Middle the the World, a world premier at BCT

Or: Non Zero Sum

Two economists meet in a Manhattan ride share. Out of such meetings are worlds sent spinning. Glenn (Christian Telesmar) a high flying finance bro who back flipped his way up by his bootstraps, wants to get to a club to drink with his buddies. Victoria (Cheryl Umaña) is an exile from Ecuador, living a frozen life, estranged from her family and her country, out to collect her pay and get through another nightmare of New York Ubery. Over nine months, through the past and the present, sweeping together in whirl of liminal spaces, they will break and shape each others lives.

Playwright Juan José Alfonso has created a play of continual surprises, twists and turns. The jaded audience member may think they glimpse where the story is headed, but each moment still hits as totally unexpected. Alfonso also layers questions of politics and power, of money and responsibility, with the eternal questions of what to do with our wild desiring hearts, or our impossible wishes to do good in the world.

He’s also done a remarkable job with character. Neither Victoria nor Glenn are everything they seem to be, and both actors slip into their complicated roles with ease. Telesmar buries Glenn’s eternal life under posturing and mirroring, correcting to his environment. Even when Glenn seems to be at his most passionate, his most vulnerable, Glenn shows us glimmers of the true soul beneath, peaking out behind the mask. Umaña, relishes in Victoria: a fiercely smart, driven person, wracked with anguish yet still on top of her game. Neither of them is a fool or martyr, a hero or a villain.

They’re born up by three supporting casts, each as richly veined, as contradictory as our principals. Warren (Dan Lin), Glenn’s brother in arms, is electric and neon, constantly dancing around the stage, perfectly at ease, his characters smarmishinss and cool reliance, still somehow endears us to him. Jessica Ives Morris bounces as Barbara, Victoria’s lawyer, and a number of other bit parts that she performs with underhanded surety. And Leandro Cano, as Bob, an operative of the United States State Department, laid back paternal menace, so wonderful summates US fringe policy: Someone used to calling all the shots, who’s perfectly willing to go the distance, and still knows in his heart that’s one of the angels.

As the scenes crash together and New York and Quito slide in and around through a series of projections (not my favorite theatrical devise, personally, but here executed with skill and poignancy), Alfonso gives us a series of compromises, people struggling their best for decency, and often settling for what the want, though not happily. Middle of the World is a play about compromise, but it makes no compromises on its own behalf, being bitter and sharp and smart to its very last.