By Kevin Zimmerman
As my companion and I settled into our seats last Friday at the Thalia Spanish Theatre, we both scanned the office set recreated in front of the audience.
“There’s a toilet on the stage,” my friend said.
She was right.
In place of a desk chair sat a white porcelain commode. As the house lights dimmed, actor Francisco Fuertes walked onto stage, dropped his trousers and boxers and pretended to christen this bathroom fixture.
“My writing,” he said, “is…” He then used a four-letter word to describe his creations. “When I think, I write,” he said. “And, I…” Well, you can probably figure out what he said he does.
So begins the absurdest comedy “Secret Weapons of Fat Destruction,” by Spanish playwright Iñigo Ramirez de Haro, now at the Thalia, 41-17 Greenpoint Ave. in Sunnyside, through June 23.
Ramirez de Haro takes on many foibles of 21st-century society: consumerism, celebrity worship, blind faith, overt sexuality and our constant need to be entertained.
Fuertes plays a slightly off-kilter director and writer named Ramirez, who wants to take theater back to its Greek beginnings where the spectator was the spectacle; where the audience was the actor. To that end, he turns up the house lights and suddenly those people watching are part of the show.
“You’re going to be really bored,” Ramirez said. “Let’s see what happens when nothing happens.”
But of course something happens.
“Audience member” Santiago, played by actor William Saquicela, wanders up on stage and quickly becomes one of Ramirez’s disciples. He hangs onto his every word and even calls Ramirez “our master” as he looks for meaning in the proceedings. As the two men banter, Santiago’s wife Bartola, played by Soledad López, strolls down the theater’s aisle looking for her husband. She too ends up on stage and is excited to be there.
“Am I famous?” Bartola asks her husband. Without waiting for an answer, she begins to think of herself as a Spanish sex kitten, a la Penelope Cruz in a Pedro Almadovar film. Meanwhile, another “audience member,” Harry, played by Jesus Martinez, complains about the action or inaction of what is taking place on stage.
“I came here to enjoy myself,” Harry said.
The show’s poster on Greenpoint Avenue shows the bottom half of a woman wearing only a pink thong and Harry said that led him to believe he was in for a night of bawdy comedy not overblown existentialism.
Ramirez attempts to discount this shallowness. But Harry, who happens to be a salesman offering miracle beauty cures — including that weapon of fat destruction — points out it is not shallow but a reality of the world.
“Everything in life is about impact,” Harry said. “Within the first two seconds everyone is judged.”
Harry convinces Bartola to leave Santiago and run off with him and his cellulite-fighting machine before everything crumbles into chaos.
It’s all quite ridiculous but the quartet makes it work.
López plays the absurdity of a middle-aged woman suddenly empowered by her self-delusion without taking Bartola too far into cartoon character territory. As sad sack Santiago, Saquicela quietly captures the angst of a man who, in looking for the big answers, risks losing his wife, his faith and even his life. Martinez plays a character who snaps when pushed too hard about his beliefs. And while he slips too often into yelling to show us Harry is crazy, he is able to express that in his movements and interactions with real audience members. Fuertes, who basically plays a version of the real playwright, seems to enjoy the absurdity of the evening’s events and conveys that to the audience.
For the character of Ramirez, however, all of Santiago’s fawning, Bartola’s pseudo-sexuality and Harry’s consumerism is ruining his great experiment in nothingness.
“You should come to the theater not to kill time, but to be masters of your time,” Ramirez said.
And just as Albert Einstein reduced the 20th century to his theory that everything is relative, said Ramirez, the director has his own ideas about the 21st century.
“Everything is boring,” Ramirez said.
Ramirez de Haro’s play is a lot of things but boring isn’t one of them.
If you go
“Secret Weapons of Fat Destruction”
Thalia Spanish Theatre
41-17 Greenpoint Ave., Sunnyside
Fridays at 8 p.m. and Saturdays at 3 p.m. performed in English; Saturdays at 8 p.m. and Sundays at 4 p.m. in Spanish, through June 23
Tickets are $25, $22/seniors and students
(718) 729-3880
