was Tony-nominated for her
In the Heights book, has a new play that's in South Florida as part of its rolling debut.
Part broken-family soap opera, part feel-good road trip, 26 Miles, as produced at New Theatre in Coral Gables, perhaps tries to address too many concerns but that's difficult to determine because the tech aspects are so often distracting.
The story: Olivia's parents divorced, bitterly, about half her lifetime ago. She's 15 now and living sort of -- with her Jewish father, who was granted custody; her wicked stepmother refuses to let the teenager into the top floor of the house, and her father, a builder, quietly goes along with this. Her mother born in Cuba but now a U.S. citizen deals in antiques and curios, has an entrepreneurial boyfriend, goes months without seeing her daughter (separated only by the distance between Philadelphia and suburban Paoli) and does very little quietly. Olivia reads to us from her journal and obsesses about someday going to Yellowstone National Park because of photo she saw as a girl in her father's National Geographic magazine. She goes to her mother's house in the middle of the night, and mom decides on the spot to take her daughter on a road trip to a destination at first undecided but which soon enough becomes Yellowstone.
Along the way, characters are revealed to each other -- in the car or in painful phone calls or a chance encounter with food vendor. We get glimpses of rancourous divorce, custody battles and immigrant pain. Whatever the distances between Philly and Paoli or the city and Yellowstone, the title cues us that resolving these family frictions is going to be a marathon endeavor.
Performances all are good, but Evelyn Perez enlivens the proceedings considerably as Beatriz, the big, curvy, impetuous mother, and Christopher Vicchiollo, as Peruvian immigrant Manuel recalling his mother's cooking, delivers a softly mesmerizing speech with the precision of gently played notes of some broken chord a lovely combination of writing and performance.
Clearly, Hudes has plenty going on, and tech from the first and too often thereafter may distract from the writing and actors. Why, for example, was a chair lying on its side as the audience came in? A pre-curtain toppling, or some misguided attempt at metaphor? (An actor set it right early on.) Why is the portion of the stage devoted to Beatriz's business and car so cluttered with curios? She's a dealer, albeit an impetuous one, not a hoarder. And why does Manuel's tunic seem more Asian than Andean? If the goal is an ethnic look, this one seems to be from the wrong continent.
