FIVE MORE SHOWS WE'VE CAUGHT AT THE HOLLYWOOD FRINGE FESTIVAL BY LYLE ZIMSKIND

'Til Sunday

Nairoby Otero plays three characters in her extraordinarily moving and perfectly realized one-woman play ‘Til Sunday, directed by Michael D’Angora, which takes place in the Cuban immigrant community of New Orleans and skips around between the years 1972 and 1985.
One of these is Claridad, a girl straddling two cultures: early in the play, she leaves Cuba for the US at age 2; by the end, she celebrates her quinceanera. Another is the girl’s mother, who has had to leave the island with her daughter, though not her husband. He remains behind, but hopes to join them soon. The play’s title refers to their biweekly Sunday phone calls back to him. The third character is Pepe, a gregarious cigar-smoking, dominoes-playing neighbor who readily pontificates about Cuban and American politics.

Switching frequently among these three roles, Otero memorably evokes the hardship of family separation and the difficult hope of better life in a new world. The mother’s calls back to her husband over the 13-year span of the play are rife with eager expectations of reunion that keep getting dashed. Claridad’s life as an immigrant kid isn’t too bad, but is full of difficult moments, like when she brings a meagerly populated family tree, padded with a picture of Pepe, for her school project. Or when her mother discovers she has lied about her family status to her friends in order to fit in better. Our own favorite moments in the show may have been Pepe’s charismatically engaging disquisitions about the Bay of Pigs, Castro’s shrewdness and America’s geopolitical fecklessness.

No description of this or that incident or event in ‘Til Sunday can do justice to the sheer holistic power of Otero’s play and her performance. There are no cheap laughs or gratuitous moments of pity, but plenty of acutely understated moments, like when Claridad suddenly catches herself pronouncing “Cuba” with an American accent. Or her mother’s regular updates to her absent husband about how Claridad is doing. It’s all heart-warming, but occasionally heart-searing. And certainly not to be missed by any Fringe-goer.