MY OTHER HEART
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Which is too bad, because aside from its conventionality and an occasional hint of smugness, the play isn’t so hard to swallow. Set in Spain in 1494, it focuses on the moving if predictable friendship that grows between Pilar and Cara, the Indian woman Pilar’s husband brought back from the New World as a slave. It’s clear from the first that Pilar, and Cara have a lot in common, including Pilar’s charming pig of a husband, a navigator on one of Columbus’s ships. So we don’t go along with Pilar on her journey of discovery; we sit back and wait for the inevitable. Yet Boesing’s script is occasionally lyrical, and the performances of Shanesia Davis and Jenna Ward are solid enough to hold our interest.
Boesing also introduces some interesting parallels between the two women’s beliefs–both are outsiders in the eyes of the church, no small problem in the days of the Inquisition. Pilar is presumably a converted Jew, but when she’s alone she ignores the crucifix that hangs center stage and covers her head, drawing comfort from her true religion. Yet it’s up to her to convert the “savage” Cara to the ways of the church. This is a struggle worth exploring, but Pilar’s duty to convert Cara is mentioned once or twice and then dropped. Perhaps there would be more time for it if the 16-member chorus of “townspeople” in this production didn’t shuffle in and out in awkward, often embarrassing attempts to create a sense of spectacle. When an auto-da-fe parade passes below Pilar’s window the action onstage comes to a halt, and we watch uncomfortably as actors portraying hollow-eyed churchmen and flagellants roam the aisles of the theater.
