STAGE WEST: "Stir" at Old Globe Theatre

Joel Perez and Melinda Lopez in "Stir."                                                                      Photo by Rich Soublet II

            In the thick of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I like many others found myself in isolation, I wondered: When this was all “over,” if it ever would be, how would artists, including theater makers, respond? Would there be a slew of real-life-inspired fictional stories about the darkest days and loneliest nights, about the losses and sacrifices, about the struggle to survive an unprecedented viral enemy?
            More than four years after the onset of the pandemic, the answer is … no. There have been a few notable attempts to document artistically what we all went through, such as the collaborative novel “Fourteen Days” or Jodi Picoult’s “Wish You Were Here.” “The COVID Confessions” by Louisa Vilardi was a New Play Exchange production, and Richard Nelson’s “What Do We Need to Talk About?” from 2020 was hailed by The New Yorker as “the first great original play of quarantine.”
            But I ask you: Have you seen or read any of these?
            I’ve been considering this for some time and am drawing closer and closer to the conclusion that rather than attempting to reflect on life during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, creatives have decided to do what many of us have chosen to do as well: move on. For some, the years between 2020 and 2022 were deeply painful and best not exploited as “art.” For some others, including theater makers, it’s better to move forward than to re-examine the past.
          The cost to live theater and to theater companies in general from COVID isolation is well documented. But some positives did come out of having to reinvent the wheel in order to keep the flame alive, artistically and financially. One of them was experimenting with Zoom technology to present virtual theater to audiences stuck at home.
            That’s how a one-act drama by Melinda Lopez and Joel Perez (who also co-star) began: as a Zoom production originating at the Huntington Theatre Company where Lopez is artist-in-residence. What was originally called “The Black Beans Project” taps into all the devastations and disorientations of COVID isolation while also telling an intimate story of family.
            Its potential recognized by Old Globe Artistic Director Barry Edelstein, “The Black Beans Project” would be workshopped as a live play at the theater’s Powers New Voices Festival. Now a world-premiere production, the retitled “Stir” is onstage at the Globe in the Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre space. Marcela Lorca directs.
            Make no mistake, “Stir” has a pandemic foundation: Siblings Mariana (Lopez) and Henry (Perez) communicate throughout the 80-minute show via Zoom. (Not literally, but much of the time they are looking into the screens of laptop computers.) The worst of COVID lockdown is over and vaccines are available, but both Mariana and Henry are still isolated – she in her Buffalo home, alone after the departure of her husband Carlos (the reason for that is made out to be a big reveal later), he sharing a place with their viejo but sprightly Papi (Al Rodrigo) in an Orlando retirement home. Their mother has passed away (during COVID but not from it).
            Mariana and her younger brother connect virtually, ostensibly to cook up in each other’s kitchens (niftily designed at the Globe by the ingenious Diggle) their mother’s secret and wonderful black beans recipe. Well, Mariana knows the recipe and Henry is kinda comically learning as they go through the cooking process.
            As expected, the beans and the preparation of them are a pretext for the dramatic revelations and admissions – and conflagrations – that ensue over the course of this slowly simmering one-act. I never saw the original Zoom iteration of this production. Like most Zoom theater I watched during COVID isolation, it must have seemed very talky and claustrophobic. Not so with this stage production, where not merely the business of chopping and slicing and stirring but also the actors moving in and around the two cleverly mobile “kitchens” works to create a piece that is very live. These are working kitchens too – you can smell the onions from anywhere in the theater.
            Conflicts major and less so abound in “Stir,” a pot full of crises. The chief ingredient is grief. Because of the enforced isolation of the pandemic, neither sibling (nor their father) was able to formally lay the beloved family matriarch to rest. Her ashes wait in a closet at the retirement home. Henry it turns out is most tormented by this. At once haunted and soothed by a memory of a family camping trip, he becomes more and more determined to do right by his mother. Mariana, a busy tax expert, missed her last opportunity to visit her mother before the pandemic arrived and is as such ridden with self-recrimination. As for Papi, his strategy is live for the moment. Though he misses the woman who first beguiled him in Miami’s Little Havana, he’s got his dominoes and friends and Fox News (ugh) to keep him going.
            Where “Stir” overreaches is overcomplicating the recipe. While the story never loses sight of its arc – a family separated physically and emotionally by not just COVID but by the loss of its dearest guiding light – it addresses seemingly every other aspect of Mariana and Henry’s troubled lives. Her wayward spouse and grown gringa daughters. His “emotionally unavailable” romantic history as a gay man. Her COVID-initiated and ongoing agoraphobia. His frustration with and resentment about living with his father. Her obsession with work. His not having any.
            To be fair, if we learned one thing about those Zoom conversations we had with each other it was that closeup-to-closeup we found ourselves sometimes rambling to fill the silences. That’s how “Stir” feels at times. Got to keep the convo moving.
            There is comic relief now and then, which also feels very Zoom-y. And the cast is excellent. Lopez, who starred in the Globe’s one-woman play “Mala” two years ago, carries this production, and the slings and arrows of Mariana’s life as such have emotional authenticity. Perez’s is the flashier, funnier role, which he does well by, and in mainly cameo appearances onstage (until a rather strained, dreamlike sequence near the end of the play) Rodrigo is delightful as Papi. It’s a character that wasn’t in the early versions of the play; its inclusion was inspired.
            Dominoes is the metaphor for “Stir,” the game having been not only the first impetus for the parents’ relationship but the go-to glue that kept the financially poor family together for years. The dominoes are the “bones” of the family, Papi tells us. They allow this play’s characters to escape for a little while their pain but also to honor their family roots and the love that made them grow.
            You could actually take COVID-19 out of “Stir” and still have a meaningful play about family, loss and love. But somebody has to say something about how our shared global nightmare took its toll in so many ways. That is part if not all of Lopez and Perez’s play.
            Food for thought.
           “Stir” runs through May 26 at the Old Globe’s Sheryl and Harvey White Theatre in Balboa Park.