By Donald H. Harrison
EL CAJON, California — Moses Maimonides, the 12th century Jewish doctor and philosopher, reportedly instructed his contemporaries that it is so important to give tzedakah (charity), that even a beggar who lives entirely on charity, must himself give it. In An Ordinary Day, which has just opened a run through May 18 at Grossmont College’s Stagehouse Theatre, we are exposed to a corollary about suicide prevention counseling. Even someone so desperate as to be considering suicide must try to help prevent another person from carrying out the same act.
Co-written by Nobel laureate Dario Fo and his wife Franca Rame, and adapted by director Martin Katz, An Ordinary Day is a tragi-comedy which begins with Julia (portrayed by Julia Yvette Angulo) primping herself for a big date. Only this date is not with a special boyfriend, it is with death. After a year of being separated from her cheating husband, she has decided to end it all. But first, she wants to explain in a video post card to her husband just why she is doing it. She doesn’t want him to get all puffed up and think that he’s the reason, but of course he is.
She starts and stops the video because as an advertising copywriter she wants to say everything just right. And besides, she keeps getting interrupted. There are phone calls from women who think that Julia is a psychiatrist, whose bizarre treatment methods have been cited in a health magazine. Also there are noisy neighbors who fight and have loud make-up sex that can be heard through her apartment’s thin walls. And, as on any “ordinary day” she also gets hungry, and figures she might as well eat–albeit while keeping on her diet– before she kills herself.
A persistent caller who wants to talk to Julia is a woman who herself is in the process of committing suicide. She has turned on the gas in her apartment and she is getting more and more woozy. It is an open question whether Julia is herself that woman, and if everything that seems to be happening in the play — including several scenarios in which a man, in one form or another, is emasculated — really is the figment of Julia’s own oxygen-starved, revenge-seeking brain.
Regardless of whether the conversation is only imagined, or simply wonderfully coincidental, Julia becomes involved in the other woman’s crisis, and tries to counsel her. But have things gone too far? Will her advice be too late?
Actress Julia Yvette Angulo is on the stage alone through most of the production, although she has plenty of company in lights that turn on and off at the clap of her hands, sirens that wail whenever she starts to pour herself an alcoholic drink, and ghastly images that appear on her wall if she ever reaches for a cigarette. Her character has imprisoned herself in an electronic hell, and it’s a comic relief when her psychic jail is busted into by two slapstick robbers (Patrick E. Monaghan and Shane Monaghan).
Director Katz, in program notes, introduces the husband and wife writing team of Dario Fo and Franca Rame as humanitarians, long involved in social causes. He reports that Fo, as a young man, helped to smuggle Allied soldiers and Jewish scientists from Italy to neutral Switzerland during World War II. Together, he and Rame wrote satirical comedies, many of them with an orientation so left-wing that U.S. authorities refused to grant them a visa to visit the United States. When Fo won the 1997 Nobel Prize for Literature, he told a reporter: “God is a jester because he bitterly disappointed a lot of people, including the Vatican newspaper; I feel almost guilty but it was a great joke on them.” He donated his prize money to various causes including the campaign to ban land mines.
We hear an echo of this social consciousness when Julia, used to the dark of her apartment, is able at one point to rear back and slap one of the robbers silly, shouting the slogan “stop violence against women.”
The Grossmont College production started slowly but built to a madcap crescendo. Julia Yvette Angulo, the star, deserves praise for her depiction of the many moods of a woman determined to end it all. Kudos as well to Manny Lopez, the sound and lighting technician, and to director Katz.
*
Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World. He may be contacted at donald.harrison@sdjewishworld.com