John Leguizamo's Big Yikes

The Other Americans left me with more questions than answers. Well, really just one: can John Leguizamo write a show for more than one person? But the presumptive answer, based on Leguizamo’s newest offering at the Public, is no.

Conceptually, the play is solid, if not original. I love a good living room family drama and old-fashioned American realism, and Leguizamo had a superb chance to expand that genre to Latin-American realism. But alas, he flubs the opportunity.

We open with Nelson (Leguizamo) on the phone discussing the legal and financial troubles facing his Queens laundromat business. But there are more pressing matters; today is the homecoming party for his son Nick (Trey Santiago-Hudson), who has been away for in-patient psychological treatment for seven months, and Nelson is excited to see Nick’s reaction to the family’s new above-ground pool. Patti (Luna Lauren Velez), Nelson’s wife, stresses over dinner, with help from her sister Veronica (Sarah Nina Hayon) and future son-in-law Eddie (Bradley James Tejada).

Nick shows up about 25 minutes in, and for the next two hours, we go around and around, learning about the laundromat’s money troubles and the incident that Nick believes sparked his mental health troubles: a brutal, racially motivated assault by a white teen who got off scot free. Things unravel after Nick’s well-meaning sister Toni (Rebecca Jimenez) gets him a job interview with a developer trying to buy Nelson’s business. There, Nick accidentally discovers his father’s web of lies. It turns out Nelson could have pressed charges against Nick’s assailant, but he instead cut a deal with the boy’s father–the developer–taking cash instead of pursuing justice for his son. The developer’s offer to buy the laundromats–the result of Nelson’s attempt to wring more money out of Nick’s assault–falls through when Nick learns the truth and understandably freaks out. Everything collapses. Nick drowns himself in the pool and Patti leaves Nelson, who closes the play making the same phone call over and over, leveraging sympathy for Nick’s death and attempting to drum up investment for the “‘mats.” He has learned nothing.

The bones are strong, fitting well into the classic American family play genre. The plot twist is a fresh-feeling punch in the gut. On a macro level, Leguizamo has something good going here! But on a micro level, it struggles mightily.

The script is just an absolute mess. Leguizamo’s writing does no favors for anyone, except maybe himself. It’s stilted, false, and laden with an ungodly amount of exposition. For example, Nick repeats over and over and over that he “just needs to talk about what happened” but he might as well have said, “I need to do some exposition about my horrible near-death assault,” because that’s what ends up happening. Eventually, Nick relays what he can remember of the assault before asking, “What happened next, mom?” so that Patti can continue the water-logged slog.

Excess exposition is awful and, usually, lazy. There’s a reason why one of the first “rules” taught in any writing class is “show, don’t tell.” Whether we’re reading a novel, watching a movie, or taking in a play, we don’t want to be told what is (or has been) going on, we want to see it, to experience it! Especially live, at the theatre! But The Other Americans is an excruciatingly painful two-plus hours of Leguizamo telling the audience this story. There are some decent moments–like the opening scene which dynamically shows us who Nelson is, or some of the banter among the women that lets us see the family dynamics without spelling them out–but they are the exception to the rule. Even when the show succeeds in building up tension, it reliably neuters itself with shoehorned exposition. One could argue that this is just how people–or at least, these characters–talk. And that might be true but–and I say this as a hardcore fan of American realism–it makes for shitty theatre. It’s not dramatic, it’s just boring.

On top of the issues with the text, there isn’t much chemistry among the cast, who sometimes felt like actors meeting for the first time at a callback. That’s a gigantic problem in any type of play, let alone in a living room family drama.

Leguizamo certainly gives the best performance, perhaps in large part because he wrote the thing. His acting is–at least comparatively–strong. He’s relatively natural with each respective cast member and he is a genuine thrill to watch dancing in the living room with the others in the first scene. But he and Velez never establish anything approaching the chemistry of a long-married couple that the story requires. Rose Evangelina Arrendondo (as Norma, Nelson’s sister) makes an applaudable effort to elevate the poor script, telling us some about the family’s dynamics with her facial expressions and body language. Jimenez’s performance is a bit of an enigma. Toni the character is the common denominator, the daughter trying her best to bridge the gaps between her family members and keep things from falling apart. But Jimenez the actress doesn’t have much chemistry with her castmates.

And then we come to Trey Santiago-Hudson’s Nick.  

One of the only things that The Other Americans does well is the steady ratcheting up of tension as the family waits for Nick to arrive in the opening scene. It’s like a balloon inflating, with the audience waiting for the pop.

But when Santiago-Hudson finally enters, there’s no pop–only a fluttering, flatulent deflation. Yes, the writing is wooden. But it doesn’t help that Santiago-Hudson is utterly flat, and in a “bad acting” kind of way, not a “fragile, mentally ill character” kind of way. You know when you're seeing a piece of theatre and you think to yourself, “Wow, that person sure is acting up there”? It’s not a good thing any time, but especially not in hardcore realism. He’s a bit better in the moments that he snaps, in the flashes of emotional crescendo before he inevitably storms off, but even those are all one note.

Santiago-Hudson is at his best towards the end once things have gone off the rails. His final scene–confronting his father, revealing the plot twist, and unraveling the lies surrounding his horrific assault–is remarkably good when compared with the rest of his performance. Finally, instead of deflating, the bubble of tension pops.  

But the ending can’t make up for the rest. Santiago-Hudson stuck out like a sore thumb, the only performer on stage who wouldn’t have improved with better material. It strains credulity to think that he would have ended up in the role were his father not in the director’s chair. 

The lone bright spot in the production–if I reach to find one–was Arnulfo Maldonado’s scenic design. With an aggressive three-quarter thrust, it felt like we were dropped directly into the middle of an outer-borough living room. While sight lines did not always work (a failure of the director more than the designer), if I can be so enveloped in the world of the play that I forget that I’m in a theatre, I don’t mind that I can’t see perfectly all the time. 

The problem was that there were a handful of moments that made me very aware that I was in the theatre. First, Toni and Nick play backgammon with obviously blank dice, little white foam cubes without pips. It’s like if you staged a production of A Streetcar Named Desire and during the poker scene the actors used blank playing cards. Yikes. Second, it seemed like almost everyone on stage forgot how doors worked, leaving the front and back doors of the “house” hanging open after entrances and exits. Who walks into their front door and doesn’t close it behind them?  It’s these little details that make or break this sort of realism, and in this case, it broke it.

But the worst offense came at the show’s climax, Nick's death. As Nelson and Patti weep and wail, the rear facade of the house splits in two, briefly parting to display them cradling the lifeless, drowned body of their son. A dramatic moment, one they clearly wanted every patron to have a good view of, but one that felt cheapened by that piece of set work that catapulted the audience right out of the realism we’ve lived in for several hours. Like much in The Other Americans, it just didn’t work. 

If you ask my wife whether she’s a football fan, she’s quick to note how little actual action there is during the hours a game lasts. Less a sporting event, more 2 hours of commercials with a few minutes of brain damage sprinkled in, she’ll argue. The Other Americans was like the theatrical version of an American Football game: two and a quarter hours from start to finish with only about ten to fifteen minutes of actual action moving the plot along.  

At least there weren't any commercials.