RED RED RED by Amelio García
Oakland Theater Project
1501 Martin Luther King Jr. Way
Oakland
Through May 19
RED RED RED, “the alternate telling of a story no one really knows,” was chaotic and brilliant when I saw it on April 26, its world premiere. Written by Amelio García, a transmasculine actor, playwright, and Fulbright Scholar from El Salvador, the story was inspired by Anne Carson’s novel Autobiography of Red: A Novel in Verse.
The novel is about a boy named Geryon, as in the three-bodied, winged Greek monster Geryon. The boy suffers sexual abuse by his brother with no one but an unprotecting mother around, so he finds comfort in photography and emotional destruction in a romance with a young man named Herakles.
The play shares all of these elements, but the ingenuity lies in the metaphor of three-bodied Greek monster RED as a transmasculine person on their postmodern gender journey. RED is played skillfully by Berkeley actor Romeo Channer, who carries the majority of the lines while enduring a laborious, congruous, and pained state of heartbreak delivered with unwavering intensity.
The Oakland Theater Project is housed in a side room of the airy, high-ceilinged FLAX Art and Design, a gorgeous independent art supply store. The theater has mighty sound and lighting systems supporting innovative production elements. During one exciting moment in the exposition, a book fell loudly on the hollow bedroom floor stage from a small wooden trap in the ceiling while stagehands pushed books off of a shelf to create literary mayhem. Projected elements were used without a screen, directly lighting the set pieces and dark walls, which was extremely effective for rain and to visually score a tasteful orgasm.
Embracing anachronism, the play exists simultaneously in ancient and modern times, the script making references to Oakland Theater Project and its Martin Luther King Jr. Way location while also slipping into Hades and a gay nightclub called “The Inferno.” The set is RED’s childhood bedroom, with an IKEA lantern hanging above the knit-blanket-covered bed, and built into the craggy cliffside of hell. While effective for the beginning of the story, the prominence and height of the bedroom was distracting as it remained unchanged throughout, despite the play navigating multiple new settings, like an airplane, a friend’s apartment, or the nightclub, in the compact 60-seat space.
Even though first-generation Vietnamese-American actor Anthony Doan had fewer lines, they had a tall task, playing four different roles: H, Mother, Brother, and ANA. Costume designer Kipper Yanaga cleared the way for them to shine, especially in the femme roles as the big blonde-wigged Mother and particularly with Doan’s affects as the queer flight attendant ANA. At times it was hard to differentiate between H and Brother and also H and ANA, so more obvious costume changes would have helped to define the characters.
The most compelling aspect of the play to me were the constant reflections and woes of today’s trans experience injected among the thoughts of RED, reading almost like journal entries from the playwright himself.
I found this in the truth and ownership it takes to write “I was a white woman once” as a transman. In the themes of bullying. The pain in “have you ever wanted to be someone else so bad you can’t stop thinking about it?” The desperation in the idea to “sew our souls together so he won’t leave me like he did last time.” Falling in love with someone who will break your heart and re-affirm the negative narrative you have about yourself. I have a transmasculine friend from Berlin with “Unreliable narrator” tattooed, and I acknowledge the fear in that self descriptor.
“I am not a reliable narrator,” RED said it in “Fragment 7: An End.”
RED RED RED was a powerful queer re-imagining of Anne Carson’s novel. The seven fragments were an interesting approach to structure but also felt that the climax and denouement story elements could have been more clearly defined; researching Carson’s novel certainly aided me in understanding the story and characters.
Critiques aside, the play invites a non-queer-identifying audience into authentic queer states of mind and because of that, I will be discussing it whenever I have the opportunity, with queer community and theater-goers alike.
RED RED RED runs at Oakland Theater Project through May 19; tickets can be purchased here.
