Carlotta (Begonya Plaza) and Andrés (Shawn Elliott) explore sex and religion in TERESA’S ECSTASY
Cherry Lane Theatre
38 Commerce St.
Through April 1, $61
212-989-2020
www.cherrylanetheatre.org
Something strange happened after we returned to our seats following a brief stroll outside in the beautiful fresh air of a lovely end-of-winter evening during intermission of Teresa’s Ecstasy, running at the Cherry Lane through April 1. It was like we had walked back into a different play. What had been a warm, intimate, and engaging story suddenly turned acidic, mean-spirited, and convoluted. Thank goodness the dreadful second act is much shorter than the tender first. Playwright Begonya Plaza stars as Carlotta, a writer who has returned to Barcelona to get her husband, Andrés (Shawn Elliott), to finally sign their divorce papers and to research a magazine story she is doing on St. Teresa of Avila, a sixteenth-century Carmelite nun of Jewish ancestry who, as Carlotta notes, “overcame death-threatening illnesses, defamations, ethnic and religious genocide by the Spanish Inquisition, reformed her own church, founded over a dozen monasteries, and all the while writing works, masterworks, of literature.” But Andrés, a painter, has no time for organized religion and mysticism. “She’s part of an institution that excludes, kills, exploits, and brainwashes people into complacency,” the painter says. “God is an invention to control the masses for power and wealth.” While that is not necessarily an original argument, the debate works well between the passionate Carlotta and the gentle, easygoing Andrés, even when they are joined by Carlotta’s editor, Becky (Linda Larkin), a sharp-dressed elitist blonde who is immediately at odds with Andrés. But when Becky and Carlotta return from Avila in the second act, they are transformed in such a way that is utterly unbelievable, delivering clichéd diatribes on sex and religion as Andrés turns nasty and rotten, completely undermining everything that was so well established in the first act. Elliott, who had been in the midst of an unforgettable performance, his every movement a work of art, from his arms, hands, and head to his soft eyes that gaze into the audience, stumbled badly over one line, as if he couldn’t get himself to say it out loud in public. Meanwhile, Plaza forces in references to Cat Stevens and Federico García Lorca that feel out-of-place and downright unnecessary. Directed by Will Pomerantz, Teresa’s Ecstasy features tantalizing foreplay that fails to reach a satisfying conclusion.