Thaddeus Phillips's "¡El Conquistador!' at the Fringe (1st review)

Thaddeus Phillips's sly humor and wildly crafty theatrical invention reveal him and his Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental as one of the most endearing of theatrical wizards performing today. His one-man performances have become perennial "must-sees" in the Live Arts/Philly Fringe Festival. Last year's darkly humorous Microworlds, set in the last remaining inhabited capsule of Tokyo's Nakagin Capsule, will shortly begin a run Off-Broadway. This year's ¡El Conquistador! , in the works for four years, is no exception.

In a continuing quest to mine the eccentricities of international cultures, Phillips assumes the role of a peasant, Polonio Castro, who is forced by crop and lottery disappointments to relocate to Bogota. He arrives in the big city fueled by dreams of a new life as a star of Latin America's telenovela soap opera dramas. He winds up in the service underclass as a doorman at a high-rise building, as do many similar migrants worldwide who forsake rural life for the aspirations of urban upward mobility.

Phillips interacts with the filmed images of residents of the building who appear on the doorman's desk video screen. Their melodramatic anxieties and excesses are those of characters of the telenovela. To play out the ambiguities of illusion and reality even further, in "real life" they are in fact telenovela stars who would be known to a larger Latin American (and increasingly international) audience who watch them.

(Although not noted in the program, all the performers are also relatives of Phillips's wife, Tatiana Mallorino, herself a Colombian actor and co-writer and co-director with Phillips of this piece— a perfect means by which a low budget performance artist, practicing a kind of theater arte povera, can attract top-notch talent at no cost.)

Whir of illusions

Phillips maintains a non-stop, high velocity dialogue with his changing cast of apartment dwellers, often stepping into and out of a filmed setting of his doorman's lobby, creating a whir of illusionistic realities and live stage presence. His perfect timing and cuing for these frenetic, altering realities is amazing to witness.

These vignettes reach a peak in a weird twist out of Shakespeare or Gilbert and Sullivan, when the doorman discovers a lost twin brother (performed, of course, by Phillips), who appears as an apartment dweller's avenging hit man, and dead bodies and roles change faster than one's laughter can keep pace with.

Along with the fast-paced scene changes come magical alterations of scenic props: A peasant's roof becomes part of the building lobby becomes a taxi cab becomes a swimming pool becomes the ocean with Columbus's three ships.

Classic Chaplin character

With all this wit and wizardry, Philips brings a much-welcomed intelligence to his material, especially its inherent political content. The telenovela is not only a TV entertainment but also a kind of Latin Horatio Alger mythological vehicle of experiencing, however vicariously and futilely, the possibility of upward mobility. Like a classic Chaplin character— and with much the same brilliance— the doorman is clearly a member of an exploited underclass at the beck and whim of the pettiest demands of the building's residents.

At the same time, Phillips cleverly reveals how the servant also becomes the master, possessing the only key to the building, so that residents complain of their lack of freedom under the doorman's regime. Political humor harnessed to a wildly engaging theatrical imagination doesn't get better than this.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.