Review: TACO TOWN at Miners Alley Performing Arts Center

Miner’s Alley Performing Art Center was freezing on opening night of Taco Town. Not “I wish I’d brought a cardigan” freezing—the theatre provided complimentary blankets to audience members apparently accustomed to enduring this particular climatic condition. Amid the arctic blast, Luke Sorge’s new workplace comedy brings together a crew of fast-food employees approaching their collective breaking point. Sorge assembles the makings of an interesting character study, but uneven tone and staging leave the production feeling underdeveloped. As for why the theatre’s HVAC problem couldn’t be fixed rather than accessorized, well, that remains a mystery.

Taco Town follows a group of fast-food workers fed up with the piss-poor treatment they receive from their franchise owner, Dustin. He is sexist, verbally abusive, and, as one employee puts it, “low-key racist.” When tensions finally boil over, the workers lock down their Taco Town location and stumble, somewhat accidentally, into a strike. From there, the play takes on a Breakfast Club-like structure, allowing its characters to reveal the circumstances that brought them behind the counter and the complicated reasons some can walk away while others still need Taco Town to make ends meet. By the end, the employees have begun to imagine lives beyond the restaurant while Dustin is left counting his ill-gotten gains, revealing just how remarkably small the little world he controls really is.

Sorge, a local playwright with several successful productions behind him, has created compelling characters, but Taco Town still feels closer to an exploratory draft than a finished play. Its tone fluctuates between broad, nearly farcical comedy and earnest sentiment without either mode consistently finding the right key. Most difficult are a series of dramatic backstory monologues that halt the momentum so characters can stand and explain themselves to the audience. Len Matheo’s direction exacerbates the problem by frequently sending the other actors fleeing toward the voms, clearing the stage for conspicuous capital-M Moments rather than allowing these revelations to emerge from the messy relationships the production establishes so well. I wanted to watch these characters collide, rather than repeatedly stop the action to learn what makes them tick.

The actors are at their best when given exactly that opportunity. Maya Ferrario leads the ensemble as Kym with an anger that seems to originate somewhere in her gut, filling the space without tipping into theatrical bluster. Ethan Hoover’s nerdy Isaac is a delight and proves particularly adept at navigating the play’s broad comedy, finding absurdity without resorting to pratfalls and grounding his character’s antics in recognizable stakes. Jysten Atom brings a weary credibility to Roddy, the one exhausted employee who seems to actually know how to do his job. Together, the Taco Town front-line crew develops a genuinely convincing shared language. There are flashes of affection, irritation, shorthand, and understanding that make these people feel like coworkers who have spent far too many hours trapped behind the same counter. Even their spats carry the comfort of familiarity.

Brett Mack has the considerably less enviable job of playing Dustin, a character constructed to absorb nearly all of the audience’s ire, and he certainly succeeds on that front. His performance, however, occasionally feels stiffer and less connected to the actors around him. Where the Taco Town crew shares an easy rhythm, Dustin sometimes seems to be operating in a different theatrical register. That disconnect makes his scenes feel less integrated into the lived-in world the rest of the cast creates.

Reader Reviews

To post a comment, you must register and login.

Need more Colorado Theatre News in your life?
Sign up for all the news on the Summer season, discounts & more...