"Into the Beautiful North" at Central Works

Central Works photo by J. Norrena

It's always interesting to see what Central Works offers. It's an ambitious undertaking, producing four world-premiere plays per year, and having to commit to those plays before they really exist. So you never know quite what you're going to get.

"Into the Beautiful North" is a bit different from the usual fare, in that it's not a local playwright or company member creating the script, but rather a local production of a "rolling world premiere" through the National New Play Network.

The Play

The core of the play is kind of a riff on the movies "The Seven Samurai" and "The Magnificent Seven." The small Mexican town of Tres Camarones is being besieged by "narcos," corrupt police officers selling drugs and generally terrorizing the citizenry. Nayeli, a plucky teenager, decides to steal off to the U.S. to recruit seven magnificent men to come back to Tres Camarones and save the town. She takes with her her best friend, Vampi, and her employer, Tacho, who runs the only Internet cafe in town, El Mano Caido.

The structure of the play is pretty familiar, with characters narrating among fairly quick scene changes. If you've seen some of the story plays by the likes of Campo Santo or Culture Clash, it will seem similar.

Nayeli, played by Samanta Yunuen Cubias, and Tacho (Rudy Guerrero) maintain their characters throughout, with the other six players in the ensemble playing about 40 other roles. For the most part it works well, though some of the scene changes are a bit clunky.

The Production

Realizing that this is a world premiere, a work in progress, and still relatively early in the current run (the play runs through November 13), one expects a few hiccups. There are some hesitations and fumbled lines, and a number of the (quite frequent) scene changes are distractingly slow. Some of the latter is due to the constraints of the little theater space in the Berkeley City Club. The plays I've seen there that work the best are those where either there are few scene changes at all, or where the play works with little or no scenery.

Somewhat surprisingly, the second act of the play comes out much smoother than the first. I'm not sure whether the ensemble just hit their stride after intermission or whether they have just honed the latter part of the play more completely. In any case, in the first half I was concerned that a lot of the dialog came out rather stilted, and some of the characters just didn't gel. But the show was better in virtually all aspects in the second half, which gives me hope that they will eventually get rid of some of the other wrinkles.

The writing is clever, with some quite witty dialogue, featuring fun puns and topical references. Clearly, the presence of "nasty women" and "bad hombres" was added just this week, as those references come directly from a presidential campaign debate just a few days before. In context, they work fine. Not all of the jokes flow quite as organically, but some bits work really well. The scenes with Rudy Guerrero and Ben Ortega in a bar in Tijuana and crossing the border are very funny and very well done. And Caleb Cabrera's "Atomiko" is consistently good.

Conclusion

I think the script has a lot of promise, and there are good bits to be found throughout. I was a bit disappointed with the cohesion of the cast, particularly in the first act. Some of the acting just felt rather amateurish, and not up to the standard I expect from Central Works. But it got much better in the second act, so I can hope that some of the bumps can be attributed to changes being made to the script and staging as the play is developed.

Overall, I thought it was a fun evening and certainly worth seeing. I really like what Central Works does, and fully expect that not every play they do will live up to expectations. But more power to them for promoting new works and opening doors to actors who might not have the resume to land a role this large in one of the bigger theaters in the area.