‘Laughs in Spanish’ Rarely Delivers It

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s Laughs in Spanish. Jenna Bonofiglio, Isa Condo-Olvera, Rana Roman, Ashley Oviedo and Arash Fakhrabadi. Photo courtesy of the Milwaukee Chamber Theatre.

Milwaukee Chamber Theatre intends to put a culturally conscious and warm foot forward in its opening production through October 8. The company in the studio theater of the Broadway Theatre Center is both joking around with Cuban-Columbian-Latino ingredients and American slang in the dialect mix and using a comic whodunit plot and telenovela echoes to warm and chill mother-daughter relations in the provocatively named Laughs in Spanish.

The production seems disjointed. It wants to create guffaws while also providing thoughtful epigrams and comic gems. A talented and relatively new author, Alexis Scheer, has a gift with language and domestic insights that deserve moments of approval even as the structure and continuity of the play flounder.

The floundering occurs at the start, with an empty Miami gallery whose panicked owner suspects theft of valuable art and is surprised in her confusion by her famous movie star mom arriving out of nowhere. Estella is a brash invasion of many opinions and a conviction that mother knows best.

This is a sitcom premise, but it is designed to lead to some touching insights for the various couples on the stage. The actors and director Anna Skidis Vargas go awry immediately because they assume the audience will get the style and bounce along with them without clean acting moments and without doing the groundwork needed to start the piece humming.

We are partly rescued by the affection for and general talent of a Milwaukee veteran actress, Rana Roman as Estella. She may not be brassy enough for some parts of the role but the skill of her movement, her peals of laughter and her timing keep us attentive even when Estella wanders into poetic justification of the overbearing mother label.

But all the actors have trouble balancing comic and serious conviction for their characters and keeping their hand windmills from looking like an acting crutch. The gestures should be there, but should stem from the core of the characters, not the comfort zone of the actors. The plot has them wandering in and off stage, hoping the patrons keep the connections secure.

A chief offender is Isa Condo-Olvera as the angry and then melting daughter. We want to ride her emotional waves, but the acting choices have an overly hard edge that should have been corrected by the director. The lone male serving as love interest and policeman, Arash Fakhrabadi, seeks an improv actor’s speed in changing directions and intentions, but sometimes leaves the audience behind.

Jenna Bonofiglio does more relaxed character work while Ashley Oviedo has done better acting in past roles. But finding the right style eludes this production.

Many hands seem responsible for the production’s looks, which at some points flatly relies on lighting designer Maaz Ahmed’s manipulations.

Laughs in Spanish deliberately aims at Latino culture through sponsorship and accouterments (including a pre-show turntable of music from DJ Palante, alias Eric Kleppe-Montenegro). It should have been a showcase for an interesting playwright who is also heavily employed in TV development, but this production isn’t the best way to show off her talent.

Dominique Paul Noth served for decades as film and drama critic, later senior editor for features at the Milwaukee Journal. You’ll find his blogs here and here.