There is a very personal tragedy at the heart of John Leguizamo’s play, The Other Americans, which this underpowered production attempts to connect to the bigger themes of how racism and a feverish pursuit of the American Dream jointly capsize a family.
As well as writing the play (Public Theater, to Oct. 26), Leguizamo also plays its 59-year-old patriarch, Nelson Castro, a Colombian-American owner of a chain of laundromats. Nelson is initially full of avuncular swagger, but Leguizamo ensures—after Nelson shows off some impressive dance moves—that we soon see a darkness to him, a sour-grapes sneer to anything and anyone that displeases him.
Nelson might seem initially like the life and soul of a party (dancing first to “The Beat Goes On” by Whispers), but as the play progresses he becomes more bellicose, insensitive, and obnoxious. He prefers scorn, flimsily masked as joshing and needling, to listening.
Nelson and wife Patti (Luna Lauren Velez) live in Forest Hills, Queens. On paper they’ve moved up in the world from Jackson Heights (“the upgrade we deserved,” Nelson tells Patti), and the buzz, community, and nights out on Junction Boulevard, all of which Patti misses acutely. Nelson does not. Where they live now, for him, shows the twinned pinnacles of facing down bigotry and social ascent. They seem happy. Patti is preparing food, and dancing with her husband to “I’d Do Anything for You” by Denroy Morgan.
We also meet Eddie (Bradley James Tejeda), who works for Nelson’s half-sister Norma (a sharply excellent Rosa Evangelina Arredondo), who runs half the family laundromat empire and who sees Nelson for who he is. Eddie is about to marry Nelson and Patti’s daughter, Toni (Rebecca Jimenez).
When the play opens Nelson and Patti are awaiting the return of 20-year-old son Nick (Trey Santiago-Hudson) from a mental health facility. Just as the fussy set feels cluttered, so does the story—there is a lot of kindling, but very little sustained spark. Nick seems understandably muted on his return from the facility. Nelson wants Nick back in the swim of the world; he won’t spare a moment to consider what his son may have gone through.
Patti (played with warmth by Velez) wants to ensure Nick has all the space he needs to recover. Adding to the complications is Nelson’s wish to upgrade the laundromats, rather than selling them, and wanting Norma to loan him some money to do so.
Leguizamo has said he wanted to write a “great American tragedy,” putting a Latino family center stage; he has been at the vanguard of campaigning for increased Latin representation on stage and screen for many years, including in his own shows: Mambo Mouth, Spic-O-Rama, Freak (for which he won an Emmy Award, and was Tony-nominated), Sexaholix…A Love Story, Ghetto Klown (based on his memoir, Pimps, Hos, Playa Hatas, and All the Rest of My Hollywood Friends: My Life), and his excellent 2017 Broadway show Latin History for Morons. In 2018, he received a Special Tony Award.
The politics within The Other Americans are more baked-in than volubly debated. As its darkness gathers pace, so do the Arthur Miller vibes (particularly All My Sons and Death of a Salesman). We see Nelson not respond to his son’s suffering, and we see that he’s so used to hustling hard—to having to do so to build something of his own in a racist America, he would say—that one huge deception connects his business and greed directly to a racist attack Nick suffered that led to his breakdown and his current fragile state.
If the point of the play is that racism not only poisons but also corrupts, the play muddles this by giving characters slices of exposition, though not enough space to reveal their own depths. The story ambles, rather than surprises.
The play also makes Nelson utterly irredeemable and inexplicable. Leguizamo gives no space or quarter to his character to fully reveal himself, even as—because of his behavior—he loses everyone he loves.
Leguizamo and Nelson’s best moment comes near the end, with the character, eyes glazed, head bowed, in ashen-faced silence. The Other Americans needs more of these textured moments to help connect the dots of its characters, plot, and bigger themes.
In one notable way, the play is impressive. Leguizamo has written for himself a character who—apart from some of Nelson’s jokes and all his dance moves—is grindingly unsympathetic. Leguizamo doesn’t even give Nelson a stirring speech of self-justification. He just drags the patriarch down further and further until the audience, rather like his family, can stand no more of him. That’s bold writing for any author, let alone one who is playing a protagonist of his own creation.
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