Here are Pat Launer's reviews of the two plays I directed for Compass Theatre:
The third piece of the Program 1 evening, Paola Hornbuckle’s “Violets Bloom at Sunset,” is also based in fact. The play was inspired by the story of her uncle, Andres Garcia Jaime, who was arrested in Spain in 1965, when he was 24 years old, under the Law Against Vagrants and Evildoers (Vagos y Maleantes) implemented by Fascist dictator Francisco Franco. Andres (also the name of the character, superbly played by Jorge Rodriguez) was held captive for three months. His crime: frequenting a homosexual bar. The heinous law, Hornbuckle reports, was only repealed in the 1970s. During the ’60s, there were “reform centers” run by priests, where gays were tortured. The cleric she created, Father Navarro (terrifyingly portrayed by Charles Peters, who makes memorable appearances in three of the seven Festival plays), seems to be a closet homosexual himself, which makes his horrendous tortures that much more aggressive and severe. Poet/playwright Federico Garcia Lorca makes an appearance (Brian Burke, marvelous in an ethereal, whispery way), and this, too, is rooted in truth. The real-life Andres was fascinated by Lorca, who was gay and brutally murdered. Honrbuckle’s uncle, who escaped Spain and lived in Sweden for many years, recently gave her an antique book of Lorca’s plays, like the one he had in his younger years. That book also found its way into the play, in which Hornbuckle herself appears in several roles. It’s a riveting story, and a heart-rending tribute to her uncle and all those, present and past, who have the courage to “be proud of who you are.”
In Program 2, “Blondes,” by American poet/playwright Frank Higgins, also stayed with me long after the final blackout. In Iraq, a young female soldier comes in to be “investigated” by a female officer, who wants to reward her with a purple heart for the gunshot wound she received outside Tikrit. After a protracted game of cat-and-mouse, what this supply private was doing in a dangerous area comes to light. It’s an awful story, too awful to have been imagined. As always, we civilians don’t know the half of what our soldiers are up to in a war zone. A chilling piece, tautly directed by Kevin Six, and admirably acted by Wendy Savage as the blonde who gives it all for her country (and her autistic son) and Calandra Crane as the hidebound Captain who’s hellbent on getting to the bottom of it all, even if the repercussions are worse than the facts. Todd P. Hylton plays the sergeant who comes up with the alarming diversionary scheme.
