Theatre in Review: The Surgeon and Her Daughter (Colt Coeur at Theatre 154)

	Eden Marryshow. Photo: Maria Baranova

The Surgeon and Her Daughter is a great big hunk of playwriting that all but dares you to digest it. It is packed with outsized emotions, brimming with arias, and crowded with characters who have plenty to get off their chests. It's also unwieldy, following its plot down so many blind alleys that one worries it will never get anywhere at all. And yet, just when it seems he has hit a dead end, playwright Chris Gabo offers yet another vivid slice of dialogue or another twist that (however unlikely) keeps one engaged. It's a mess, but a lively one, introducing a writer who, working in other media, has a voice all his own.

The surgeon of the title is Mohammed-Ahmed, a middle-aged African who wanders into a Times Square bar where he meets "her," a/k/a Mariana, a single mother with a military career. (Gabo is vague on that last point, leaving unclear what she does and in which branch she serves; he also seemingly alters her status from retired to on duty as needed. A little explanation would go a long way here.) Theirs is a memorable encounter, and not just because Mohammed-Ahmed thinks, incorrectly, that he is having a heart attack. Mariana manages to talk him down from his health-induced panic, captivating him in the process.

Indeed, Mariana is a real motormouth, and not the last one we will encounter before the play is over; some of her dialogue is so ripe you could pluck it off a vine and bite into it. "I am competitively hot," she notes. "I've been breaking boys' necks every sunny day in Ozone Park since Dapper Dan was perfecting the cross stitch. You don't wanna see me in a black bra and a wife-beater." And just in case you were wondering, she adds, "I can be tender. I'm soft...I'm a fucking dandelion in heat." Such remarks have a destabilizing effect on Mohammed-Ahmed, who, fascinated by this flamboyant creature, warns, "If I am honest, I am afraid that it would take me till sunrise to get...hard;" nevertheless, they head off for a life-changing night of sex of the sort usually found only in the plays of John Patrick Shanley.

It's fair to say that Gabo's sometimes poetic, sometimes purple style is indebted to Shanley and perhaps Stephen Adly Guirgis as well. Such influences extend to his cast of characters. Marian lives in Queens with her feisty, smart-mouthed adult daughters: Cecilia, who is the take-charge type, and Ashley, an aspiring dancer, whose default attitude is snark. With one look at mom, they want to know the details of her big night out. ("This is not Gilmore Girls. We're not doing that," Mariana warns.) But their banter turns sour when Mariana announces that she has been called up for another tour of duty. Cecilia, who clearly learned oratory at her mother's knee, replies, "There is a limit to how long you get to nurture this conception of yourself as a good person -- this bifurcated existence where you tell yourself, 'Hey, I'm a good mom, I raise two beautiful girls by day and by night I'm execute the orders of a fucking genocidal empire'." Around this kitchen table, they don't take prisoners.

Back in Manhattan, Mohammed-Ahmed may have been a surgeon back home -- he has a terrible history, which Gabo is loath to go into -- but now he carries a sandwich board advertising a Midtown Irish bar run by "Mr. O'Halleron," who is, in fact, a Mexican immigrant. (As he notes, market research reveals that paying patrons prefer shamrocks to tacos.) O'Halleron, the worst boss since Ebeneezer Scrooge closed his account book, drips with contempt for everyone, reserving his extra special reserve of venom for Mohammed-Ahmed and his sidekick, Isaiah, a seemingly street person who uses a wheelchair. Then again, Isaiah, who, like everyone else onstage, spouts colorful dialogue a mile a minute, and has a complicated, tragic backstory that is best not described in detail. (But it involves, of all people, Pina Bausch. You didn't see that coming, did you?)

Following a shocker first-act curtain (which, again, I'd better not reveal), Gabo cranks up his plot machinery to bring most of these characters together in what may or may not prove to be an ad-hoc family. But, as each character takes the stage, he or she steals focus, holding forth at such length that the play struggles to gather forward momentum. You can make a case that Isaiah and Mr. O'Halleron belong to another play altogether. Why are we learning so much about Isaiah's life when Mohammed-Ahmed's troubled history is much more germane to the play's action? Gabo is also fairly shameless at deploying coincidences; given the way these characters run into each other, you'd never know that Times Square teems with total strangers.

If director Adrienne Campbell-Holt can't pump up the overall drama, she stages the script's many one-on-one confrontations with brio. Fortunately, her actors have the technical skills (and lung power) needed to tackle their characters' luxuriantly written speeches. Liza Fernandez is a pistol as Mariana, who, among other things, knows how to land a man for the night. Brian D. Coats invests Mohammed-Ahmed with enormous dignity flecked with unappeasable sorrow, especially when he turns to Allah in anguish, wondering why he is still alive. Eden Marryshow's Isaiah shines in some of the play's best bits, whether shaming the noxious Mr. O'Halleron (Johnny Sanchez, lending a poisonous vitality to a one-note villain), or calling out Ashley for unprofessional behavior that includes wandering drunkenly through the Theatre District. This reprimand is especially satisfying: Kana Seiki can't quite put the bellicose Ashley over, nor can Yadira Guevara as Cecilia, but the trouble is with the writing: Faced with grief, their behavior comes across as entitled and almost entirely lacking in compassion for others. I suspect that Gabo doesn't have the same insight into young people as he has for the other, more weathered characters onstage.

The production has the right gritty look, thanks to Tatiana Kahvegian's set design, which employs a cube placed on a turntable. Reza Behjat's lighting expands and contracts the playing area as needed, meeting the mood of each scene. Sarita P. Fellows' costumes are solid character studies. Salvador Zamora's sound design includes the noise of New York streets, ambient voices in a bar, and a rainstorm, as well as several music selections in varying styles.

Once everyone has said his or her piece, and Gabo has assembled nearly everybody in Mariana's kitchen, he gives Mohammed-Ahmed the final word, evoking a backstory about which one would like to know much more; still, the play ends on a suitably dramatic climax that helps dispel some of its earlier longueurs. Anyway, it's a singular experience: The Surgeon and Her Daughter is equal parts fairy tale and nightmare, a story pulled from some of today's most distressing headlines, written in a style that is both gripping and exhausting. It talks one's ear off, and yet it left me eager to see what Gabo does next. --David Barbour