‘BRAINPEOPLE’ LEAPS INTO THE BAFFLED MIND
Robert Hurwitt

San Francisco Chronicle
Feb 4 2008
CA

Brainpeople: Drama. By Jose Rivera. Directed by Chay Yew. (Through
Feb. 16. American Conservatory Theater at Zeum Theater, 221 Fourth
St., San Francisco. 80 minutes. Tickets: $12.50-$20.50. Call (415)
749-2228 or visit )

A tiger is being consumed nightly onstage at Zeum Theater. No, that’s
not a metaphor – except in the sense that almost everything that occurs
in the surrealistic world of Jose Rivera’s plays is metaphorical. In
his new "Brainpeople," three women sit down to a banquet of freshly
slaughtered tiger flesh.

The playwright and American Conservatory Theater, which is producing
the world premiere that opened Saturday, would probably prefer to
avoid any associations with the recent tragic events at the San
Francisco Zoo. That’s not likely to happen, before and after the
show at any rate, but during the 80 minutes these three accomplished
performers inhabit Rivera’s teasingly engrossing stage reality, most
such associations tend to evaporate. Except, say, when one woman
speaks of the thrill of eating "endangered" meat. Or another refers
to the meal as "sweet revenge."

Developed throughout the past year in ACT’s First Look series,
"Brainpeople" isn’t really about the fraught relationship between
humans and tigers. It’s a return to the postapocalyptic landscape
this most magical-realist of major American playwrights has explored
in such compelling works as "Marisol" and "References to Salvador
Dali Make Me Hot," among his many plays produced in the Bay Area.

(San Jose’s Teatro Vision is now staging the West Coast premiere of his
"School of the Americas," about the last days of Che Guevara, whose
earlier life was the subject of Rivera’s "The Motorcycle Diaries"
screenplay.)

But this surreal urban world has a very different effect. There
are no talking moons or cats, no pregnant men or wars between gods
and angels this time. Events have caught up with Rivera to the point
that his city under martial law, with brutal police sweeps, dangerous
checkpoints and wealthy enclaves protected by private militias, no
longer seems such an imaginative stretch. More than that, though,
Rivera eschews external surreal symbols this time to delve directly
into the chaos of his characters’ disordered minds.

The result is both an engrossing descent into the traumatized
inner realms of three very different, isolated women and somewhat
disappointingly tidy – both in terms of the play’s resolution and
a structure that breaks down too neatly into separate arias. Each
flight of concentrated poetry is vividly written, however, and each
is brilliantly performed in director Chay Yew’s sharply staged and
handsomely designed production.

The setting is the Los Angeles apartment of the very wealthy Puerto
Rican Mayannah (Lucia Brawley), its smudged and fading riches floating
isolated in a black void in Daniel Ostling’s acute set design. Lydia
Tanji’s smart costumes telegraph the women’s different economic realms,
as Paul Whitaker’s lights and Cliff Caruthers’ sound effects convey
the police actions on the street below.

Rosemary (Rene Augesen, in flea-market chic) and Ani (Sona Tatoyan,
the playwright’s wife, in uptight, prim-wear) are guests at Mayannah’s
annual tiger banquet – strangers she is paying to attend, having sent
her armored limousine to pick them up. In the course of the dinner,
each woman reveals a madness which internalizes the injustices outside.

Augesen has a field day with Rosemary’s multiple personalities (her
"brainpeople") – from Liverpudlian wannabe rocker, genial country girl
and bedeviled innocent to ancient Irishwoman and smooth Puerto Rican
man – in a blithely versatile performance of quick-shifting attitudes,
appetites and accents. Tatoyan opens up by carefully calculated degrees
from repressed, paranoid Armenian, carrying a history of persecution,
to empathetic catalyst. Brawley anchors the evening nicely in the
more schematic role of the traumatized, take-charge hostess.

The tiger-feast metaphor develops a disappointingly neat, literal
reality in the end. By then, though, Rivera has created an intriguing
and evocative drama with the social and psychological terrors that
have leapt from the grottoes of the women’s minds.