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Curtain call: Living Out
Visions of the American dream
By Adam Goldstein
goldstea@mscd.edu

Makela Spielman plays Nancy Robins in the Denver Center Theatre Company's production of Lisa Loomer's Living Out.

The Denver Center Theatre Company’s production of Living Out tackles an ambitious menu of slippery cultural questions.

What happens when divergent dreams collide in a sole setting? How does modern American society accommodate its diverse citizens’ different goals, their separate aims? Where do we find common ground intellectually and socially?

Regularly alternating between simplistic caricature and affecting insight, the drama pierces the heart of some issues as it only scratches the surface of others.

What the play sometimes lacks in depth, however, it makes up for in ingenuity. Director Wendy Goldberg and stage manager Matthew Swartz create a compelling parallel between two families from separate backgrounds, both in terms of the actors’ physical interactions and their use of the limited space of the stage.

Romi Diaz plays Ana Hernandez, a Salvadoran immigrant who has immigrated to the U.S. in search of stability and security for her family. Ana and her husband Bobby (Rey Lucas) are waiting for the green cards that will allow them to provide for their two sons – one still living in El Salvador and one, 6-year-old Santiago, living with them in Los Angeles.

As her application for citizenship slowly makes its way through the layers of bureaucratic approval, Ana finds work as a nanny for the Robins, an upper-middle-class couple who has just had their first child, Jenna.

Nancy Robin, played by Makela Spielman, seeks to balance her professional ambitions as an entertainment lawyer with her nascent duties as a mother. Her husband Richard, played by Christopher Burns, is a public defender steeped in the utopian, humanistic ideals of the 1960s.

When Nancy and Richard hire Ana as a full-time caregiver, parental responsibilities shift and domestic dynamics are transformed in both households. Ana’s new duties take her away from her own son, and Bobby is forced to stand in as a full-time parent, even as he juggles with his own career as a carpenter.

Meanwhile, Nancy’s professional obligations inspire their own amount of marital conflict, as Richard feels her absence more and more poignantly as the play progresses, and Nancy misses more and more of Jenna’s infant milestones. The two culturally and economically distinct families find common ground in common dilemmas.

The cast is rounded out by auxiliary figures from both economic and social worlds. A pair of well-to-do mommies, played by Denver Center veteran Kathleen McCall and newcomer Lanie MacEwan, paint a pitiless picture of upper-class snobbery.

Gabriella Cavellero and Socorro Santiago provide a chorus from the other side of the economic scale, playing two nannies railing continually against their bourgeois overseers. Both sets of characters provide a type of Greek chorus in a contemporary setting, serving up exposition, commentary and color in equal doses.

Loomer’s text seeks to resolve countless complex issues in a limited forum, with a result that borders on oversimplification. At times, the Robins emerge as a caricature of a clueless upper-class couple, despite nuanced performances by both Spielman and Burns.

Ana and Bobby Hernandez find a deeper focus, as the drama’s spotlight on their travails allows for more detail and exposition. Dias and Lucas convincingly capture the struggles of a couple in transition, with roots in two countries and dreams in flux. In a play that ostensibly tackles immigration, Loomer manages to suggest shared problems and issues in two seemingly separated families.

“Everyone’s working and paying someone else to watch their child. It’s insane!” Richard observes at one point.

As two different visions of the American dream struggle to coexist, the limited, circular dimensions of the Stage Theater accommodate the thematic struggle. Whether the Robins are fretting about their mortgage or the Hernandez family is worrying about the status of their citizenship, the struggles are painted on a single tableau.

The households occupy the same stage, and the actors continually depict distinct dramas in one space – standing in the same room or seated on the same bench, side by side.

Despite its tendency toward oversimplification, Living Out captures a conflict that is both specific and universal. In a social climate where immigration issues polarize and antagonize, Loomer’s play points to the concerns that bind us all. To be a responsible parent, a loving spouse, a responsible employee; these are issues that pertain to no single culture or nationality.