Review: The Whole of Time—a Waste of Time?

Romina Paula’s The Whole of Time opens with a big lie. Brother and sister Lorenzo (Lucas Salvagno) and Antonia (Josefina Scaro) create a live improvised music video to Mexican singer-songwriter Marco Antonio Solís’s gushingly emotive “Si No Te Hubieras Ido,” her pushing him around in a swivel chair as he seductively strips off a leopard print coat.

When the song wraps, Antonia casually drops, “What’s funny is that it sounds like a love song, a song about being apart. But what’s really going on is that she’s already dead. And she’s dead because he killed her, the singer-songwriter killed her.” When Lorenzo asks if that’s true, she responds with the mildly condescending certainty of a keyboard warrior: “Yeah, everyone knows that. It’s just something you know.”

But it’s not true. Solís has been married (happily, according to his social media) to Cristy Salas for over three decades (he penned the song in 1999). Both are still alive.

What does this lie tell us about our propensity to credulously internalize the little things we read or hear? What does it say about the darkly exotic role Mexicans play in the Argentine imagination (both siblings are Argentinian, as is the playwright)? And, most importantly, how has this behavior flourished in the Internet Age, when so many of us treat our screens as our only windows on the world?

This is literally the case for Antonia, who spends her days ensconced behind an antique laptop, ingesting Internet garbage. While her brother mostly indulges her, her mother, Ursula (Ana B. Gabriel), hectors her to go out and find a boyfriend. Antonia protests that she’s happy with her little life at home with mom and bro. Why would she change? But the arrival of Lorenzo’s co-worker, Maximiliano (Ben Becher), presents Antonia with both a challenge and an opportunity as this gentleman caller aggressively attempts to coax her out of her shell.

Clever readers will have noticed the similarities to a certain Tennessee Williams play. The Whole of Time was nominated for a Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Adaptation for its US debut in 2024 (the English translation is by Jean Graham-Jones). The full cast reunites at the Brick for this return engagement—a brisk and painless riff on The Glass Menagerie that nevertheless fails to find the blue notes the story is capable of producing.

Director Tony Torn leans heavily into type for both performance and design. Scaro’s whiny kid-sister portrayal of Antonia certainly suggests suspended adolescence, while a sleeveless sweater featuring a cartoon house further infantilizes her (Zane Gan is the costume consultant). She looks and sounds like the host of a Nickelodeon show for young agoraphobics.

Gabriel is doing Amanda Wingfield in Buenos Aires, aimlessly teasing her hair and shoving her breasts in Maximiliano’s face. Her persistent pecking quickens the pulse. Conversely, Salvagno’s quiet detachment has a sedative effect. Handsome and weird, Lorenzo spends much of the play reading the final chapter of Moby Dick, hoping that if he plays dead, his emotional scavenger of a mother will sniff elsewhere.

Enter Maximiliano, clad in a distressed leather jacket and plain white T-shirt, like he’s just returned from an audition for Grease. Becher’s thick Brooklyn accent instantly makes him the sensible voice of the working class in this den of the highly educated and downwardly mobile.

Andromache Chalfant and Rebecca Lord-Surratt’s assortment of mismatched furniture tells the story of a house that has been accumulating for generations, but whose current inhabitants can’t afford much better than IKEA.

Frida Kahlo’s portrait of her father hangs above the mantle in digital form, and is briefly replaced by video (of Solís) and another Kahlo painting,  “Unos cuantos piquetitos.” It vividly suggests the crippling fear that might inform Antonia’s lifestyle, although her gleeful description of the painting makes her seem more like a true-crime addict incapable of comprehending real human suffering. This is the least sympathetic version of Laura I’ve ever encountered.

When Maximiliano asks Antonia what money she lives on she rolls her eyes and says, “I’m getting bored. I thought you were a little less normal,” which is something a high-minded freeloader would say. “I don’t believe in doing,” she tells Maximiliano—an unmistakable red flag for any sensible person who doesn’t want to have to do all the work in bed.

It’s up to that time-honored off-off-Broadway convention, the interpretive dance, to convey the animal attraction between Antonia and Maximiliano. Movement consultant Dan Safer’s mildly risqué duet to “I Wanna Be Your Dog” does the trick, when we can see it (downstage moments on the floor, while undoubtedly hot in the rehearsal studio, fail to read in the theater when the backs of heads block the view of everyone but the first two rows). Still, the play’s extended passages of recorded music (Luke Santy is the audio-visual consultant) feel like so much filler in this already slim 70-minute drama.

The result is an experimental CliffsNotes version of The Glass Menagerie. It will give you the basic plot and may even prompt you to tie Williams’s 1944 drama to contemporary themes. But it mostly feels like an echo of the source material, a rumor passed among Internet fabulists bearing little resemblance to the truth.