Mariela in the desert is a play based in the 1950's about a mother who tells her daughter, Blanca- who lives in Mexico city- to come back home to help bury their dead father. Blanca arrives back in the desert with her lover, Adam, to find her father not dead, but dying. The family must struggle with the past, secrets are revealed, and a son’s ghost seems to roam the empty desert. It was an emotional drama that had its spikes of energy and excitement, but there were the few times I did not feel the emotion needed from the actors.
Though the play did run in 2005, Mariela in the Desert's writer, Karen Zacarias, felt that it needed improvements. So with the help of Bruce K. Sevy, they wrote a whole new script, keeping the same story line. Though I have never seen the original play, I felt this version needed more emotion. Or maybe it was just the actors, but I never really felt like they meant it. Jean-Pierre Serret, who was Carlos, is the one actor you could really feel the emotion emanating from, and I really believed he was a boy who was scared and sad. But for the rest of the cast, it really took them along to find the emotion necessary. Yetta Gottesman, as Mariela, built the emotion really well in the second act, but the first act was a bit bland and silly at parts.
The story was a bit predictable early on, and they tried to reveal the story bit by bit, but the emotion really didn't give that feeling of hidden jealousy and grudges. I felt as though it took a while for the pace of the play, and the underlying emotions, to pick up. But at the end it really let all the emotions burst out and everything felt alive, which really made the play both exciting and emotional.
All together I felt the show was distant, but kept alive by actors Jean-Pierre Serret and Geno Silvia. Also, Yetta Gottesman did a great job of holding the suspense until it all came out like a volcano. I would suggest it to a friend, but not for the impatient and short attention span people out there.
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