Review: Roxana Ortega's Am I Roxie? Looks at the Burden of Caring for an Ill Parent

The Geffen Playhouse is launching its new season with playwright Roxana Ortega’s Am I Roxie?, a tender one-person confessional about parenthood, obligations, and finding love in the most traumatic places. Portraying a version of herself, as well as her family members and friends, Ortega recollects and reconceptualizes the six years she spent caring for her ill mother.

The Roxie of the play struggles in Los Angeles to be a working actress. She has put love, marriage, and children on hold to focus on a career she cherishes, even if it’s in the beginning stages. Her mother, an immigrant from South America, once acted in a local Peruvian play, and Ortega wants to carry that torch for a parent who gave it all up to a family.

Her life gets complicated when her father, the caregiver for her unstable mother, passes away. As the only sibling not raising kids, Roxie finds the burden dropped in her lap. Denying her cultural guilt, she puts her mother in a nursing home and Roxie begins to juggle her tenuous career with caring for her mother. As a rhythm in their relationship emerges, Roxie discovers a wonderful, if inconsistent, best friend. The exhaustion of tending to someone unpredictable leads to a relationship unbound by memory or prudence.

Caring for someone debilitated by disease can be petrifying. The heartbreak, the nursing home ordeals, or the violent outbursts, can fray even the strongest relations. To bear witness to Roxie’s uplifting experience with her mom brings pastel to a black and white nightmare.

As an author, Ortega culls her past experiences with some playwright pixie dust to place the audience in her corner. Unfortunately, this current version distances the audience by undercutting tender moments with easy jokes as punctuation.  It’s as if the audience is leaning in and the play is pushing them away. Stand-up routines utilize repetition to dig into the venom of a laugh, but as a fully-realized play, this technique feels cheap and isolating.

Ortega portrays over 10 roles, not including herself and her mother, but there needs to be more modulation between the characters for the audience to envisage them.  Too many sound similar. When playing the version of herself or her mother, she reveals insecurities, determination, and quirkiness that make the two major characters worth the investment. She also has a lovely operatic voice.

Director Bernardo Cubría visualizes Roxie’s struggles with a set by Efren Delgadillo Jr. that includes an ant’s view of her mother’s closet. It’s filled with pinned notes desperately trying to keep track of the few memories she had left at the time, and a rising plank to simulate Mount Kilimanjaro, the site of a major epiphany.  The projections allow the audience to see Ortega in early commercials and a visual joke of her dead at the bottom of the stairs, which she punctuates with a Bernard Herrmann Psycho violin string.

As a world premiere, Am I Roxie? contains solid building blocks for a moving tale about death, dying, and building relationships in those final moments. Though elements are counterproductive to the symbiosis she could have with the audience, these are surmountable issues in the future.