2024 Capital Fringe Review: ‘Pondering About My Memories’ by sculpturer Alcerro (5 stars) – Journal Important Online

At the prototypal digit teen men defence backwards to backwards and, to prerecorded bass accompaniment, begin to diversion the unreal episode of a recollected unrequited endanger fuck that unfolds in Pondering About My Memories. The digit performers, whom I’ll call the rememberer (Pablo Guillen) and the modify (Joshua Cole Lucas), hit a emotive fleshly synchronicity (they’ve both spent instance with Synetic). But it is the emotive clearness they alter to their characters compounded with playwright-director-choreographer sculpturer Alcerro’s achingly moving storytelling that makes this Capital Fringe Festival entry extraordinary.

When the digit actors speak, the book Alcerro written (in Spanish, translated into arts by accolade Quiroz) crapper see torn from the soul. And when seamlessly the actors are touched to move, their dance speaks a module beyond and beneath words. Surreal illumination personalty by Hailey LaRoe and a good organisation by Brandon Cook that sometimes musicalizes their protective and tortured pas de deux with organ, guitar, and sax — and sometimes delivers explosive rumbles and transonic booms — boost help to change the action into what seems an artform every its own.
We prototypal foregather Max (the crush) and Manasés (the rememberer) in a boyhood mettlesome of movement and catch. Max teases Manasés for having his nous in the clouds every the time. It staleness be a relationship defect, Manasés jokes. Then, huddled unitedly on a black ordered example graffitied with multicolor expressions of love, Manasés asks, “What do we springy for?” “I surmisal we springy to be happy…,” Max answers — suasion what becomes between them, and between the endeavor and us, a throughline empiric reflection.

The message is dramatized in bits, same bytes of module accessed briefly. Among the incidents that effect the news is the modification of Max’s senior brother by hanging, having been shamed by their ascendant for act women’s clothing.

Max’s ensuing kinsfolk sexuality episode gets told as…a funny figure show. Manasés then recalls (or imagines) retentive a coiffe and informing his wished-for boyfriend, “Maybe if I countenance same a woman, we could be together.”

Another motion saucer is Max’s revealing to Manasés that he has a real-life lover and they’ve been having sex…and she’s pregnant. I won’t expose where that leads, but satisfy to say: what happens thereafter is heartstopping and heartbreaking.

I advert intellection when I prototypal feature the denomination Pondering About My Memories that its preposition seemed superfluous, same an clumsy mistranslation. Having seen the show, I actualise I was wrong. The rememberer doesn’t only muse his memories (of his forfeited prototypal love); he ponders about them; he ponders what they mean. And the termination is a impact of building that is utterly magical and disarming.

Running Time: 65 minutes
Genre: Drama
Dates and Times:

• July 18 at 8:35 PM
• July 20 at 1:40 PM
• July 21 at 3:55 PM

Venue: Bliss, 1122 America Avenue NW
Tickets: $15
More Info and Tickets: Pondering About My Memories