COCKS HAVE CLAWS AND WINGS TO FLY
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The event that seems to have broken the family apart is the recent senseless murder of the father. Youngest son Guero (Carlos Tamayo), who witnessed the killing, is so racked with guilt that he escapes into drugs. Mama (Laurie Martinez) has made a career out of caring for the nearly helpless Guero but never attends to her own wounds. And her devotion to her son has taken a decidedly incestuous turn: watching Guero drop his pants so that Mama can give him a shot of vitamin B-12 is pretty unsettling.
But Garcia is too intelligent a writer to hang the entire play on the father’s murder, in effect placing responsibility for the family’s troubles on an external force. She makes it clear that the family’s decades-old curse is a combination of fate and fatalism. By age 14 Mama was married and had a child while her husband ran around with other women. Cast into a desperately unhappy situation, Mama decided she deserved nothing better. Twenty years later her only way of dealing with her debilitating guilt is to intone repeatedly: “I’ve done so many bad things in my life.”
Director Edward F. Torres provides a strong visual sense for the quieter moments in the play. Mama’s wedding, for example, is presented as a simple, solemn walk down the aisle of the theater with Mama holding a dead flower over her head. As the action heats up, however, Torres’s stage becomes a bit cluttered and his actors tend to wander, muddying scenes that are already difficult to follow.
