THEATER REVIEW: Fresno State’s “Fade” is a good play that dissolves in a slow production
by Casey Ballard
Where does a writer draw the line when using someone else’s story for their own material? This is the inciting question for “Fade,” directed by Gina Sandí-Diaz and running for just two more performances at Fresno State’s University Theatre.
“Fade” is the story of Lucia, a Mexican-born novelist, who gets her first TV writing job in Los Angeles. Lucia quickly becomes friends with the only other Latino around, a janitor named Abel. As Abel shares his stories with Lucia, similar plots begin to find their way into the TV scripts that Lucia writes, inevitably leading to tension. According to University Theater, “Fade” is a play about class and race within the Latinx community and at large and how status does not change who people are at their core.”
Tanya Saracho wrote “Fade” as a response to the initial rise of Trump, and it premiered in 2017. Playing a decade later shows just how little has actually changed. Sandí-Diaz invites the audience in her director’s note “…to reflect on the climate that shaped the play and consider how our communities continue to wrestle with questions of belonging, representation, and power.”
The content and purpose behind this play are fantastic, and I am glad it is getting stage time. I think it asks its audience some interesting and challenging questions. As an elder Millennial (yes, it’s its own subcategory) white woman raised in the Central Valley, a lot of things made me chortle, and a lot of things went over my head because of my own ignorance. However, there is always that lurking question of right, as in, do I have the right to critique something outside my culture? I feel like I don’t; I have zero commentary on the cultural identity politics at play in Fade. For that kind of analysis, I encourage the reader to research the playwright or read more of Sandí-Diaz’s thoughtful analysis.
That said, I offer my insight as someone trained in theater, viewing through a technical lens.
To begin, it was way too long with no intermission. While the running time states 90 minutes in the program, the audience was given a verbal notification that it was 1 hour and 45 minutes. Much of that time was unfortunately spent sitting in dim lighting staring at an empty stage while Mexican pop music (albeit really catchy Mexican pop music) played during scene transitions. A large amount of this dead time was due to what felt like unnecessary costume changes. This is not to say the costumes (designed by Dulce Quezada and Maggie Walker) weren’t great—more that they were redundant. Lighting designer Beyonce Rodriguez-Fabela did a fantastic job of guiding the audience through time changes using her lighting effects. The audience was well aware that days were passing; we didn’t need to sit through time-consuming costume changes (though hats off to some of the quicker quick-changes, I know how stressful those can be).
All the technical designs were good, but the cumulative implementation felt lacking. The set was fantastic but also seemed to minimize the actors. There were times where these humans felt (unintentionally) much smaller than they were.
Paulina D. Marin Contreras made for an extremely likeable (for the most part) Lucia (pronounced Loo-SEE-yuh, not LOO-shuh. Even I cringed at the idea of someone saying LOO-sha!), but I found myself wanting her to take up more space on the set. Additionally, the melodic nature of her voice and speech rhythms at times made it difficult to stay focused as every line delivered seemed to follow the same inflection pattern. Marin Contreras really shone when she spoke from her body instead of her head, allowing her vocal quality to differentiate. She seemed to hold herself back in some ways, which is a shame, because when she allowed herself to be more impish and natural, she was captivating.
Henry Mercado brings a fantastic, grounded quality to the role of Abel (pronounced Ah-BELL, not AYE-bull), and his facial expressions alone communicated a great degree of information. He plays off of Marin Contreras very well.
The story is good, the designs were great, and the acting was solid, but the pacing really suffered from the constant transitions. It felt like even the actors lost steam somewhere around the middle and were just waiting to get to their “Big Moment.” Not to mention, since the transitions were so constant and so long, the audience began to have full-on conversations at the end of every scene in an attempt to kill time.
All in all, the sum didn’t equal the parts here. I applaud University Theatre for bringing these up-to-the-minute contemporary plays to the stage. Hopefully, the direction can bring them to a cohesive whole so the student actors can rise to the material.
“Fade” has two more performances at Fresno State, Friday, March 20, and Saturday, March 21, at 7:30 p.m.
Casey Ballard is a local educator and theater practitioner. You can find her haphazard book reviews on Instagram @bookishballard.
