Comments (0) Best New Play - 2008

Juan C. Sanchez's Red TideThe Promethean Theatre at the Mailman Hollywood Theatre Nova Southeastern University

Near as we can tell, South Florida's got only two playwrights who live up to New Times' standards of both talent and weirdness. One is Marco Ramirez, who mostly sticks to Miami, and whose only full-length offering this year was a pulpy play about a werewolf (but look out next year, when he'll unveil a new play about a guitar riff that opens a portal to hell). The other is Juan C. Sanchez, a mild-mannered gentleman who can usually be found manning the ticket counter at New Theatre in Coral Gables. It would be hard to tell from his boyish, bespectacled face that his brain is the demon-haunted pit of nastiness suggested by Red Tide, mounted by Davie's Promethean Theatre last fall. Red Tide was a film noir-ish nightmare featuring two memory-haunted brothers and a woman with mysterious motives. One brother was a loser with serious cognition problems: at any given moment, it was hard to tell whether he was a cuddly teddy bear or a savage killer. The woman was equally hard to figure: sometimes she came off like a vindictive snake, at other times like a soft-hearted lover. The second brother was forced to play straight man, but he was an egocentric, misogynistic mess. The stories behind these listless souls were unveiled in flashbacks that seemed more like time-travel. The whole show was bottomlessly mysterious, thanks to a script from Sanchez that embraced play, imagination, novelty, and any perversity that happened to drift its way.

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