Review: The Other Americans and the Profound Loneliness of Dad

There’s a moment near the very end of John Leguizamo’s bracing family drama, The Other Americans, when the protagonist, played by Leguizamo, briefly surrenders to overwhelming grief. His heaving, deeply human sorrow lasts only a few seconds before he gathers himself and, forming two fists, crushes those genuine feelings. This might seem like strange behavior to some theatergoers; who is there to witness his moment of weakness but us? But to many of the men in the audience, it will undoubtedly feel painfully familiar—a survival reflex learned at a young age that one cannot shake, even in solitude. At least, that’s how I experienced it.

Now making its New York debut at the Public Theater, The Other Americans is a radical departure for Leguizamo, an accomplished dramatic screen actor whose work as a playwright has hitherto come in the form of light solo comedies like Ghetto Klown and Latin History for Morons. With The Other Americans, he digs deep into the traumas and expectations driving American men to both success and ruin, forces that are particularly concentrated in the psyches of those whose families have only recently chosen to become American.

Nelson Castro (Leguizamo) is the heir to a chain of laundromats in Queens. It is 1998 and he is living in a single-family home in Forest Hills with his wife, Patti (Luna Lauren Velez, motherly with a kick), and daughter, Toni (Rebecca Jimenez), who helps him manage the matts. Toni will soon marry Eddie (a charmingly dorky Bradley James Tejeda), while Nelson is considering an offer from a developer to purchase his business. Outwardly, he’s living the dream—at least, the one conjured by his father, an immigrant from Colombia.

But Nelson suspects his sister, Norma (Rosa Evangelina Arredondo, arriving like an alien from Manhattan), inherited the better half of the kingdom, leaving him the “hood” locations. He knows he could improve them with enough capital, but he cannot secure a bank loan, “cause my name is Castro and not MacMann,” he reasons. He’s especially bitter that Norma is leveraging her success for an expansion into the Los Angeles market. If only she would invest that money in him, he knows he could leave something even better to his son, Nick (Trey Santiago-Hudson), whose return home after a stint in a psychological facility is the reason the whole family has gathered. As is often the case in plays like this, drinks are poured, tea is spilled, and dark family secrets bubble to the surface.

Director Ruben Santiago-Hudson does an excellent job navigating the oscillating tone of the script, with comedy and tragedy cohabiting uncomfortably yet functionally—as so many things do in New York. Leguizamo is particularly deft at showing us how Nelson’s full-contact humor (a South American pastime) is both a source of levity and an outlet for his genuine disappointment. We begin to suspect that his barbs are so sharp because this was one of the few avenues of expression he was encouraged to develop.

Scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado conveys middle-class suffocation with his overstuffed set, complete with swimming pool squeezed into the tiny yard. We know the place from the moment we see the window dressing and backdrop of sturdy little brick houses, but we’re unclear on the date, as Queens has long existed in a time warp. Luckily, a Nokia phone strapped to Eddie’s belt offers a clue (believable turn-of-the-century costumes by Kara Harmon).

But why was it important for Leguizamo to set his play in the late ’90s? I suspect it has something to do with the changing demographics of the neighborhood and the need for Forest Hills to be majority white, which it no longer is. Nick’s mental breakdown stems from a racially charged attack perpetrated by a group of white boys at one of the laundromats—a subject his father steadfastly refuses to discuss. Those who frequent the Public Theater, a premier purveyor of identity-centered stagecraft, might assume that the “other” in the title refers to the “othering” (to use a bit of fashionable parlance) of Latin Americans. But Leguizamo is hazy on the role of ethnicity in this tragedy. It’s not nothing, but as Norma brutally points out late in the play, it’s not a catch-all explanation either. This complication of a lazy and pervasive narrative on an off-Broadway stage certainly feels like progress.

Still, The Other Americans is by no means a textbook perfect drama, and there are moments when the author’s contrivance is all too apparent, like when Nick tells his mother, “Ma, I need your help. In order to let go of what happened to me. I need to talk through with you what happened moment by moment when I was attacked.” This also happens to be a convenient excuse to recount an offstage event. It doesn’t help that Trey Santiago-Hudson (who, in a shameless metatheatrical flourish, is the son of the director) telegraphs Nick’s mounting anxiety with a twitchy performance straight out of a teen soap opera. And there are elements that really should have been cut in an early draft (Sarah Nina Hayon does a fine job in the superfluous role of Veronica, the next-door neighbor).

But it’s clear that Leguizamo is reaching for something difficult, and even if The Other Americans won’t join the ranks of Death of a Salesman in its searing examination of American hubris, it is likely to prompt a conversation on the way home that too many of us would prefer to avoid—about the heirloom of emotional abuse passed from father to son and the dominant culture’s complicity in that process when we expect straight men to simultaneously provide materially and make space. The Other Americans is Leguizamo’s way of saying, The floor’s all yours, gentlemen.