Surasree Das, Victor Salinas, and Anna Takayo. Photo by Ryan Maxwell Photography.
Communicating miscommunication across different languages can be a difficult task for artists catering to a primarily English-speaking audience, but doing the same when everyone onstage is speaking English themselves presents a whole different set of challenges. Spooky Action Theater’s production of Phillip Howze’s “Frontières Sans Frontiéres” tackles those challenges in an intriguing effort that, despite a lackluster second act, highlights many of the ways the Western world fails to meet marginalized populations where they are.
…highlights many of the ways the Western world fails to meet marginalized populations where they are…strong performances across the board, an admirably distinct, visual style…
“Frontières” focuses on Win (Anna Takayo), Noon (Surasree Das) and Pan (Victor Salinas), a trio of young teenagers orphaned by a nondescript but ongoing war, living in a garbage dump and speaking a cobbled together conglomeration of English words they call “Engaleash.” Takayo, Das, and Salinas all bring a verve, charm and bright physicality to their characters that ensures the audience understands perfectly what they’re saying even if their actual words rarely add up to technically correct sentences. It’s a delight to see them play and just exist in their space in the opening moments, with Win leading practice of their “dance” of how to most effectively beg from foreigners. It doesn’t approach the line of poverty porn, though. While the difficulty of their circumstances never fully recedes, the trio are too full of ideas, movement, and dynamic life for that to ever fully dominate the focus.
As important as the energy of the children is, so is the careful design of their space by set designer Nadi Bey. At first glance, it doesn’t look like much more than a random selection of garbage, but a few select elements like toys and a sandbox (used as a bed by Pan) hint strongly towards a refuge for children specifically before a word is said. Combined with Johnna Presby’s patched together costume design for the children, you quickly get the sense of how these kids have carved out this equilibrium for themselves, arranging the scattered pieces of their broken world into something coherent and meaningful the same way they have for their Engaleash.
As the show progresses, that life is intruded on by a series of foreigners all seeking to use the children for their own ends. A clever conceit of the show is in how these foreigners are framed. They’re all borderline commedia-level caricatures, hopelessly focused on their own wants and desires to the point of being unable to communicate with the children at all. The gulf between both parties’ understandings of language isn’t even the main barrier here. Even if the children spoke perfectly tailored English, you don’t get the sense their interactions with the foreigners would go any differently because the fundamental disconnect is of the skewed intentions of the outsiders. In the meantime, it’s a lot of fun to see their increasingly absurd interactions play out. Supported by Navi’s appropriately jarring and trippy sound design, the feeling is one of dreamlike slapstick as the children figure out what to do with a traveling clown and mime pair (Frank Britton and Lauren Davis, respectively), try to turn their refuge into their approximation of a tea shop, and make so very many fart jokes.
The slapstick doesn’t last forever, though. The jaunty music also shares space with the periodic sounds of the war getting closer every day. The end of the first act sees the trio separated for the first time with Noon dragged into that violence. It’s in that second act, though, where the show experiences its first real difficulties. Noon returns before too long, but now as some sort of indeterminate avatar of capitalism referred to only as Nobel Laureate. The details of both her disappearance and reemergence are glossed over. Much of the second half of the show is dominated by an extended prose poem she delivers about Western interactions with the third world that has a few clever bits but ultimately overstays its welcome. While the foreigners in the first act were plenty odd themselves, they were all grounded in recognizable archetypes. While Das does her best with the character’s hard pivot into Noon as an ephemeral goddess figure, it shifts the tone in a way that doesn’t quite feel earned. Meanwhile with Noon no longer a factor in the main trio, their effusive charm that anchored the first act largely dissipates. Win and Pan still have a few solid moments together before the curtain closes, but on balance the last 30 minutes or so come across as significantly under-baked compared to what preceded them.
Still, there’s enough going on beyond this last minute stumble to warrant a recommendation. The show has some strong performances across the board, an admirably distinct, visual style, and covers subjects that are very much relevant to a town as tied to the NGO complex as Washington, DC. If you’re willing to meet the show at its sometimes extremely weird level, you might learn more than the Westerners it depicts onstage.
Running Time: Two hours with one 15-minute intermission
Advisory: Contains shooting and war sounds, on-stage violence, drug and alcohol use, and implications of child trafficking.
“Frontières sans Frontiéres” runs through May 19, 2024 at Spooky Action Theater, 1810 16th St NW, Washington, DC 20009. For more information and to purchase tickets, go online.
