Lyrical tale walks into your heart

By John Moore | The Denver Post

PUBLISHED: October 29, 2005 at 2:41 AM MDT

Getting your player ready...

According to alternative therapies, there can be many windows into the soul – the iris, the palm, the foot. In Jose Cruz Gonzalez’s deeply moving “September Shoes,” a cleaning woman named Cuki can look into your soul by looking deep into the sole – of your shoe.

The first thing you notice before the start of the Denver Center Theatre Company’s groundbreaking new magic-realism tale are the dozens of used shoes nailed to a back wall that may as well be the clear-blue horizon. These are the many shoes Cuki has stolen right from under their owners’ feet.

But at the heart of this lyrical mystery are just four pairs, the ones Cuki found long ago strewn across a lonely desert road. Who owned these shoes she eventually rips from her wall, wraps in a blanket and swaddles like a child is the key to understanding this slowly unfolding riddle that ultimately reveals itself to be a grievously familiar social tragedy.

In magic realism, elements of fantasy are infused into realistic situations. In this case, the first act is the magic; the second act is the all-too-realism. The sight of any mother in such deep pain is as real as it gets.

This accessible, tender tale opens in a desert, where we see a couple lying in a hotel bed. Nearby, an aging hippie grave-digger named Huilo has built a chair for the lord as a place to rest come Judgment Day. This chair is so massive, all we can see is one of its gigantic legs jutting into the sky. The leg is etched with the names of all those who have died in this tiny Southwestern border town. But one name that’s missing is that of Ana, a girl who died 30 years before but whose work on Earth is clearly not yet done. She flitters freely about this desert cemetery communicating with Huilo and the couple in bed. Gail and Alberto have reluctantly come home to bury Gail’s Chinese-Mexican aunt. Alberto, Ana’s now middle-aged brother, carries a heavy burden. Gail is an unfulfilled woman with, as Cuki says, “a hole in her sole.”

And through the center of this desert runs an impossibly narrow highway that splits this landscape in two like a broken heart.

The strength of González’s script is in his creation and intersection of five such damaged, palpable characters, all of whom must now deal with their pasts in order to move forward. Cuki, the charming kleptomaniac, is one of the most original characters to come along in years. She walks and works barefoot because she believes the advent of shoes cost us our connection to the Earth. Huilo is a seizure-prone drifter in a permanent state of penance for sins not even he comprehends. Ana is preserved in her 13-year-old joy and naive belief in the goodness of people, yet she cries red tears for all that is left unresolved. And so all roads must lead back to this desert road, where Ana awaits to lead one and all down a new road to forgiveness.

González has a deft touch as storyteller, though Aunt Lilly’s involvement in all this interconnectedness comes across as a bit of tangential piling on. And I have a slight quibble with his structure. The first act slowly builds to the revelation of Ana’s fate 30 years ago. This is a powerful stage moment but, in retrospect, coming where it does leaves too much left to be said and done in too little time. As a result, the two acts operate on significantly different horsepowers. As leisurely as the first act is, the more devastating second act passes in a wisp of fog. This power shift has its own resonance, but some might want to walk a mile longer in this world once we fully comprehend the heart of the play.

Director Amy González’s staging is filled with stunning visual moments large and small, but her success with her actors can be divided along gender lines. Karmin Murcelo (Gail), Adriana Gaviria (Ana) and especially the spectacular Wilma Bonet (Cuki) create aching, full-blooded women. While the play passes from character to character actor like a cup of wine to be savored, Bonet’s Cuki has the greatest arc and the evening’s defining moment – a scene of such terrible beauty it would make the dead weep.

Luis Saguar (Huilo) and John Herrera (Alberto) are accomplished actors (Herrera is a Tony-nominated singer) but both men seem a bit more self-conscious and thus their characters are less realized.

Amy Gonzalez (no relation) has shown great care in welcoming her audiences into this strange, warm world, but her greatest accomplishment is in simply leaving them infused with a dueling and dual sense of lingering sadness and wonder.

Theater critic John Moore can be reached at 303-820-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com.

*** | “September Shoes”

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