Theatre in Review: Sancocho (WP Theatre/The Sol Project)The title dish in Christin Eve Cato's new play is a stew brimming with meat and vegetables, in this case spiced up with a rackful of family secrets. Cato brings together sisters Renata and Caridad in an East Harlem kitchen for an afternoon's chat in which the wisecracks fly, the wine flows, and bombshells are dropped with clockwork regularity. The ingredients are zesty and plentiful but, despite a flurry of surprises, the recipe for drama remains elusive. Sancocho is an epic in miniature, a two-hander rooted in decades of tumultuous events. Renata, in her early 30s, is a successful lawyer but, even with her career and imminent motherhood, she is restless, bored with her marriage, feeling cut off from her roots. (Among other things, her cooking skills are pitiful and, as the last of her generation, she never knew her revered abuela; as we will learn, she also grew up missing out on some prime dirt about her relatives.) Caridad, Renata's elder by a quarter-century, is the reigning matriarch, a no-nonsense dispenser of food and wisdom. The two share a lengthy, complex history, much of which comes tumbling out in a conversation that rambles in several directions at once. The immediate cause for the get-together is the impending death of their father, in hospice thanks to a stroke followed by kidney failure. Unexpectedly, he is leaving behind a substantial amount of cash, with his daughters named as beneficiaries. It's a gesture that could be seen as atonement for his multiple failings. But, as Renata reveals, there's a catch, and it's a doozy, requiring her and Caridad to reckon with their sharply differing views of the past. Then again, it is only one part of a legacy so top-heavy with events that the script lays them out in a timeline stretching across several decades. The talk in Sancocho is usually pointed and frequently laugh-provoking. "You know I like to sip on the blood of Christ as I am preparing the food that sustains everlasting life," says Caridad as she works her way through a bottle and a half of vin ordinaire. Walter Mercado, the Liberace-like astrologist who captivated generations of TV watchers, is invoked with an amusing degree of reverence. Renata admits to having a home altar stocked with "chakra candles, flowers, Sonia Sotomayor, a buddha." And a great many issues are relitigated, most notably the sisters' conflicting feelings about their father: Renata is a bit of a daddy's girl, while Caridad, remembering his cheating and abuse, holds in him contempt, even on his deathbed. And then there's the news relating to that will... Indeed, the family's collective rap sheet includes spousal abuse, adultery, molestation, illness, business failure, abandonment, internalized racism, and more. You could make several plays out of it all, but here it's just part of the conversational flow; events that by all rights should have left an enduring impact are brought up only to be dropped. But when everything has the same dramatic weight, none of it has any weight. Even the ostensible centerpiece, the wrangle over the estate, fails to anchor the action. It's all talk and, I suspect, for audiences eager to see the lives of Latinas portrayed onstage in a reasonably realistic manner, it may be enough. But Cato leaves so many plot points on the back burner that Sancocho never comes to a boil. If the director Rebecca Martínez can't do much more than keep the dialogue moving, she does fine work with her cast. Renata, whining about her husband and pontificating about transgenerational trauma, could become something of a pain, but Shirley Rumierk keeps her engaging, especially when she drops her guard and painfully recalls witnessing incidents of marital humiliation at home. Zuleyma Guevara is a skilled tough-love practitioner as Caridad, especially when the time comes to share revelations that cast their father in the worst possible light. She also knows where the script's laughs are, and she bags them unfailingly. There's a lot to like in the production design, beginning with Raul Abrego's lovingly detailed kitchen set, an affair of white brick and yellow painted walls filled with cooking utensils, plans, and a statue of the Virgin Mary; wrapped around the proscenium is an artfully painted view of the building's exterior. María-Cristína Fusté's lighting is marked by subtle time-of-day shifts and more overt effects that signal Caridad is slipping into her memories. Harry Nadal's costumes draw strong generational lines between the characters. Germán Mártínez's sound design includes a preshow playlist featuring Bad Bunny and Rosalía, along with some key ambient effects and the sound of salsa on the radio, setting up a brief dance break. In some ways, Sancocho reminds me of Deepa Purohit's Elyria, seen recently at Atlantic Theater Company. Both plays try to force material that is the stuff of multigenerational sagas into standard dramatic formats that don't serve them as well; in each case, something sprawling and unruly has been unfortunately tamed. As a writer, Cato has a lot going for her; maybe she'll revisit these characters at a later date. --David Barbour 
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