MCT Opens Season with "Where Did We Sit on the Bus?"
Photos by Michael Brosilow
When Brian Quijada was in elementary school in the Chicago suburbs, his class learned about the Civil Rights era and the struggle for Black Americans to overcome segregation and staggering, overt discrimination. His teacher told the story of Rosa Parks, one of the heroes of the movement, famously refusing to give up her seat on a bus to a white person. As the child of undocumented immigrants from El Salvador, this prompted Quijada to ask the titular question for the one person play/spoken word/rap/musical he later penned, “Where did we sit on the bus?”
The premise of a multi-media, autobiographical show exploring where Latinx Americans fit into the history of our country is a good one, and certainly apt in this period of multicultural reckoning. Helmed by Artistic Director Brent Hazelton, Where Did We Sit on the Bus? opens Milwaukee Chamber Theatre’s 2022-23 season two years after it was originally slated, in a concerted effort to amplify voices of underrepresented cultures, expand audiences, and reflect the diversity of the community. And thanks to an electric, heartfelt performance by Chicago-based actress Isa Arciniegas and playful onstage accompaniment by Milwaukee music icon Kellen “Klassik” Abston, the production is captivating. But these talented artists cannot overcome the weak, cliched script that fails to deliver any new insight on the Latinx experience and certainly does not live up to the play’s provocative title, investigating representation and bias against minorities in this country.
Photos by Michael Brosilow
In productions throughout the country, the playwright/composer often performs the show himself and provides all the musical accompaniment in a one-person, tour-de-force. When it is produced using other actors, women have taken on the narrator part, changing the name of the lead from Brian to Bee and switching out a heterosexual Latino for a lesbian Latina. The change works surprisingly well, although it begs for some extra text that addresses the main character’s additional layer of “other” as a member of the LGBTQIA+ community.
In MCT’s show, the story begins with Bee Quijada proposing to her girlfriend, an Austrian Swiss woman, and then immediately worrying about how they will someday explain their personal histories to their children. This provides the impetus for a detailed biography that actually begins in the womb and traces Bee’s life from a trailer park with three older brothers, to various schools where she is sometimes in the minority and sometimes in the majority. From an early age she is fascinated by music and dancing, so some of the story revolves around idolizing Michael Jackson on MTV, learning to merengue at quinceaneras, and discovering her calling as a performer by working her way through high school musicals.
In between stories of finding the spotlight, Bee describes basic difficulties of understanding her heritage, casual racism, and making friends with kids from other ethnicities that earns her the ire of her Latinx classmates. A trip to Ellis Island reminds her that her history isn’t written alongside that of many other American immigrants. She worries about gaining the approval of her parents after deciding to pursue theater in college and she despairs for the detentions and deaths of so many Latinx people who are still trying to enter the country by crossing the southern border and walking for days through the desert.
Photos by Michael Brosilow
Fortunately, these issues, discoveries, celebrations and conflicts are told through kinetic rap/spoken word sequences, impressive dance breaks, and extremely effective storytelling by Arciniegas. Playing dozens of characters, she is precise in her characterizations through small mannerisms, vocal changes, and accent shifts. She is practically bursting with energy, from the moment she runs onstage. Arciniegas attacks each section of the story with passion and is equally adept at the syncopated rap, straight songs, and dialogues that bounce through the show. Klassik supports her, wearing headphones and playing a keyboard while also managing sound loops and other effects on a laptop. He smiles and grooves through the show as the main character’s right hand man.
Visually the performance is elevated by Jason Fassl’s impressive lighting effects that permeate the absolutely bare playing space, helped with a fog machine that holds the deep blue, purple and and red light on the stage. Lit from both sides of the small space, Arciniegas looks like the rockstar performer that she aspired to be when she was younger.
She also handles a difficult tonal shift towards the end of the play with ease. Her sudden serious tone catches the audience off guard, giving more power to her plea to America to accept new immigrants instead of criminalizing them.
The biggest problem with Where Did We Sit on the Bus? is that, while entertaining, it skims the surface of serious conversations and wastes an opportunity for an authentic voice from Latinx culture to frankly confront its disconnect with the so-called American dream. Quijada can’t be faulted for writing from his own experience, but with low stakes, little conflict, and less compelling information about immigration than one can glean from the nightly news, his story may not be the one we need to hear most right now.
MCT’s Where Did We Sit on the Bus? runs through October 23 in the Studio Theatre in the Broadway Theatre Center.