Review: Mocha
by Michael Meigs
In her earnest drama about international adoption Eleanor Burgess tries to do too much.
Adoption is a topic that offers all sorts of dramatic possibilities. Suspecting and then confirming infertility, efforts to conceive; reluctant and then increasingly determined efforts to discover ways to create or come into possession of a life that will irrevocably change one's own; and dealing with all those involved in the process, revealing one's psyche and circumstances in order to qualify as a potentially acceptable parent. Burgess touches on many of these aspects.
She furnishes the audience with plenty of information, some of it impressionistic, some of it uttered by voices of apparent authority, some dramatized, as she presents the imagined case of a tiny female child on an unnamed remote Indonesian island devastated by a tsunami. Agencies in international adoption have turned away from the more familiar sources of unclaimed, unwanted or unsupported children -- eastern Europe, China, Vietnam, Guatemala, etc. -- and they've focused their clients on this tiny dot on the map of the southern Pacific.
But playwright Burgess crowds the stage for this ninety-minute one-act play and divides the action into two narratives, one on the Indonesian island and the other in the suburban United States. The child's picture has appeared in adoption brochures and has attracted the entusiastic attention of potentially competing would-be adopters. Burgess wants to engage us in both of the stories, but she establishes her central characters inadequately and surrounds them with distractions. Moreover, although the action of each narrative targets the same goal -- adoption of the child -- those stories and their characters never even come close to the clash and confrontation inherent to their mutually exclusive desires. There's a dull thump as one succeeds and the other fails, and an unconvincing uplift as the failing effort receives a consolation prize.
Infographics are big on the Internet these days, so here's my awkward effort to illustrate what I see as structural problems in this script:
Ameena the worried government official (Martinique Duchene-Phillips) introduces the play to us, and she is the only character who periodically addresses the audience directly (thus, the *). The Indonesian narrative thread is well populated. At the bottom is Eliot the movie star (Laura Artesi), who's guided and counseled by Donna, her personal assistant (Karen Alvarado). In private they pick through the adoption brochure -- catalog -- and decide which orphan to purchase (almost literally). Mark (Ben McLemore), a dour freelance journalist, shows up to interview the new arrivals and manages to hover over them almost unceasingly. In order to adopt the child Eliot and Donna have to pass scrutiny by government watchdog Ameena and by the child's maternal uncle Chehaya (Frank J. Kim) and maternal aunt Merpati (Nguyen Stanton).
Those developments in Indonesia are intercut with scenes in the United States, where Carol (Marie Fahlgren) and Ted (Trace Pope) are supported by Lee (Scot Friedman), a friendly but somewhat worn-down salesman (oops, representative) from an adoption agency. The wistful young couple have the same goal as the film actress. They want to adopt the same child despite the procedural obstacles, including the indignities of the home visit and interviews carried out by taciturn social worker Alicia (Heather Leonard). And by the way, the cost of all this will be about $25,000.
The cast is solid, given what they and director Elizabeth V. Newman have to work with. I particularly appreciated Friedman as the disabused but quietly philosophical agency rep,Marie Fahlgren as the hopeful young American woman, Heather Leonard as the American social worker careful to avoid overencouraging the young couple, and Nguyen Stanton as the bereaved and deeply downcast aunt.
The playwright could have structured the plot elements more effectively (including by bringing the competitors face to face), or she could have reduced the number of stories she was trying to tell. As it stands, the script of Mocha is a bit like a game of three-card monte, except that there are as many as seven cards in this deck. The stories are further handicapped by the cartoonish lack of depth of most of the characters. We get a good deal of information about procedure, but almost no one provides much personal background or reflection. Key points from Donna the publicist and from the elderly Indonesia couple are pulled out as late revelations. Eliot the film star is so shallow and vague that she would give even Hollywood a bad name.
Despite the theme of adoption and its heartbreaks, the writer wraps things up by presenting a completely unexpected romance between two of the unmarried characters, neither of whom has the least interest in parenting. The intention may be ironic, but the effect is like something drawn from a Harlequin romance.
Mocha
by Eleanor Burgess
Mocha is staged four times for FronteraFest -- tickets here.
