Skip to main content

Miss You Like Hell at The Public Theater

I want to preface my thoughts on Miss You Like Hell with a personal note: stories involving mothers are typically my emotional kryptonite. It's why I still can't talk about The Other Place without crying, or why I sobbed during Next to Normal and Grey Gardens, and why I can't listen to "Stay With Me" or "Children and Art," as brilliant as they are. And so, Miss You Like Hell, the new topical musical by Pulitzer Prize winner Quiara Alegría Hudes and Erin McKeown, despite it's flaws, packs an emotional punch.

How could it not?

But...is it earned?

Yes and no. The concept of Miss You Like Hell isn't quite original but it's still compelling; an immigrant mother from Mexico, Beatriz, attempts to reconnect with her teenage daughter, Olivia, whom she has been estranged from for the last four years. The daughter is only sixteen but has essentially given up on herself (she's sexually promiscuous, has neglected her hygiene, and has even strongly considered suicide.) Oh, did I mention she has a blog, that, judging from what we know from the text, is pretty popular? (She at least has loyal readers that she refers to as "castaways.") So it's all a bit...cliched. And it quickly becomes a road trip musical, as Beatriz convinces Olivia to accompany her across country from Philadelphia to Los Angeles. Now road trip shows are always a little hit or miss because it's hard to make two people (or however many) interesting when they're sitting in a car. We can't see what they see, so the conceit doesn't work as well as it would on film. Hudes uses the scenes set in Beatriz's truck as a way to develop the relationship between the two women, and fill the audience in on backstory. Is it too much exposition? Not necessarily because they only tells us things we should know. But does it make compelling theater? Not always, no.

What does make Miss You Like Hell interesting is that Beatriz has ulterior motives. She is facing deportation for a minor drug charge from decades ago and needs Olivia to be her character witness. So Olivia battles with trying to comes to terms with the lack of relationship with her mother and whether or not she should help her remain in the country.

How can anyone not be moved by the predicaments faced by Beatriz and Olivia? If you strip away the teenage angst blog nonsense, the underdeveloped minor characters (they're not interesting or strong enough to really convince you they belong in the plot), you have a woman's last chance to connect with her daughter. She has lost so much time with her due to circumstances and is now faced with losing her forever. Daphne Rubin-Vegas as Beatriz does a wonderful job portraying the character's desperation while showing exactly why she lost control of the situation years ago.

But Miss You Like Hell plays on the sentiments of anyone who is disgusted by the current administration's attack on immigrants (such as yours truly). How could you not be angry or upset at the end when Beatriz is deported for a dumb reason? It is very immediate, true, but it is a bit manipulative. The rest of the show isn't particularly strong or developed (it felt like a workshop and not a fleshed out musical production) but you're going to remember exactly how you feel at the end because the ending is powerful. (It helps that the final number, the title song, is the best song in the score and the one you're going to remember.)

Miss You Like Hell is salvageable. There is a good musical there. But I think it deserves a better realized production. 
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Fireflies by Donja R. Love at the Atlantic Theater Company

Okay, look, I get it, two-handers are tough. You have two characters with which to tell your story, and you have to somehow tell this story with as little exposition as possible. You have to show, not tell. Are you listening, Donja Love? Love's current play, Fireflies , tells the story of a married African American couple in 1963. He's a preacher, traveling the southern part of the country to speak at the funerals of other African Americans who have died due to racial terrorism. (When the play begins, the church bombing that claimed the lives of four little girls in Birmingham has just occurs.) She's a doting and devoted housewife who goes so far as to write her husband's speeches and sermons for him. But what her husband, Charles, doesn't know is that she secretly smokes, she wants to abort the baby she's carrying, and she writes explicit letters to a woman she's in love with whom she only met once, briefly. Oh, and did I mention she, Olivia, has PTSD a...
Post a Comment
Read more

I Was Most Alive With You by Craig Lucas at Playwrights Horizons

There's something incredibly exciting (for me) about going to a show at Playwrights Horizons. I don't know what it is--maybe it's because two of my favorite theater-going experiences ever were there, Mr. Burns and The Christians, and every time I enter those doors on 42nd street, I think, "will this be another play just like those great ones?" Sadly, they rarely tend to be these days (although, for all their faults, I enjoyed Mankind and Log Cabin .) And for as ambitious as Craig Lucas' new play,  I Was Most Alive With You is, I can't help but say, "c'mon, Craig, less is more." Lucas sets out to write a play loosely based on the Book of Job, highlighting one man's suffering. This man, Ash, who is Jewish, is a successful TV writer (apparently the writer of the longest-running show of all time? No, he's not Matt Groening) who is a recovering addict and let's not forget, did time for domestic abuse. (His Gentile wife, Pleasant, ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Yerma by Simon Stone at the Park Avenue Armory

Simon Stone's new adaptation of Lorca's Yerma now playing at the Park Avenue Armory is one of the most interesting productions I've ever seen. Stone, who also directs, has created a unique vision and staging, and gets terrific performances by his cast (especially Billie Piper). Unfortunately his own adaptation lets the production down. Yerma has a simple plot: a woman wants to have a child, and the obsession over conceiving one completely takes over her life and ruins it. The Lorca original makes this a community and social issue; it is the woman's duty to provide her husband with an heir, and if she cannot, she will be ostracized by society. Stone's version has set it in the twenty-first century, a time during which is it not out of the ordinary for women to remain childless. Of course, some stigma still exists around women not becoming mothers (whether by choice or otherwise), no matter how much we tell ourselves that women have the choice to do whatever they wa...
Post a Comment
Read more