...steals the show though with her unique brand of sardonic comedy: Her timing is always right

Love, Vengeance on the Road

No one knows how to craft mood and space quite like Quantum Theatre.

Tucked in Lawrenceville past Butler and 55th streets and over abandoned railroad tracks, the stage is set in an eerie warehouse for Quantum's most recent production, "El Paso Blue."

Once inside, tall, wooden posts lined with yellow lights direct you to the dirt stage. It's like a haunted theater house where the play, of course, is the main spectacle. The frightfulness commences even before the play starts.

"El Paso Blue" follows released convict Alejandro (Tim Andres Pabon) as he treks along the Texas and Mexico border in search of his wife, Sylvie (Tami Dixon) and his father, Marcelo (Fermin Suarez) in order to exact revenge on them.

It's quite a shock to learn Sylvie and Marcelo have been sharing a bed while Alejandro was behind bars. But the psychological backstory of the two - Sylvie lost her father in a terrible wreck and Marcelo lost his wife to diabetes - makes their affair believable. She has been searching for a father all her life, and he's been dead since the premature death of his wife.

"El Paso Blue" works wonderfully as a "blues ballad." There a number of songs, both English and Spanish, that Sylvie, a former Texas pageant queen, sings. On stage, a man dressed in a black cowboy hat strums the blues on a mahogany guitar. The live blues played by John Marcinizyn are a real treat.

The scene design by Tony Ferrieri is a conglomerate of five distinct spaces: Marcelo's ranch house, Duane's (Jeffrey Carpenter) car interior, a town pub, Alejandro's living room and a prison cell. The set helps hold the play together as the story frequently switches between present and past through flashbacks.

China (Ruth Gamble), a loner who carries a pistol filled with ammonia, and Duane, Alejandro's crook-buddy, round out the small cast of five. The transmissions from Duane's radio-head - a metal plate in his head transmits radio frequencies - get a little tiresome, though. This comic aspect of "El Paso Blue" could have used, no pun intended, a little tuning.

The five actors each give a daring performance. Tami Dixon has a strong voice and makes a great drunk, flopping on tables, legs up, and swearing in Spanish. Ruth Gamble steals the show though with her unique brand of sardonic comedy: Her timing is always right. And with a deep, sultry voice like his, Tim Andres Pabon should have spoken more in Spanish.

The central characters' struggles overshadow the play's social commentary on the immigrant experience. There is some dispersed dialogue about Alejandro's desire to be more than "just another Mexican" by being with a white woman, and Marcelo speaks on the American Dream.

But taken as a whole, it is the theme of dangerous love that makes "El Paso Blue" unforgettable - and the fate of the three lovers, like a black fence against the black night, unforeseeable.

Rimma Hussain

Senior Staff Writer

December 6,2006