Alma offers more than just a mother-daughter conflict

The sound design hits you first in Alma, Benjamin Benne’s 70-minute two-hander that uses a mother-daughter relationship to depict precisely how inextricable the political is from the personal.

Director Ana Velaquez’s staging for American Blues Theater (in association with the fifth Destinos: Chicago International Latino Theater Festival) is compact—a little too so. At just over an hour, it needs a bit more to feel fully complete. But Alma has impact, and it will keep you engaged. More than that, Benne distills the legion of issues densely packed into any discussion of immigration and documentation into a relatable mother-daughter relationship.

Alma Through 10/22: Thu-Fri 7:30 PM, Sat 3 and 7:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM, Rivendell Theatre Ensemble, 5779 N. Ridge, 773-654-3103, americanbluestheater.com or clata.org, $25-$45

Alma offers a prelude of sorts before getting into the fraught conversation that plays out in real time between 17-year-old U.S.-born Angel (Bryanna Ciera Colón) and her mother, Alma (Jazmín Corona), who migrated to the U.S. before Angel was born.

Benne begins long before then, in pre-Columbian Tongva land (today, Greater Los Angeles). The stage is in darkness, but sound designer/composer Eric Backus’s watery splashes and feathery rustles quickly give way to new, defining sounds as epochs and eras are identified in brief supertitles. 1769: Spanish colonization and the toll of church bells. 1846: Gunfire and screams from the Mexican-American War. So it goes through 2016, when we meet Alma and Angel in their home in La Puenta, California.

For Alma nothing is more important than securing her daughter’s education and future success. Crucial in those goals: the SAT exam Angel is to take shortly. But Angel has very different priorities—none of which include taking a standardized test. As Angel points out, she’s testing with students who have the means to afford tutors and the time to study. There’s little chance she’ll get a score that can compete with that.

Alma has more on its mind than an intergenerational argument about the importance of a test score, or even the unfair weight that standardized tests have long held in college admissions offices.

When Alma mentions she saw a lawyer shortly after “the election,” the higher stakes become ominously clear. Outside the meticulously cared-for apartment (check out the tabletop Christmas tree, which is a lovely, detailed depiction of Christianity and far older traditions), the United States under 45 looms. Alma and Angel don’t know precisely what’s coming, but they know it’s not good. The audience, however, does know, and that makes watching Alma all the more wrenching.

Mother-daughter conflicts are nothing new in theater; they go back at least to the Greeks. But in Alma, Benne has given us a relationship that sheds a harsh light on a place where nascent fascism and toxic nationalism are problems of far greater impact than a test score.

Colón brings her own light to Angel, whose frustration with her mother never rings false. Corona’s Alma is a warrior and a true believer. Benne doesn’t give us a happy ending but for this: as Corona plays it, Alma will win her battles, be they with Angel, or with anything that wants to harm Angel.

Read More