Boleros for the Disenchanted (review)

In Boleros for the Disenchanted, José Rivera returns to his roots, personally and professionally. In earlier plays, Rivera included autobiographical elements of his Puerto Rican heritage, but he frequently subordinated them to sociopolitical concerns. Not so in Boleros for the Disenchanted, which may be Rivera’s most intensely personal play. Dramatizing his parents’ romance in Puerto Rico, their raising a family in the United States, and their long, often-troubled marriage, the play is autobiographical in ways not seen since his The House of Ramon Iglesia twenty-six years earlier. Moreover, Boleros for the Disenchanted returns to the abiding themes of Rivera’s plays—the struggle with ethnic identity, the allure of the American Dream, the battle between the sexes—but with a matured, more meditative perspective. Directed beautifully by Carey Perloff at the American Conservatory Theatre, this play suggests new and fertile directions for Rivera in subject matter (Puerto Rico, family, fathers) and dramaturgy (autobiography and genre).

The first of Rivera’s works to represent Puerto Rico, Boleros for the Disenchanted begins in 1953, in the town of Miraflores, with the troubled engagement of Flora and Manuelo. Learning that Manuelo has been unfaithful, Flora demands his fidelity and, when he argues that he cannot control his desires, breaks their engagement. Despite her naiveté about courtship, Flora—based on Rivera’s mother—is in the tradition of the strong, defiant women of his plays. While in Santurce, trying to forget Manuelo, she meets Eusebio, based on Rivera’s father, and falls in love to the haunting rhythms of boleros music. In both locales, scenographer Ralph Funicello divided the stage between the known and the unknown: in Miraflores, Flora’s parents’ rundown, stucco house contrasted with the tiny houses hanging from wires, with a hazy moon overhead; in Santurce, he contrasted a poster-covered wall representing a dance hall with a park bench against the mystery of darkness. This Puerto Rico had both the solidity of home and the possibility of romance and love.

Rachel Ticotin (Doña Milla), Lela Loren (Flora), and Robert Beltran (Don Fermin) in Boleros for the Disenchanted. (Photo: Kevin Berne.)

Thirty-nine years later, in rural Alabama, act 2 foregrounds marriage, fidelity, and forgiveness. Not the idealized marriage imagined by the young Flora and Eusebio, this is a real, difficult marriage that demands sacrifice and compromise, as the older Flora and Eusebio talk about serving as volunteer marriage counselors for the local church; Eusebio being confined to his bed because of losing his legs to diabetes; Flora continually tending to his needs; their children, in the military or at college, never calling. Worse are Eusebio’s infidelities, admitted during hastily arranged last rites after dreaming that he would die by week’s end. Angry and hurt, Flora still stays with him, even after a stroke leaves him partially paralyzed and aphasiac. This vision of marriage is brutally honest and yet lovingly rendered, especially against the hardships of their lives. Funicello emphasized these hardships in the design: at right, Eusebio’s bed and a tiny television occupied the bedroom; at left, worn-out furniture filled the living room, the weeds of the dilapidated neighborhood visible through a window.

In plumbing this autobiography, Rivera returns to an intriguing subject in his writing: the father figure. Embittered by a miserable life, the father figure abuses and manipulates his wife and children in earlier Rivera plays, particularly Augie from Each Day Dies with Sleep. In Boleros for the Disenchanted, the father Don Fermin makes his first entrance, drunk and staggering, bringing this legacy with him: he hits his wife and removes his belt to strike Flora because the neighbors are gossiping about the family. But then something remarkable occurs: he begins crying and admits his failures as a husband and father. In Don Fermin, Rivera depicts a more nuanced, introspective father, and continues in this direction with the older Eusebio (Robert Beltran performed both roles). When confessing to the priest, Eusebio confronts...