Long Way Go Down is the story of an illegal couple stuck at the border in Arizona, but don’t think this is just a topical-issue play. It could be set in any border state, and it was written before their new law. It doesn’t waste time shaking its fist. This plot has tension to build and twists to take. No time for the larger injustices, these are just the cards these characters have been dealt, and we’re there to watch how they’re played. I guarantee they’ll surprise you. High stakes makes for high drama in this no-limit world of people with nothing to lose but everything. Playwright Zayd Dohrn has created a sort of nouveau noir world like some great detective thriller without a detective. Director Chris Carlos has a hit on his hands in this world premiere that will leave you a little smarter, a little harder, and surprisingly, a little hopeful.
Billy (Bruce DuBose) is a long-haul trucker who makes extra money smuggling immigrants illegally into the country. At the beginning of the play, he is telling his son, Chris, a horrifyingly violent story as if it is a joke with every brutal detail a punch line, literally. The message is clear: cruelty doesn’t bother Billy. After all, he traffics in humans. Billy’s son, Chris (Drew Wall), is the screw-up sidekick. In their possession is a fetching girl Violetta (Ani Celise Vera). As the story unfolds, she and her boyfriend, Nini, have been brought across the border. Nini (Ivan Jasso) is out scrounging for the money while Billy and Chris keep Violetta for collateral. It is a straightforward situation until Nini can’t pay the fee. (Giving you much more detail than that would spoil the play.) It suffices to say that people at the end of their rope sometimes swing to safety and sometimes knit a noose.
Director Chris Carlos has steered the cast toward its strengths. Ivan Jasso’s Nini is deceptively manipulative. He masks his maneuvering in a smirk and a shrug. DuBose is surprisingly menacing. It is hard to believe that he was only recently acting from an easy chair in Endgame over at Undermain. Speaking of earlier in the season, if you saw Drew Wall in Slacker at Kitchen Dog, you’d be forgiven for thinking this was a similar character. You’d be mistaken, but forgiven. In fact, the key to this play is his beguilingly gullible, racist but loveable, Chris. In order for us to buy several of the plot twists, Wall’s Chris has to combine a dutiful dimwitted son, a kidnapper with a conscience, and a roughed-up Romeo. This noble nobody meets his match in the beautiful Violetta played slyly by Ani Celise Vera. Much of her part is played in broken English, Spanish, or silence. It forces Vera into other meaning-making methods. Her glances, gazes, and glares are adeptly deployed here. The relationship between these two runs the gamut, and in the end it is her choice that elevates the play from simple crime drama to something more. That’s what makes this play a great investment. It pays off in the car on the way home and days later, as you ponder the future of the characters and of their motivations.
Brian Wofford outdoes himself for the set design of Long Way Go Down. The vast lonesome desert surrounds the action and isolates the characters. Though there are various playing areas, they don’t provide any escape. In a peculiar fringe benefit of the confined space, the characters can’t get far from each other. Their fates are intertwined no matter where they go. It is a rare combination of serviceability and expressivity in set design, not to mention the poetic juxtaposition of beautiful natural landscape and the ugly human trappings of graffiti, office furniture, and McDonald’s sacks. In the end, when the dust settles, this bastardization of a bus station could be considered an Eden oasis, a sort of phoenix from the tacky. Wow, Arizona after all.
