STAGE REVIEW : Latin Paradise Found, Lost in ‘Burning Patience’

SAN DIEGO —  Call it paradise. Call it Camelot. Call it the first, happily-ever-after act of Stephen Sondheim’s “Into the Woods.”

Repetition does not seem to dull the wound of the ejection from the Garden, fall from Camelot or unraveling of happy endings. Instead, each painful reminder touches a mythic memory of innocence lost, leaving the lonely heart to ask the forever-unanswered question: Why?

Such is the case with Antonio Skarmeta’s poignant “Burning Patience,” so brilliantly executed by the San Diego Repertory Theatre, which plans nine performances in Spanish. It’s the first time in the history of local theater that a company has offered bilingual performances in its regular season.

In “Burning Patience,” Eden is Chile in the late 1960s when the great poet, Pablo Neruda, takes time out from politics to help a young mailman, Mario, woo the simple daughter of a local innkeeper.

With the help of Neruda’s poetry, Mario wins his maid at the same time that Salvador Allende wins the Chilean presidency with the help of Neruda’s campaigning. Three years later, the death of Allende in what many believe was a CIA-backed military coup, is the penultimate note that shatters the innocence of the first two thirds of the play.

It was a day followed by thousands of disappearances, of loved ones whisked away without trials to probable torture and execution. In the lyrics of the Don McLean song, “It was the day the music died.”

The direction by Doug Jacobs and Jorge Huerta skillfully blends Neruda’s exquisite poetry with jazzy folk music by Roberto Lecaros and choreography by Miguel Delgado that runs the gamut from communal fun to an inventively erotic duet with a hard-boiled egg.

As Pablo Neruda, Leon Singer grows in stature over the course of the evening; his has the feel of a performance that will deepen through the run. In contrast, Alma Martinez as the comically anxious mother-in-law-to-be starts at a hyper pitch that needs to calm down to the superbly controlled fever she masters in the second act.

It seems fitting that no such fault can be found with Vic Trevino and Yolanda Lloyd-Delgado as the young lovers. The two bring an unself-conscious sense of innocence that permeates the longing, coltish way they look not only at each other but at the world when they are alone; Mario staring off dreamily at the ocean in the distance, Beatriz smiling and singing to herself as she shreds large leaves of lettuce into a big yellow bowl.

Victoria Petrovich’s set without walls heightens the Eden-like sense of people in harmony with nature. Neruda’s desk is set on the shifting sands; like the sands, it will be swept away by the rising political tide. The sounds of sea gulls, of bells, weave in and out of the poetry and are part of the larger poem that is this play.

Life, of course, was never this lovely, not for Neruda, Allende or the people of Chile. Neruda, after all, not only lived through World War II, but also lost his friend and fellow poet, Federico Garcia Lorca, during the earlier Spanish Civil War. Allende was struggling to doctor widespread inflation, strikes and the rising discontent of the middle class at the time of the coup.

But one might as well argue that the Kennedy Administration was no Camelot, that there is no such thing as fairy tales. The music and poetry of hope was in the air and that is what died with the ascendancy of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, whose power is being challenged by the Chilean people today.

Artists seem determined to remind American audiences of the dark side of U.S. involvement in Central America, as if to warn that it could be a repeat of the tragedy of Chile. The message is hammered home in the pop music of Jackson Browne and Sting, among others.

Locally, this production by the San Diego Repertory Theatre puts them squarely in the company of the Old Globe Theatre, which recently adapted “Coriolanus” as a world in which American forces were pitted against those in the Third World, and the San Diego Opera, which is planning a production of “Fidelio,” that will update Beethoven’s story of political prisoners to a Central American setting.

And what of America’s role in these faraway matters? Would Allende have fallen if he had not expropriated U.S. copper mines without compensation?

In Chile, there is a dance called the “ Gueca Solo “ in which the wives, daughters and mothers of the thousands of “missing” dance with the photographs of loved ones pinned to their clothing.

“Burning Patience” is such a dance that earns the laughter and tears it so honestly brings. In the absence of marked graves, art is the closest thing to a memorial that the missing in Chile may ever have.

‘BURNING PATIENCE’

By Antonio Skarmeta. Directors are Doug Jacobs and Jorge Huerta. Translation by Marion Peter Holt. Music by Roberto Lecaros. English translation of songs by Guillermo Reyes. Set by Victoria Petrovich. Lighting by John B. Forbes. Costumes by Diane Rodriguez. Musical direction by Victor Zupanc. Choreography by Miguel Delgado. Sound by Debby Van Poucke. Fight choreography by Christopher Villa. Stage manager is Lisa Ledwich. With Leon Singer, Vic Trevino, Yolanda Lloyd-Delgado, Alma Martinez, Joyhn Padilla, Goyo Flores, Ismael Alarcon, Eloise DeLeon, Octavio Gamboa and Luisa Vargas. At 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 7 p.m. Sunday through Dec. 23. At the San Diego Repertory Theatre Lyceum Space, 79 Horton Plaza.