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'After Guantanamo' at Live Arts/Philly Fringe Fest
Let the characters (not the playwright) speak!
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Tom Weinberg Wilson is a Philadelphia composer and playwright whose musicals about gay life (Ten Percent Revue, Get Used to It) have appealed to gay and straight audiences alike. In After Guantanamo he floats an intriguing plot, set in 1992, in which a Cuban-American wounded in the Gulf War holes up in a fleabag Cuban hotel to seek the destruction of America’s Guantanamo military base in the name of both Americanism and Cuban nationalism.
Renaldo’s emotional problems since his service cause him to obsess about President Bush Sr. and his cabinet with the intensity of a stalker. Renaldo is also a devout Catholic as well as a repressed homosexual. In effect Wilson has assembled all the ingredients for a potent sociopolitical drama. That’s a rarity in contemporary theater, but Wilson fails to flesh out complete scenes and winds up resorting to bail-out sketches to move the story along. The drama disintegrates into tirades about Dick Cheney and American Imperialism, which play more like the author’s words than the characters’.
An uneven cast and amateurish pacing don’t help either. Nevertheless, After Guantanamo frames a sensitive performance by Fernando Gonzalez, who portrays physical and emotional shell shock with haunting nuance.
LEWIS WHITTINGTON
Tom Weinberg Wilson is a Philadelphia composer and playwright whose musicals about gay life (Ten Percent Revue, Get Used to It) have appealed to gay and straight audiences alike. In After Guantanamo he floats an intriguing plot, set in 1992, in which a Cuban-American wounded in the Gulf War holes up in a fleabag Cuban hotel to seek the destruction of America’s Guantanamo military base in the name of both Americanism and Cuban nationalism.
Renaldo’s emotional problems since his service cause him to obsess about President Bush Sr. and his cabinet with the intensity of a stalker. Renaldo is also a devout Catholic as well as a repressed homosexual. In effect Wilson has assembled all the ingredients for a potent sociopolitical drama. That’s a rarity in contemporary theater, but Wilson fails to flesh out complete scenes and winds up resorting to bail-out sketches to move the story along. The drama disintegrates into tirades about Dick Cheney and American Imperialism, which play more like the author’s words than the characters’.
An uneven cast and amateurish pacing don’t help either. Nevertheless, After Guantanamo frames a sensitive performance by Fernando Gonzalez, who portrays physical and emotional shell shock with haunting nuance.
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