The Denver Center Theatre Company’s “Sunsets & Margaritas” might easily be dismissed as a featherweight comedy as full of air as a sopaipilla. It’s difficult to believe it would have made it onto the season were it not a commissioned world premiere by a playwright of color.
But while it’s a superficial play that sounds like it comes with its own sitcom laugh track, those are real people in the Ricketson Theater, laughing heartily at all those awful sight gags and rim-shot jokes.
Jose Cruz González’s madcap play is pure escapism — and it clearly connected with a hooting and hawing opening-night audience.
Just don’t expect it to change the world. “Lydia,” this is not. Critically speaking, it’s a sitting duck.
Meet the Serranos, a wacky Mexican-American family in a small southwest Colorado town. The story revolves around an aging father who built a taco stand into a popular diner, and his emasculated middle-aged cop son who, simply put, needs to man up.
The play opens with a wonderful bit of stage magic: The old man, Candelario, literally drives his convertible through the wall of the diner. And it hangs there, anchoring Sara Ryung Clement’s wonderfully designed set, for the rest of the play. There’s also a talking portrait that’s a trip and a half.
It’s time to put Candelario into assisted living, but he refuses. And oldest, simpering son Gregario just can’t stand up to his loco old man, who’s brought to life with great comic gusto by Ricardo Gutierrez.
Candelario swipes a case of Preparation H from the Korean grocer and goes shooting up the town in his boxer shorts.
And yet it’s possible Gregario (Philip Hernandez) is even more far gone. Dad’s antics send him into panic attacks that bring on visions of the Virgin of Guadalupe — in the form of a wisecracking stand-up comedian who comes, literally, with her own rim shot.
The ever-adorable Romi Diaz (“The Clean House”), in one of five silly roles, informs Gregario that his 10-years-dead mother won’t find eternal peace until he puts his father in his place.
You can take it from there.
While “Sunsets” fully exploits fundamental Latino stereotypes like the carousing patriarch and the angelic matriarch, the comedy is largely dependent on reversals when it comes to their children. Gregario’s sister, Gabby (a terrific Sarah Nina Hayon), is a lesbian Latina Republican who can’t decide on a name for her sperm-donor baby. It’s come down to the (couldn’t-be-more-Caucasian) “Ashleigh, Amber or Courtney” — so that combined moniker is exactly what everyone calls her.
Charming brother Jojo (Sol Castillo) is a wannabe gangster in a blinged-out wheelchair with the license plate “92SPINE” — his way of bragging about being paralyzed in a (questionable) shootout.
Conflicting generational values have always made for fertile comic territory. That makes “Sunsets and Margaritas” the most traditional of comedies. But Latino audiences have rarely seen the formula applied to one of their own families. Not on the Denver Center stage, anyway.
Along the way, we’re fleetingly exposed to archetypes like the wailing mother La Llorona. Issues are raised like immigration, homosexuality and the Catholic Church, but in utterly nonconfrontational ways. It teases, but offers no real window into the real conflict of what it means to be a man today in the Latino culture. That question gets no deeper than “Are you a rooster or a duck?”
In short, “Sunsets and Margaritas” is remarkable only because it exists. It’s capably acted, it has a big heart . . . and it’ll stay with you about as long as a very special episode of “The George Lopez Show.”
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com
“Sunsets and Margaritas” **1/2 (out of four stars)
Denver Center Theatre Company, Ricketson Theatre, Denver Performing Arts Complex. Written by Jose Cruz González. Directed by Nicholas C. Avila. Starring Philip Hernandez and Ricardo Gutierrez. Through May 16. 2 hours. 6:30 p.m. Mondays-Thursdays; 7:30 p.m. Fridays; 1:30 and 7:30 p.m. Saturdays. $25-$51. 303-893-4100 (800-641-1222 outside Denver), all King Soopers or
