Two stories emerge in Real, a terrific and ambitious new play by the Brazilian playwright Rodrigo Nogueira. One takes place in the present with Dominique, her husband and two friends chatting during a dinner party celebrating an award she received from her law firm. The other plot concerns Dominic, a young boy at a conservatory who is busy composing a fugue. In music, a fugue is a composition where a short melody is introduced by one part and is successively taken up by others and developed by interweaving the parts.
Dominique (Rebecca Gibel, outstanding) played the piano when she was young but hasn’t done so in years. She is now a mother and successful lawyer. She becomes obsessed with a play she is reading as she also begins to question her sexuality and purpose in life. A fugue writes itself in her dreams and she begins playing again. Her conservatively pompous husband believes “realism is the strongest poison against dreams.” The plotline of the play and the related fugue is the one being written by Dominic.
Both Mexican by descent, Dominic and a maid at the conservatory worry about being deported. Between 1929 and 1936, the Mexican Repatriation was a mass deportation of Mexicans and Mexican-Americans. An estimated sixty percent were United States citizens. As this movement was based on race and not citizenship, the process meets the modern definition of ethnic cleansing. While this largely untaught historical crime is only a small part of Dominic’s story, it remains apropos now.
A musical genius, Dominic (Darwin Del Fabro, perfect) is beginning to feel trapped in the body of a male. His sympathetic professor encourages him to finish the fugue which is already so brilliant. In a bizarre line, he says, “I’m so impressed it’s as if a cherry tree grew from my left nipple.”
Back and forth these scenes flow, intertwining the passions and dreams of Dominic and Dominique while those around them struggle to comprehend what is going on. The language is highly memorable: “truth is the antidote for hope” and “artists undermining the pillars of a sane society.” Here, these two musicians are clearly attempting to get in touch with their inner personas. Dominique’s reading of the play and dreaming of the music while Dominic is dreaming of the future and becoming Dominique while composing. All of this meshes together to create a final scene where both stories are combined into a playwriting fugue.
Erin Ortman’s superb direction of this play and a fine cast created a mysterious mood as this story unwrapped. The Lighting Design by Kia Rodgers perfectly framed this dreamscape’s the two divergent and combining plotlines. A few jokes felt a bit forced (the repeated sex and riding a bicycle one as an example). However, the overall quality of the mesmerizing storytelling and the clarity in presentation made this play great theater.
In this particular artistic period, many try to spotlight the internal difficulties for people with gender confusion. We now know that perhaps the best way to understand them is to realize it’s all a fugue. After all, the psychiatric definition of a fugue is a loss of awareness of one’s identity. At off-off-Broadway’s The Tank, Real is sure to be one of the most creatively successful productions I will have the opportunity to witness in 2019.