Theater Review : A Memoir From a Gifted Comic Actress

LOS ANGELES — Ever heard of Willy Chevalier?

In her wonderful one-woman show, “A Line Around the Block,” Marga Gomez makes you feel you have seen the act of this all-but-forgotten Cuban entertainer, a comic and impresario of New York’s Latino theater community in the 1960s and ‘70s who was also Gomez’s father. She enters his skin, with vision both cruel and compassionate, memorializing him as only a daughter can.

Her show is part stand-up routine, part memory play, but mostly it is a deeply warm but unsentimental tribute to a difficult, loving, show-biz father.

Miss Gomez, as Willy fondly called her, followed in her dad’s steps to become a stand-up comic herself, and, ultimately, a gifted playwright and actress. “A Line Around the Block” continues at the Taper, Too, only until April 15.

The enterprising, energetic Willy, known throughout Spanish-speaking New York as the spokesperson for El Pico Cafe, loses some of his snap after his wife leaves him. But he still has the adoration of young Marga, who loves the backstage world he shares with her during the summers she spends with him.

As she grows, Marga watches Willy’s provincial but not inconsequential fame slip away. This once proud owner of the Teatro Latino in Harlem ends up performing comedy in a bad Spanish restaurant in Greenwich Village, where he also has to bring menus to tables. And Marga comes to watch--proud, ashamed, loving, helping.

With her huge, luminous eyes and gap-toothed smile, Gomez here sports a short tuxedo dress with black tights, white socks and black oxfords, an outfit that allows her to transform from a small girl to her father and other memorable members of the community, including a busybody bodega owner, as well as Irma Pagan, the glamorous star at the Teatro Latino, whom young Marga idolized.

The show is also a girl’s remembrance of a vanished theatrical landscape, one where live acts alternated with Mexican films so melodramatic you didn’t need to know Spanish to understand them. Audiences came in droves, bringing along the old folks and the screaming babies.

“We were all familia , and we could slap the children if we wanted to,” recalls Gomez with a sass that only barely covers her warmth.

Gomez seems most comfortable when playing Willy. She gives us his cocky walk, staccato way of speaking, and the emphatic skip he adds to his gait when he needs to improve his spirits. He was brave, foolish and vain, and it’s clear she adored him even as she observed him with scalpel-sharp writer’s eyes, down to the heartbreaking way he asks her about her mother--as quickly as possible, before any emotion can seep out.

Gomez cross-cuts from the world of her childhood to her own struggle to find her voice as a stand-up--bombing in a New York club around the time of her father’s funeral. The scene has an almost absurdist tinge; it’s a comic-nightmare exaggeration of the way her father’s death affected her performance. Director Corey Madden has found exactly the right pitch for the scene: a kind of hyper-reality concocted out of memory, pain and yearning--all charged and funneled into a yearning for the high pitch of the life of a performer, the legacy of Willy.

Toward the end of her show, Gomez performs an angry monologue about being turned down by a “lesbian comedy” special on cable because they wanted someone “more traditional.”

“When did this tradition start--in February?” she demands to know. The show ingeniously links a stand-up’s anger to the frustrations of a daughter who could not save her father from himself.

The show is a companion piece to “Memory Tricks,” Gomez’s earlier tribute to her mother. “A Line Around the Block” kicks off the “Virtual Theatre” series at the Taper, Too, although there is nothing virtual about the theater that Gomez and Madden have created. Like Willy Chevalier, Gomez will be a very hard act to follow.

* “A Line Around the Block,” Taper, Too, John Anson Ford Theatre, 2580 Cahuenga Blvd. East, Hollywood, today at 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m., Sunday at 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m., Tuesday-Friday at 8 p.m., and April 15 at 2:30 p.m. and 8 p.m. $15, (213) 972-7392. Running time: 90 minutes.