Thaddeus Phillips's "¡El Conquistador!' at the Fringe (2nd review)

In the past, Thaddeus Phillips's group, Lucidity Suitcase Intercontinental, has made its mark at Philadelphia's Fringe festival with large-cast madcap comic inventions like The Melting Bridge and Flamingo Winnebago. By contrast, ¡El Conquistador! has only one person on stage— Phillips himself.

¡El Conquistador! was developed on location in Colombia and involves experienced South American actors. But they didn't travel with the show. Instead, they appeared via videos that were coordinated with the live action, which was supplied entirely by Phillips.

In the process he surprised us with comic performing abilities that were only hinted at in his earlier plays. Phillips played a Colombian peasant who, aspiring to become a soap-opera actor, takes a temporary job as doorman in a high-rise condo in Bogota. From the vantage point of his lobby desk, he observes denizens of the building, the Nuevo Mundo, who could have stepped right out of any soap opera, American or Hispanic.

The Phillips character is sort of a"“ well, how do you say nebbish or klutz in Spanish? He was both endearing and hilarious, and his timing was near perfect as he moved in and out of projected images of the Nuevo Mundo's doorway, with cars and people passing by. I was most impressed when packages were delivered to Phillips in front of the building, on the screen, and the real-life Phillips carried them indoors to his desk. The transitions were so well timed and directed that we began to take them for granted until Phillips intentionally messed one up, for laughs.

The audience encountered the building's tenants just as the doorman does: through the TV monitor screen at his desk. Here's where the guest actors got to display their talents. As they talked back and forth with Phillips, they developed relationships that eventually led to melodrama, albeit of the tongue-in-cheek variety.

The dialogue was spoken in Spanish, with English titles. That gambit worked smoothly, especially since Phillips, an American, speaks Spanish slowly enough to be understood by those of us who are not fluent in the language.

Fluid changes of perspective endowed the production with a cinematic look, which was abetted by the clever use of simple props. ¡El Conquistador! was a triumphant comic thriller, the most effective work yet from this creative company.♦


To read another review by Jonathan M. Stein, click here.