In Homer’s Epic Tradition A Critique of the American Dream
When the lights come up, we see a Filipina woman named Costanza appearing stressed, and talking to herself. It’s not immediately clear that she is conjuring her friend, Billy. It’s her ritual to bring someone back from a journey she had.
Pacing the stage, she is telling herself a story, making up a name, a city of origin and her circumstances. It’s not coming together. She’s in trouble, running now.
She begins again. She runs for her life.
“Blood races,” she says. “Blood races faster when you’re running. You’re the one who’s on the run. Run, damnit, run.
“We run in our sleep, we sleep as we run. After today, no more stories, just freedom.”
Los Angeles’ Skylight Theatre Company features independent theatrical productions by emerging playwrights. This season’s lineup brings thought-provoking original works and classical theater, providing innovative narratives. For its latest offering, Skylight presents the premiere of Hide & Hide, written by Roger Q. Mason and directed by Jessica Hanna. This production is the second in Mason’s Califas Trilogy: three genre-busting plays about land, power and dreams in California. The play runs through June 29.
Hide & Hide is a nonstop, gripping narrative told through a combination of intense physical performances and dialogue. The production uses only some block benches for its minimal set. There’s no intermission, costume, or scene changes. The fate of two compelling characters is told through Costanza De La Fe (Amielynn Abellera, The Pitt) a Filipina immigrant with a soon-to-expire visa, and Billy “Sweet Boy” Adams (Ben Larson), a queer rent-boy from Texas fleeing a Christian sex conversion camp. After many personal battles, Billy and Constanza form a sham marriage to pursue their version of that dream in seedy 1980 Los Angeles during the disco heyday, “a place where dreams come true if they lie well enough.”
Though unknown at first, this story plays with time with a little reinvention sprinkled in, making for a magical realism experience, juxtaposed with the gripping reality of hard truths.
When Costanza encounters Billy they are both escaping; for Costanza, “to a place where she doesn’t have to get married to be called a woman.” Billy is escaping “from the scene of the boys’ camp at Lewisville Lake made in God’s name where …”
“Be careful,” Costanza warns.
Together, they board a Greyhound bus to start over again. Back in time.
Upon her arrival in America, Costanza is introduced to a harsh reality by her aunt Conejo, who immediately demands from her niece: $500 for rent, to get a boyfriend, and informs her, in six months, by December, “you’re a stray dog because your Visa expires.” Conejo denies Costanza’s shock at her aunt’s callousness by rationalizing, “I am very charming. Americans like charm.”
Meanwhile, Billy, in need of money, finds himself a place where he can get some … money and sex. An unhoused man who offers Billy the blanket off his back tells him, “You look like you’re made of money. [They’ll] pay you big for your looks.”
While Hide & Hide introduces new characters, this is only a two-person play. Abellera and Adams portray multiple roles of those whom they encounter, for better and worse — usually both, on their journey. These personas are comedic (like Costanza as her Aunt Coneja), sinister, and sometimes helpful, often simultaneously in their disastrous attempts to “help” and prey on Billy and Costanza. But it’s all accepted because these two individuals exist outside of the hetero-normative, white hegemony of American “culture,” where the powerful do not want them to succeed. As these characters subject Costanza and Billy to realities of the unforgiving city; legal advice, shelter, pimping, employment, quid pro quo and drugs, the two strive with everything they possess and all manner of creativity to reach their American Dream.
Costanza finds a “good job” with Ricky, a Filipino attorney, who she discovers sells the dream to people from across the seas — “matchmaking free for the American Dream … to whoever is willing to pay for it.”
Midway through the story, Billy and Costanza find each other again, in a nightclub.
“I heard there’s a Strip called Sunset,” Billy says. “Where people forget their worries for a few hours of liquor and friction and good times.”
They set eyes on each other, both taken by immense attraction.
“I see the most beautiful boy I’ve ever seen,” Costanza coos. “A mix of Ricardo Montalban, Bruce Lee and Rudolph Valentino!” They dance the night away, making plans for a sham marriage, leaving together, revivified.
Soon, at her job, Costanza notices many women come to talk to Ricky, “in whispers.” Billy also knows this lawyer intimately, whom he calls a fraud, but it turns out he will also need his aid.
Billed as a Homeric critique of the American Dream, Hide & Hide succeeds. The poetry of Billy’s beautiful southern drawl phrases as he describes ugly deeds and Abellera’s mastery of Philippine English (rhotic) dialect and comedic timing leave you hanging on every word, wanting more. Filled with grand dreams and devastating disappointments, this work provides a journey through the realities of the survival of immigrants and of what lies under the surface of prejudice of the “other” in America. In a most exhilarating and entertaining way, Mason lays bare the innumerable struggles of those on the margins of society, of which many have no knowledge, and how those struggles affect their daily lives as well as the overarching life-changing events that many endure.
“Hide & Hide excavates the myth of the American Dream, how it motivates, corrodes, and ignites people to do the unspeakable in the name of freedom,” says the playwright and creator, Roger Q. Mason. “The piece is based in 1980, the year my mother immigrated to the United States from the Philippines. In times like these, she — and our family at large — wonder, ‘Was the plane ride even worth the journey?’ I think so, but we have to fight for the freedom promised in the dream.”
Hide and Hide is the recipient of the LA New Play Project from the UCLA School of Theater, Film, & Television.
Time: 8 p.m., June 12, 8:30 p.m. Thursday to Saturday and 3 p.m., Sunday June 13 to 29
Cost: $23 to $45.50
Details: Reservations, https://www.skylighttheatre.org/hide-and-hide
Venue: Skylight Theater, 1816 1/2 Vermont Ave. Los Angeles