Theatre in Review: Pinkolandia (INTAR Theater)

	Maria Helan. Photo: Rahav Segev

A legacy of political exile mars the lives of two young girls in Pinkolandia. Beny and Gaby are sisters, of Chilean descent, living in Milwaukee in the early 1980s; both spend too much of their time in fantasy worlds. Beny, who is in middle school, spins one scenario after another in which she is on the run from Nazis; Gaby, who is nine, spends hours in her bedroom closet, where she imagines an Antarctic world where she converses with a menacing polar bear.

The best part of José Zayas' production is the considerable ingenuity with which both girls' interior lives are rendered in theatrical terms. Raul Abrego's clever set consists of a series of grey flats with various locations -- a kitchen, a closet -- seemingly drawn with chalk; with a flip of a wall, the action swiftly changes locations. Before the play begins, a chalk-drawn television set is filled with a video montage by Alex Koch of '80s-era TV shows; Koch also provides a parade of animations that flesh out the girls' vivid imaginings, including moving train cars and shattering ice floes.

The reason for Beny and Gaby's retreat into fantasy is that both are infected by the sadness afflicting their parents and their Uncle Ignacio, who comes to stay with them from Paris. All three adults fled Chile after the death of Salvador Allende and the rise of the dictator General Augusto Pinochet. Separated from their extended family -- Ignacio has a son who is among the disappeared -- each deals with their grief in a different way. The girls' mother wants to erase the past and move on, while their father yearns to return home and continue the fight for freedom. The girls are aware of these tensions, without knowing the full story behind them; their imaginary worlds are their way of coping with fears they can't name.

It's a rich subject, the effects of exile on two generations -- but the playwright, Andrea Thome, errs by focusing too intently on Beny and Gaby, and not enough on the adults, who remain stick figures throughout. Neither does she make Beny and Gaby into characters compelling enough to carry an entire play. Beny, in particular, is a hysteric through and through, given to condemning her peers for their lack of political consciousness: Assigned to give a class presentation on Antarctica, she quickly turns it into the occasion for a harangue, hurling eggs at projected images of Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Mistakenly believing that Uncle Ignacio urged her to behave this way, she shouts down her parents when they try to discipline her and then commits an ugly act against Gaby. This is tricky material -- we need to see the vulnerability that is driving her -- but in the strident performance of Maria Helan, Beny comes off as an insufferable brat. (Zayas' direction allows for far too much screaming, overall; in the intimate INTAR space, the constant noise level becomes alienating.) Heather Velazquez, who is considerably older than nine, is persuasive and even touching as Gaby, but the play is already overloaded with imaginary worlds, and the protracted climactic sequence, in which a repentant Beny talks Gaby back to reality, is allowed to go on too long.

After all the shouting, the conflict is resolved much too simply by a confrontation between Beny and her mother, in which the details of the family's flight from Chile are aired. This is clearly meant to be a kind of cure-all for the girls' anxieties, although nothing is really resolved: The family is still far from home and its members irresolute about what sort of action, if any, they should take.

There are a couple of gripping moments in Pinkolandia, most notably one in which Beny innocently puts on a tape cassette, not realizing it contains the voice of Ignacio's lost son; suddenly the action freezes as Ignacio listens, his face expressing a sorrow beyond words (nice work by Jose Antonio Melian). It's in quiet moments like these that it is easy to see how a young girl might be confused by the unspoken emotional cross-currents around her. There are also fine contributions from Ryan O'Gara's lighting, which suggests different locations and emotional states, and Jane Shaw's sound, which adds to the dread of the dream sequences. The costume designer, Asta Hostetter, has created a beautiful bear costume that is really a knitted peasant's poncho, all in white, with an ursine head attached.

The stories of the children of political exiles, like those of Holocaust survivors, are difficult to dramatize; even the most extreme cases of psychological distress seem trivial compared to the real-world issues of torture, exile, and loss of loved ones and livelihood. Pinkolandia takes an imaginative stab at the problem, but the result is still unbalanced, putting the focus so intently on Beny and Gaby that their troubles seem to overrule everything else. I kept thinking, someone should tell those girls to be quiet.--David Barbour