LA RUTA tells the story of illegal immigrants risking everything for a new life in America (photo by Lia Chang)
Multiple locations
Wednesday – Sunday through May 12, $25
212-244-3300
www.theworkingtheater.org
The controversial topic of illegal immigration takes center stage in the Working Theater’s timely and powerful La Ruta. Actually, “stage” is probably the wrong word, as the uniquely immersive production takes place primarily in a forty-eight-foot truck. Sharply written by Ed Cardona Jr. and skillfully directed by Tamilla Woodard, La Ruta begins as the audience, limited to thirty people per performance, gathers in a small tent, waiting to be hustled into a truck that will take them — along with a mysterious cargo — across the border into Texas. In charge of the journey is Raula (Sheila Tapia), a tough Hispanic woman who does not like being talked back to, leading to an immediate confrontation with Irma (Zoë Sophia Garcia), who has trouble keeping her mouth shut. The audience is soon pushed inside the truck, where they sit in darkness on big boxes. Raula relaxes in the front cab with the driver, Albert (Brian D. Coats), while Irma, Mabel (Annie Henk), and Francisco (Gerardo Rodriguez) are put in the back, where the unpredictable Juancho (Bobby Plasencia) is protecting the merchandise. Expert use of sound (Sam Kusnetz), light (Lucrecia Briceno), and projection (Dave Tennant and Kate Freer) makes it feel like the truck is actually moving as the story of each character unfolds, building to a shocking and unsettling climax.
Albert (Brian D. Coats) and Raula (Sheila Tapia) take a group of illegal immigrants into Texas in moving play (photo by Lia Chang)
La Ruta is adventure theater at its best, led by a strong, convincing performance by Tapia (CQ/CX), who has the primary responsibility of putting the audience on edge and keeping them there. Garcia, in her New York debut, is also excellent, her fear representative of the audience’s, constantly worrying about what is going to happen next. Since most of the play’s seventy-five minutes take place in close, dark quarters, claustrophobics should take note, but everyone else should rush to get the limited amount of tickets available for this smashing production. Of course, the audience gets only the tiniest taste of what it’s like for illegal immigrants who risk it all trying to make a new life in the supposed land of opportunity, able to return after the show to apartments that suddenly feel a whole lot more safe and comfortable. But if you really allow yourself to become lost in the tense drama, as if you’re also risking everything and not merely there as a theatrical spectator, you’re in for an unforgettable experience. La Ruta, which already played in the Bronx, continues alongside the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in Manhattan through April 28, then traveling to IBEW Local 3 Headquarters in Flushing May 1-5 and Snug Harbor on Staten Island May 8-12. The play is accompanied by a small but informative multimedia exhibit about immigration put together by the Magnum Foundation.
After attending a presentation in 2001 by Robert King, the former Angola 3 inmate, about the controversial conditions in the Louisiana State Penitentiary and the continued incarceration — in solitary confinement — of Albert Woodfox and Herman Wallace, Brooklyn-born multidisciplinary artist Jackie Sumell began a correspondence with Wallace that developed into a fascinating friendship that is explored in Angad Singh Bhalla’s debut documentary, Herman’s House. “I’m not a lawyer and I’m not rich and I’m not powerful, but I’m an artist,” Jackie says in the film. “And I knew the only way I could get him out of prison was to get him to dream.” She gets him to dream by having him describe, in exacting detail, the house he’d like to live in if he were to ever be released, and she goes ahead and designs it, working with architects on the blueprints. She also builds a scale model that becomes part of a traveling art exhibit, “The House That Herman Built,” which includes a precise re-creation in wood of Wallace’s six-by-nine-foot cell, his home for thirty-six years. Bhalla, who wrote, directed, and produced the film, while also serving as director of photography with Iris Ng, never shows Wallace on camera; instead, he paints a portrait of the New Orleans native —who was first convicted of bank robbery in 1967, then of killing a prison guard in 1972, eventually sentenced to life without parole for a crime he claims he didn’t commit — through a series of recorded phone conversations he has with Sumell over the years. Bhalla also visits with ex-convict Michael Musser, who got his life back on track because of Wallace; Wallace’s sister Vickie, who is not afraid to speak her mind; and King, who helped form the Angola chapter of the Black Panther Party with Wallace, Woodfox, and others. “You look at this house, you’re looking at me,” Wallace says. Indeed, viewers might never get to see Wallace, but by the end of the film, they will feel like they know him — and will hope for his release. But Bhalla never steers the narrative into a clarion call condemning the prison system and demanding Wallace’s freedom, instead allowing those elements to be subtle parts of this intriguing tale of a very unusual relationship.
Alias Ruby Blade: A Story of Love and Revolution is an intimate, involving documentary that goes behind the scenes of East Timor’s battle for independence, structured like a gripping thriller with a decidedly personal edge. In 1991, Australian Kirsty Sword went to East Timor as part of a team posing as tourists while actually making a secret film about the embattled Indonesian island. Almost immediately, the Australian teacher and activist found herself right in the middle of the violent struggle as bullets flew all around her and her team, but they kept the cameras rolling, compiling amazing footage that helped alert the world as to what was happening there. Sword soon became a courier for the revolution, adopting the spy name Ruby Blade and smuggling in notes and, eventually, electronic equipment to jailed resistance leader Kay Rala “Xanana” Gusmão, who was serving a life sentence in Jakarta’s Cipinang Prison. Armed with a camera, Sword took remarkable footage during those years, most of which has never before been shown to the public; she opened up her archives for husband-and-wife documentarians Tanya Ager Meillier and Alex Meillier and speaks extensively with them in the film, relating her involvement with the independence movement — which included falling in love with the charismatic Xanana. The Meilliers also talk with such key resistance fighters as Nobel Peace Prize winner José Ramos-Horta and diplomat Constancio Pinto as well as historian and human rights activist Geoffrey Robinson and Inside Indonesia editor Pat Walsh, who share their stories about the Indonesian occupation that lasted from 1975 to 1999, followed by a UN-sponsored referendum for independence that led to yet more horrors. But Sword, who narrates much of the film, and Xanana, who appears primarily in archival footage and photographs, never gave up their dream of a free, democratic East Timor while also considering a life together. As much as Alias Ruby Blade delves into the political situation in East Timor, it’s really about how a young, strong woman followed her heart and made a difference in a faraway part of the globe. Alias Ruby Blade will have its North American premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival, where it’s part of the Documentary Competition. (By the way, the less you know about how things turned out in East Timor, the more exciting the film is, so don’t read up on it before going to one of the four screenings.)
Brendan Cooney’s Not So Silent Cinema project comes to 92YTribeca on Friday, April 19, presenting a new live score for three classic Buster Keaton shorts. In The Goat (Malcolm St. Clair & Buster Keaton, 1921), Keaton plays a man mistaken for escaped murderer Dead Shot Dan (St. Clair) and now on the run from the law. In The High Sign (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1921), Keaton fakes being a sharpshooter and ends up getting hired by the Blinking Buzzards to kill a wealthy man he is also hired to protect by his daughter (Bartine Burkett). And in One Week (Edward F. Cline & Buster Keaton, 1920), a pair of newlyweds (Keaton and Sybil Seely) get a plot of land as a wedding present, along with a house-in-a-box that they put together with hysterical results. The trio of early films established the Great Stone Face as a master comedian who commented on the hard socioeconomic times while staging remarkable, extremely dangerous stunts, whether having the side of a house fall on him, jumping from a chair to a table and through a small window above a door, or riding on the front of a speeding train heading directly at the audience. Cooney’s original score, which incorporates American roots music, ragtime, blues, bluegrass, and jazz, will be performed by Kyle Tuttle on banjo, Andy Bergman on clarinet, and Cooney on piano.