Review: ¡VOS! at Contemporary American Theater Festival

“Vos,” in Porteño, the dialect of Buenos Aires, is reportedly a somewhat idiosyncratic word, not a total equivalent of the French “vous,” in that it’s not optionally plural, but only singular in meaning. A distinctively local Buenos Aires word, in other words. It’s also the title of Christina Pumariega’s play ¡Vos!, now in production at the Contemporary American Theater Festival in Shepherdstown, WV. As one might expect from the title, then, it’s a play set in and imbued with the atmosphere of Buenos Aires.  The deeper resonances of the title, however, will only reveal themselves at the end, after the audience has immersed itself in a complicated (but very rewarding) work. 

It’s set in two eras. The first is 1975-1976, a moment when Argentina’s infamous Dirty War is being waged, with demonstrations mounted under deadly fire and secret prisons and terror and disappearances. The other era is the facially more tranquil period of 2015-2016, when American women could visit the city to obtain in vitro fertilization comparatively inexpensively, and not have to worry about being caught up in mass carnage. That said, it would be impossible for such a national trauma as the Dirty War not to touch in some way the experience of any visitor, even forty years after the fact. The experience of Annie (Francesca Santodomingo), visiting from America to wind up some family affairs and try getting her own family started, is no exception. As Faulkner famously observed about the U.S. South, “The past is never dead. It’s not even the past.” The aphorism certainly also fits the Buenos Aires of this play.

Bit by bit, we learn that Annie’s life has been wrapped in mystery from its beginning, in that, while she was born in Argentina, her mother had fled to the U.S. when Annie was but a few months old. Meanwhile, the life of Annie’s somewhat older fertility specialist, Dr. Cossi (Maggie Bofill), is somehow connected (though we don’t initially know quite how or why) with events from the Dirty War period involving Tomas, a charismatic leftist teacher and political leader, Ana, his assistant and occasional lover (also portrayed by Maggie Bofill), and a younger woman named Sofia (Francesca Santodomingo again), who grows quite close to Ana, has also slept with the prolific Tomas, and may have a clandestine relationship with the right-wing security forces. One mystery the play asks the audience to confront is exactly how all of these apparently disparate ingredients could coalesce into one coherent tale. Because it’s obvious they will – and they do.

It’s my belief that the one weakness in this intricately-constructed play is that the eventual explanation that aligns all these pieces is a little too complicated; I devoted several hours to going back over the script and working out what I had missed the first time through. It’s all there when you look hard enough; playwright Pumariega has played fair. True, at the final curtain, I was still barking up a number of wrong trees in trying to reconstruct what I’d seen. But even though I was aware I did not yet fully understand the plot at that point, I also already knew that this play had been a powerful emotional experience, one I would have delightedly seen again, even before I’d mastered the fact pattern. 

And that’s because the fact pattern may be important, but not paramount. More important than the intricacies of the plot are the deep truths ¡Vos! tells. It deals with the horror, depletion and numbness that living in a regime that is turning plutocratic and violent can induce, and the heroism involved in standing up to it. ¡Vos! also deals with the way that a later generation must come to terms with such a time, as the time itself devolves into history rather than lived experience. Separately, ¡Vos! is an account and presentation of female solidarity in the realm of obstetric matters, of the professionally loving relationship between an outstanding physician and a sensitive patient. At the end, much of the focus plays on that, simply on a tale of light succeeding darkness, partly through medical intervention. And, also at the end, there is one surprise that intensifies the impact of that succession.

“Vos,” it turns out, isn’t a plural pronoun, exactly, but in the conclusion of this play it is used to identify multiple women with each other, including all of the characters portrayed by the two actors. They will all come to be one, in the light of the connections they share and their common experience of the times they inhabit.
When two performers are each required to toggle rapidly between two characters, with different accents and completely different stories, they must be quick-change artists not only of the body but of the soul. Santodomingo and Bofill absolutely rise to the challenge.

But of course it’s not just up to the two of them. Bringing this ambitious story to the stage with only two performers of course requires the talents of a multitude, foremost among whom, probably, is director Kimberly Senior, whose pacing seemed flawless to me, and Kelly Colburn, the projections designer, who conjured up images and video footage from a tumultuous time and then ofttimes squeezed many of them down to fit into some narrow spaces. Dialect and vocal coach Kirsten Trump must have been busy as well, helping each of the actors with two very different accents and linguistic backgrounds. Designers Afsaneh Aayani (scenic), Anshuman Bhatia (lighting), and Caroline Eng (sound) all collaborated (along with Ms. Colburn) on the two shows CATF is doing in the Marinoff Theater (the other being My Favorite Sociopath), and made the space (physical and aural) work well in each of them. Costume Designer Shahrzad Mazaheri made the characters’ quick changes work on a technical level.
There are no duds in this CATF season, but if you’re going to only one show, this would be the one to pick.

¡Vos!, by Christina Pumariega, directed by Kimberly Senior, presented by the Contemporary American Theater Festival, at Marioff Theater, 62 West Campus Drive, Shepherdstown, WV, through August 2. Tickets $45-$75 at 681-240-CATF (2283). Adult language and situations, gunfire, and infertility.
Production photo by Seth Freeman.

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