Juan Castano as Juan and b as Andrea observe the excruciatingly slow movement of Tica (Frank Wood), Juan’s elderly golden retriver, in Danny Tejera’s Toros at Second Stage Uptown.
The Second Stage production of Toros deserves a prominent spot in New York theater annals thanks to Frank Wood’s tenderly compelling portrayal of Tica, a golden retriever on her last legs. Danny Tejera’s sometimes comedic drama is a largely slice-of-life depiction of three privileged, emotionally stunted millennials living in Spain after the election of President Donald J. Trump and just before the onslaught of COVID-19. Tica—loyal, empathetic, and loving—is a foil to the humans rather than the play’s focus. Wood’s impeccable performance is calibrated to avoid upstaging the other actors, yet his Tica is the most memorable aspect of this arresting, if sometimes unsatisfying, play.
Alex (known ironically as “Toro” because his surname sounds a little like the Spanish for “bull”), Juan, and Andrea were classmates at an American high school in Madrid that’s noted for the international nature of its student body. Now 26, out of college and in the work force, they hang out together in their spare time, getting drunk, dabbling in drugs, and frequenting dance clubs.
Juan and Andrea, supposedly “just friends,” regard each other in anticipation of passionless, spur-of-the-moment copulation, which is represented by frenzied but detached choreography. Photographs by Joan Marcus.
Juan (Juan Castano) is the product of a Spanish mother and American father; Toro (Abubakr Ali) is Palestinian; and Andrea (the actress known as b) is Mexican. Having reached maturity after Sept. 11, 2001, they’re accustomed to specters of violence and terror. They’re immersed in the antisocial influence of social media like fish in water, and they converse in English, striking and parrying with slang that’s crude and insulting.
The three are, to different degrees, lost souls—or, perhaps, their souls are merely mislaid. That “maybe” is what rescues Toros from being a modern tragedy. At the outset, Toro seems the most dire case: “I’ve always been jealous of people who are just from one place and have like, a really strong community and like, sense of identity,” he says. While working in finance in New York, Toro suffered an emotional crisis that brought him to the brink of suicide. “[A]ll the things people usually want: money, or fame, or—raising a family or doing social work—I was just like, none of that seems that great or useful anyway, you know? And—I just sort of like, stopped believing in reality. … Like, it just seemed like, no matter what I saw in front of me, it was all so obviously performed.” In the months since his parents brought him home to Madrid, Toro has been straining to piece together an integrated worldview.
Juan (Tica’s intolerant master) lives in the garage of his opulent childhood home, coddled by his mother and employed in his father’s commercial real estate business. He fantasizes about becoming a club DJ, but spends inordinate time and energy raging against his parents. With Andrea and Toro, he’s manipulative and often cold. Toro puts a finger on his difficult friend’s deficiencies by observing that Juan is the only person he knows who doesn’t have a “dog voice” and doesn’t empathetically “change his voice with a dog.”
Andrea has devoted her post-college years to compulsive partying, justifying her drug- and sex-focused social life as “free-spiritedness.” Her parents believe she is squandering an expensive college education as a kindergarten teacher, but she is weathering their disapproval, convinced that early childhood education is her vocation.
Alex Totah (Abubakr Ali), ironically nicknamed Toro, gives the elderly Tica a tummy rub in Toros, demonstrating how much more effectively he communicates with animals than with humans.
Tejera, an alumnus of the graduate playwriting program at Hunter College and member of Ensemble Studio Theatre’s Youngblood early-career collective, is an inventive dramatist, bold in blending realism and abstraction. When Juan coerces the not-entirely-reluctant Andrea into passionless, spur-of-the-moment sex, for instance, Tejera—aided by director Gaye Taylor Upchurch and intimacy coordinator Marcus Watson—sends the actors into a dance that, following the script’s stage directions, “looks nothing like real sex” but rather “like that game where you have to mirror what the person in front of you is doing.” At a time when sex scenes seem obligatory and by the numbers, this choreographic ploy is suggestive in the best sense, conveying the lack of intimacy or emotion in the act and doing so without prurience. Tejera’s most engaging nonrealistic device, of course, is enlisting a mature actor (especially one as adroit as Wood) to play an elderly female dog.
Upchurch’s production, though desultorily paced, has arresting moments and is played in an intriguing environment devised by scenic designer Arnulfo Maldonado and lighting designer Barbara Samuels. It’s a striking dramatization of millennial psychopathology. Having been subjected to toxic social conditions (as well as the perils of privilege), the three “toros” of the title are as emotionally clumsy as proverbial bulls in china shops. But the script and the actors’ admirable performances contain intimations of resilience and a more promising future for two (and perhaps all three) of the play’s principal characters.
Danny Tejera’s Toros runs through Aug.13 at Second Stage Uptown (2162 Broadway). Evening performances are Tuesday to Thursday and Sunday at 7 p.m.; Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m.; matinees are Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. For information and tickets, visit 2st.com/shows/toros.
Playwright: Danny Tejera
Direction: Gaye Taylor Upchurch
Sets: Arnulfo Maldonado
Lighting: Barbara Samuels
Costumes: Enver Chakartash
Sound: Darron L. West
