Centerstage - Chicago's Original City Guide

Victory Gardens, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave., Chicago
For more info: 773-871-3000 (Tickets: $30 - 35)
Through July 11, 2004

The Romance of Magno Rubio is proof positive of live theater's potential to transport. This Chicago premiere takes us where we might never be and gives us a visceral introduction to another culture without our having to get a visa or new passport photo.

Set in a migrant workers camp in 1930s California, this Lonnie Carter play is rich with the heritage of the Philippines. The show is performed in English with Filipino singing and Tagalog dialect injected in (regrettably, too seldom with translations). We are invited to absorb the novelty as we are drawn into the universality of the emotion director Loy Arcenas' cast brings to the stage. A chorus of five actors presents the workers' hard lives as their nostalgia for home battles hope for a better life in America. This struggle is the vibrant backdrop to Magno Rubio's courtship of a stranger. He is unwilling to see the warning signs as he clings to his fantasy of romantic love. Rodney To's affecting Magno Rubio is an eminently good and decent man with an optimism that can't be crushed by his bunkmates' teasing and criticism. To's sometimes beaming, other times cowering, always hard working Magno Rubio is sympathetic throughout. It is no easy task and yet it is critical to the shows success as the play would fall flat if we ever scorned this characters desperate love for Clarabelle, a woman of questionable integrity who he regards as pure and good.

Magno Rubio's bunkmates are alternately people we admire or reproach. Joseph Anthony Foronda's Nick, for instance, is the camp's educated elder statesman, a man who helps the illiterate Magno Rubio write his love letters. Frederick Garcia is the show's villain as the unhappy Claro who must tear down anything pure. Bernardo Bernardo and Narciso Lobo make their impressions respectively as a homesick bunkmate or in giving voice to Clarabelle's letters.

The core of the story is romance, hope and the indomitable spirit of man. These characters find ways "good and sad" to transcend the grime and grit of camp life (enhanced by Arcenas' set design and Christine E. Pascual's costumes). The show is not always easy to follow, and the Tagalog can be a frustrating barrier to our immersion in this world, but even as the disappointments mount for the characters this well-crafted and beautifully theatrical show has an uplifting impact.