'26 Miles': A mother & child with a ways to go

A 15-year-old girl is throwing up, all alone. She can't get to her father upstairs; her stepmother forbids the girl access to that floor. So the distressed kid calls her mother across town, an already angry Cuban woman whose intuition tells her there's one way to address this dilemma: road trip!

Thus is "26 Miles" propelled into action at Bethesda's Round House Theatre, where the play arrives after a run at New Jersey's Two River Theater Company (which co-produced this show). This lyrical, semi-autobiographical drama is by Quiara Alegría Hudes, a two-time Pulitzer finalist (she wrote the book for the Tony-winning musical "In the Heights") whose "Barrio Grrrl!" is now playing at the Kennedy Center's Family Theater. As mother-daughter stories go, this one is gentle and warm, notwithstanding the salty English and Spanish spoken by the fiery woman slowly bonding with the daughter she lost custody of years ago.

The script is sometimes tricky to animate on stage, though, given the long, where-have-you-been-for-the-last-eight-years dialogues that often unfold in the front seat of the car as daughter Olivia and mother Beatriz whiz across America. Director KJ Sanchez has fashioned a simple but handsome production, leaving the stage largely wide-open and projecting scenery onto tall panels (set and projections are by Daniel Conway). Zachary Williamson's sound design creates a traveling mood; the rest is up to the actors.

They are appealing, even if the material often sticks to surprisingly well-worn grooves. Laura C. Harris is understated and touchingly vulnerable as Olivia, a neglected kid with a literary bent. Harris's Olivia is quick but emotionally malnourished, and in her occasionally awestruck pauses you can feel the teenager drinking in Beatriz's history like a castaway finally getting fresh water.

As Beatriz, Zabryna Guevara necessarily becomes the show's primary source of energy. The character has plenty to resent -- her history with Olivia's father is bitter, her current partner is cheating on her, and the way she lost custody of Olivia still goes down hard -- and Guevara keeps her performance at a steady simmer.

The fact that Olivia's skin is as pale as her Jewish father's, not the café au lait that is her Cuban mother's complexion, casts a long shadow, too. Hudes mines her own history here, and while she plainly writes from the heart, you wait for the play to achieve a resonance that it never quite does. These Philadelphia women flee men and the City of Brotherly Love for the symbolic open spaces where the buffalo roam, yet their journey is oddly contained.

It may be a question of scale, for this is a largely static, practically two-character play (Michael Frederic and Triney Sandoval appear in multiple thinly written parts) trying to hold a big stage with language that is often honest and ordinary, with brief florid blooms. Hudes can turn a beautiful phrase; just listen as the audience grows quiet, marveling at the rhapsody offered by a random tamal seller praising the minutest details of his wife's cooking.

Such lovely words have undeniable allure. They are not magic, however, and they can't quite transform the dramatically sketchy quality of this self-discovery trip.

26 Miles, by Quiara Alegría Hudes. Directed by KJ Sanchez. Costumes, Marion Williams; lights, Thom Weaver. About 100 minutes. Through Nov. 22 at Round House Theatre Bethesda, 4545 East-West Highway. Call 240-644-1100 or visit http://www.roundhousetheatre.org.

Nelson Pressley is a freelance writer.