He greets incomers with ever moving, anxiously sweaty palms. His eyes are very wide as he likely, without realizing, stumbles through salutations and pre-show small talk with friends, faculty and unknown guests. Nervousness is evident, yet Riley Faison holds a proud smile for the work he’s done and the opportunity to share it. As showtime draws near, he wraps up conversation on one last “thank you,” then disappears around a corner in a hallway of the Van Hise building.
Last weekend, Masters of Fine Arts student Faison performed a rendition of “Mambo Mouth” by John Leguizamo. He took his audience on an emotional journey through each character, beginning loud and strong and achieving the goals he identified in our prior interview. Faison made his duty to effectively distinguish each character, uniquely engage with the audience and demonstrate part of the “latino lived experience” in the United States.
The show begins with the character Agamemnon, a talk-show host, transforming the black box theater into a live-audience TV station. The character is both boisterous and bold about his Cuban heritage. He offers himself as a relationship savior for his fellow latino men, while more of a womanizer to the opposite sex, and makes comments about the pride of his ability to attract blonde American women. Agamemnon began the pattern of complexes we would see in each character who would struggle to prove their identities, whether that be American, Latin or something else entirely. In Agamemnon's case, as Faison described in talkback, the question is, "How do I assimilate?"
Then the scene shifts. Faison takes only seconds backstage and suddenly he transforms into this new young lively character, Loco Louie, who can’t wait to tell his best friend of his first sexual experience. It’s an unexpected first-time story, involving a suspicious building, a large intimidating guard and a partner whom Loco finds unappealing. Some of us can’t help but sympathize with the character’s right of passage into manhood. We all have our own pubescent stories. Loco's story humorously gives the audience a moment to dwell into our own pasts while learning of his present.
Faison successfully carried a steady flow of smiles and laughs from the first two characters, before going backstage to let the music emotionally prepare us to shift gears a little bit.
When our MFA student returned, he’d ditched the previous character’s billed cap for handcuffs, and we faced Angel Garcia, a man recently incarcerated for domestic violence against his wife. Immediately, we feel pain clawing its way through Angel's unwillingness to accept responsibility, and the pain settles deeper with each denial of help for bail from Angel's family.
Next is Pepe Vazquez, who directly argues with the guard that he is American (after pitifully rifling through other fabricated identities with poorly done accents), and all he wants is a chance to work. But just as Angel was denied help from his family, Pepe finds the same response after trying to connect with the Dominican security guard. To his disappointment, the guard doesn’t speak Spanish, and Pepe faces the menacing reality of deportation. You could feel the audience’s heavy sigh as we share in the moment of Pepe’s sad revelation and watch it transform into anger for reaping no benefit in his Latin identity.
Finally, we reach the most conflicted character of them all, the Crossover King, who attempted to drastically renounce his Latin identity. “He hits a point where somebody tells him that it is not okay to be who he is, that it is not okay to be Latino,” Faison shared in the talkback. We see a character who squints his eyes behind glasses and holds his body firmly erect, bowing when necessary to become what he understands to be the image of success, Japanese. But alas, in closing of the show, the Crossover King's Latino heritage "cannot be suppressed."
Faison portrayed each character’s story fantastically, and I congratulate him for the accomplishment. He offered a real genuine connection with each story through his varying tones and expressions, something only achievable through hard work. Faison expressed afterward that there was a bit of anxiety while performing, recognizing how long he's been away from the play since his production in Puerto Rico last August. But this gap likely made for even better opportunity.
"It was nice to have time to sit with the text and to mull over it and ask myself 'What are the new elements I've discovered in the text?' Faison said in the talkback. This allowed him to make changes to the show like choosing new opening music. "This is beginning to sound like elevator music. So I changed it to better fit the atmosphere, and that brings the audience in more."
When asked how he distinguished each showing from each other, Faison said, "This show was completely different from Friday's, and Friday's was completely different from Saturday's ... Each audience is different and I responded accordingly."
This Friday, Faison will present excerpts of “Mambo Mouth” for the dance department's annual Moonshine showcase, hosted by dance professor Christopher Walker.
