Theater
'The Bridge of Bodies': Quest for Identity in Haiti
Kathleen Gonzales plays a Haitian immigrant and characters she meets in search of a hidden past.
(Ohio State University Theatre Department)
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Tuesday, June 3, 2008; Page C05
AIDS and voodoo are part of the stereotype of Haiti that young Marie-Therese frequently encounters growing up in Florida. She's a Haitian immigrant who hasn't been to her homeland since her mother whisked her out at an early age; her own history has been carefully hidden from her.
Going back and finding out is the subject of the personable but predictable solo show"The Bridge of Bodies" -- at Flashpoint's small Mead Theatre Lab -- in which writer-performer Kathleen Gonzales plays multiple characters. Marie-Therese, whom we first meet as a skittish college student having awful dreams, embarks on a journey, moving back and forth in time until a long-buried secret is unearthed.
Given the chaos and factional violence of Haiti's recent political history, the nature of that secret isn't hard to guess. Other Haitians scare Marie-Therese's mother, even in Florida, and the poor girl has grown up afraid to say her last name out loud.
Still, curiosity grows as Marie-Therese shares the peculiarities of her Florida childhood. (The schoolyard taunts overflow with crude stereotypes, and Gonzales plays a mean kid with comic swagger.) The more other Haitians whisper about her as "the one who left with her mother after that thing that happened to her father," the more you share her wide-eyed need for details.
The show does a better job of building that tension in the United States, though, than of exploring its source in Haiti. Stateside, Marie-Therese gropes for a sense of direction, and her quest becomes baldly but intriguingly educational. As she studies, projections on a makeshift screen at the back of the stage range from alluring topography to amazingly overcrowded "tap-taps," the beat-up pickup trucks that function as taxis.
What happens to her in Haiti isn't sharply rendered, despite the fact that Gonzales bases the piece on personal experience and interviews. Mysticism begins to fog the story, especially in the troll-like figure of an old woman directing Marie-Therese to a place called the Cave of Memories. Can it be that Marie-Therese's faintly superficial college therapist was right -- that she's suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder?
Director Patrick Crowley's production gently supports Gonzales with an understated sound and light design, and despite occasional passages of Caribbean-inflected French as she plays more than a dozen characters, Gonzales essentially gives an earnest, straightforward performance. "The Bridge of Bodies" is not a flamboyant show; it's a calmly therapeutic voyage into one girl's past. It wants you to understand, but in its anticlimactic, explanatory style, it seems to pull its punches.
The Bridge of Bodies, by Kathleen Gonzales. Directed by Patrick Crowley. Set, Ola Odeniran; lights, Jason Cowperthwaite; sound, Chris Baine. Through June 15 at Flashpoint, 916 G St. NW. About 80 minutes. Call 202-315-1340 or e-mail tickets@bridgeofbodies.com.
