Mo'olelo's 'Triad' looks at adoption issue from three perspectives

By: PAM KRAGEN - Staff Writer | Wednesday, March 21, 2007 10:54 AM PDT ∞

SentToWeb:

Over the past four years, Seema Sueko's community-focused theater group, Mo'olelo Performing Arts, has explored complex stories with roots in Israel, Vietnam and Africa. Now, with the world premiere of Kimber Lee's "The Adoption Project: Triad," it examines a challenging issue much closer to home.

Lee (who joined Mo'olelo as associate artistic director this month) based the play on her own experiences as an adoptee as well as on interviews by Mo'olelo staff with dozens of adoptees, birth and adoptive parents and caseworkers.

Through three composite female characters ---- an adult adoptee, her adoptive mother and her birth mother ---- the 90-minute play explores a vast range of adoption-related issues in poignant and often funny ways. While there's not much new or revelatory in the female-centered drama, it does explore an issue that's increasingly in the news in honest, creative and thought-provoking ways.

In the play we meet three women who are intimately related but, in a way, strangers. Agnes "Aggie" Donovan (played with an edgy, simmering fierceness by Jo Ann Glover) is a Yale-educated young woman whose surprise pregnancy (from a recently ended relationship) stirs up years of suppressed pain, anger and loss related to her adoption.

Although Aggie's affluent, remote adoptive mother Bernice (played with barely-holding-it-together fragility by Sandy Campbell) has given her a stable home and material comfort, she can't fill Aggie's hunger for love, history and belonging. Bernice has hidden her secret pain (an unfulfilling marriage, multiple miscarriages and infertility) from Aggie, so her daughter sees only the cool, self-protective shell that Bernice has built around herself.

Spurred by the pregnancy, Aggie secretly begins a search for her birth mother, unaware that the once-unwed teen who gave birth to her 23 years before, Madeleine Lopez (Linda Libby, in a multilayered, naturalistic performance), has been waiting decades for the phone to ring.

The script uses overlapping dialogue and ritualistic choreography by Erika Malone to show how the three women's lives are intricately woven together. Their bodies twitch and yank, as if invisible strings are pulling them first apart and then toward each other, concluding with a warm reunion of completion when all three women come together as a trio.

Breaking from the linear realism of the play is a fantasy element, where external, comical characters offer Aggie their own perspectives on the situation ---- ABC newswoman Barbara Walters (an adoptive mother who produced a highly rated documentary on the subject of adoption in 2001), who provides common-sense advice and statistics; an apron-wearing June Cleaver-like ideal mom who offers unconditional love and forgiveness; and Aggie's surfer-talking lesbian friend Blue, who (as a non-adoptee) sees Aggie's lack of history as positively freeing.

While these observers offer a fresh look at the women's relationships from the outside, they are the weakest spot in the play, especially that of Blue, whose cartoonish, childish dialogue is distracting. Another problem is the complete lack of a male perspective in the play. Surely men have powerful emotional struggles with adoption, and the addition of a male observer (Aggie's birth or adoptive father or her ex-boyfriend) would complete the story.

Finally, a few of the plot threads hang loose, specifically Aggie's broken relationship with her baby's father, and the future of her secret pregnancy. It would help to know how her reunion with Madeleine and her healing reconnection with Bernice inform the choices she will make in the future.

Director Sueko stages the production simply on a raised rectangular stage inside the cylindrical Centro Cultural de la Raza in Balboa Park. The backdrop is a mostly bare canvas, on which the cast members paint their thoughts and touchstone words: "surprise," "guilt," "found."

In keeping with Mo'olelo's mission, the play was created in concert with a community outreach and education program. As part of that mission, Mo'olelo has created an Art Installation Wall inside the Centro. Curated by the play's set designer Jodi Tucci Brisebois, the wall-length mural is a work in progress. Playgoers are invited to add their own thoughts and mementos to the story wall, which is papered with photographs, adoption certificates, moving personal tales and news articles.

"The Adoption Project: Triad"

When: 7:30 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays; 3 p.m. Sundays; through April 1

Where: Mo'olelo Performing Arts at Centro Cultural de la Raza, 2125 Park Blvd., Balboa Park, San Diego

Tickets: $18-$30

Info: (619) 342-7395

Web: www.moolelo.net

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