Rafael Beato (left) is Roan, and Monica Steuer is his mother Julia in Marco Antonio Rodriguez’s Bloom.
Alfred Hitchcock famously described the basis of suspense as a situation in which there is a ticking time bomb under a table. The audience knows it is only a matter of minutes in which the bomb will explode, and they sit on the edge of their seats in anticipation of the outcome. Applying this principle, Marco Antonio Rodriguez initially establishes a veritable minefield in his new play Bloom, currently running at the IATI Theater. In the totalitarian world in which the play is set, a mother has been ordered to kill her son, and if she does not do so within precisely one hour, unimaginable horrors will follow.
The premise is fascinating and chilling, but Rodriguez is his own literary saboteur. Along the way to the anticlimactic conclusion, the exchanges between the mother and son systematically defuse each moment of rising tension.
Tensions flare as mother and son are faced with cruel and impossible choices.
Appropriately, the play begins with an explosion of sorts. The lights come up on a dingy, sparse, and claustrophobic apartment (effectively designed by Lynne Koscielniak). Battered and bruised, Roan (Rafael Beato) sits sullenly at a kitchen table with a bowl of soup in front of him. His mother Julia (Monica Steuer), wearing a ragged bathrobe over a slip (Michael Piatkowski designed the costumes), is in the middle of a rage. Banging pots and pans, she curses her life as a health care worker, and in particular, she rails against her uncooperative diabetic client. Julia gradually trains her wrath on Roan, who thereby accuses his mother of turning him over to the authorities for his supposed sexual immorality. He had been beaten and tortured for almost two weeks before being released.
Julia places the blame on Roan for defiling the nation with his blatant and public homosexuality. Roan reveals, though, that he does not categorize himself as gay, as his mother presumes, but as pansexual. When Julia asks him what letter of the alphabet soup he identifies—or as she articulates, “L-G-B-T-Q- LMNOP”—, Roan matter-of-factly responds, “I don’t see things as male or female.” Instead, he explains that he has found spiritual love with a group of people who run the gamut of genders.
This free-spirited attitude has made him a cancer to the state (unnamed in the play, but it could be any oppressively authoritarian country), and Julia is sentenced to excise the growth. The officials are just outside the apartment, and if she does not take his life, her entire extended family will be rounded up and destroyed. There is a reference to Abraham and Isaac, one of the Bible’s cruelest stories, involving the test of one’s faith through filial sacrifice, and it seems the play might take a similar direction. It doesn’t. With just 60 minutes before the reckoning, the mother and son smoke weed, dance, and act out stories that Roan had composed as an adolescent.
Beato in an impassioned moment of reckoning. Photographs by Andres Bohorquez.
The metaphorical bomb stops ticking almost as soon as it’s set, and the play raises questions that immediately undermine any suspense. For instance, Julia reacts with disgust when she imagines Roan as part of “some kind of orgy cult,” but why then does she regale her son with stories about her own sexual exploits, including one with her whistling genitalia? And while Roan vigorously says that he is not gay, he is arrested for being with a man under a bridge. Was this just a ruse to get back at his mother? Additionally, if the oppressors took so much enjoyment torturing Roan in prison, why would they send him back to his mother to finish the job without perversely monitoring the deed in action?
Rather than emerging from the text, moments of suspense are manufactured by unsubtle lighting effects (designed by Miguel Valderrama) and threatening music (by Michael Hernandez). Alternatively, the apartment’s door, with its array of locks, chains, and a make-shift barricade, is much more persuasive in conveying the sense of danger that awaits outside.
As directed by Victoria Pérez, the actors do good work finding the various shades in their characters. At first the emotional and vocal volume is pitched too high, but as the play proceeds, Beato and Steuer soften, and the fraught relationship becomes clearer.
The play’s title refers to the possibility of flowers thriving in the most uncompromising soil. The terrain on which Rodriguez has built his cautionary tale is potent and fertile, and with further care and judicious dramaturgical weeding, Bloom might just flourish.
Bloom plays through May 8 at the IATI Theater (64 E. 4th St). For tickets, COVID guidelines, and performance schedule, visit iatitheater.org.
