The Royal Mexican Players FB
Alvaro Saar Rios, playwright of the critically acclaimed Luchadora!, which captured hearts during First Stage Children’s Theater’s 2014-15 season, brings a series of short new works to UW-Milwaukee Peck School of the Arts’ Studio Theatre. The weekend of performances featured a collaboration between Rios’ company The Royal Mexican Players and a group of UWM students completing their LAB/WORKS course, designed to provide the students with the practical experience of staging a production.
The evening consisted of nine short comic plays of varying lengths and subjects, though the through-line was clear; each of the plays contained an element of WTF?!?!, which translates roughly to an exclamation of confusion and surprise over something outside the norm. The twist of each play examines characters displaying behavioral oddities, from a heterosexual man (Happy Musonda) who chooses to marry his male best friend out of apparent laziness, to a college freshman (Conner Dempsey) buying a crib as a gift for the partner of a one night stand.
The first piece, from which the evening derived its title, hooked the audience with its catchy beat; a magnetic Musonda led the players in stomping through a poetic presentation of various bizarre, but common, modern customs; the rhythm established, punctuation came from Parker Muñoz’s humorous squeals of “WTF?!” The other scenes could have benefited from a similarly devised structure; some pieces lacked inventiveness, relying on gender stereotypes and profanity as the source of the comedy, rather than tools to enhance it.
A memorable moment on opening night, for which performers Muñoz and Mary Jo Perez deserve recognition, occurred during a startling fire alarm and consequent evacuation from the building halfway through a scene. The actors appeared unfazed by the flashing lights and alarm, maintaining character and continuing the scene until it was absolutely necessary to pause.
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As a whole, the show asks the kind of questions that Millennials are frequently found pondering. Characters muddle their way through wacky explorations of dating, status updates, politics, gender stereotypes, shedding a light on the strangeness often disguised as part of the everyday.
