Moxie’s Red Bike provides world view of nearly adolescents
SAN DIEGO — Just recently I spent the day with my eleven-year-old stuffy-nosed grandson while his mothers were at work. Our conversations ranged from building a program for one of his Internet ‘games’ to what he was currently reading to “How old was I when I got married/ had his mother/ lived in my house, and “was Donald Trump responsible for the way they treat the Blacks in the South”?
He’s studying the Civil War in History at school and is old enough to know about our current president.
Hey, I’m just his octogenarian grandmother. But it gave me some insight to the mind of an eleven-year-old and what matters to him. And what matters to him, he who is acutely aware of the social injustices in the world and the have-and- have-not’s of the world. he has drawings and essays on the walls in his home about just that.
So it wasn’t surprising that some of the ‘stuff’ said by character’s ‘A’ -Timothy L. Cabal and ‘M’ – Nancy Ross (the two adults playing the eleven-year olds in the West Coast Premiere of “Red Bike” at Moxie Theatre through Feb. 16th) , brought me back to an old TV Show -“Kids Say The Darndest Things.” The playwright is Obie Winner and the songwriter/lyricist is Caridad Svich.
But these kids are not saying just the darndest things. They are looking at their world and their decaying community/low wage-earning parents, and the old bus driver who will one-day die on the job, through a different lens than those who are living the American Dream.
The eleven-year-olds in Svich’s play are encouraged by their parents to “go out and ride their bikes.” They, wiser than most adults, see their American Dream passing by. Before during and in between the fifty or so frames or chapters that ‘shift …in the plays universe’ we we get a glimpse into the parents’ thinking as told by their offspring.
They talk about their bills, the world, the town, the water supply, the invisible things like stocks and derivatives and securities and big money buying up property, destroying farm land and covering it in cement for more building, what they eat for breakfast and moving all the boxes in the big warehouse his father works in.
Most of these conversations are repeated in refrain as the two travel the byways and back country roads on their exciting and exhilarating bike ride that pulls us into their conversations from the moment they draw that first image of a bike on the ground with colored chalk.
The production, a 90-minute coming of age drama, while not interactive had me feeling as though I was right in the moment with ‘A’ and ‘M’ as they rode up and over the hilly byways and ramps, slid down poles, made animal characters out of wrapping paper, and bikes out of expandable poles. (Aldondra Velez.)
Imagining their downhill plunge with horror, they project the right amount of angst, vulnerability and wide eyed fear as they seemed to have lost control of their bikes; the bikes that came speeding by us going “thirty billion seconds a minute.”
A metaphor for life as they know it?
The reality of things out of their control is a reoccurring theme; loss of community, a growing divide in the haves and have-not’s, envy, out-of-touch parents and the dying population that will eventually create a ghost town in this the first of seven play-cycle called “American Psalm.”
Teacher, professor, director Lisa Berger (“The Car Plays” as part of the WOW Festival; Paula Vogel’s “The Long Christmas Ride Home” at Diversionary) brings her speciality, that of being creative and daring. We ride the highways, hills and valleys with her eleven-year-olds; excellent actors they, who shall remain ageless in the mind of yours truly wishing she could move half as well.
Both Berger and Movement Consultant Jeffery Ingman give credit that “85% of’ the movement … was developed by the actors themselves through improvisation.” Once again, no small feat, as the movement might take off in different directions at any performance.
Cabal and Ross are splendid in creating two characters with dreams and desires, imagination and finally ready to move on while making them flesh and blood kids.
Even though I know I’m just a kid
And by the time I’m twelve
My dreams are hella gonna change
And by the time I’m the same age as Ol’ Guy
If I get there
I’ll have seen so much of the world
I’ll wonder how it is one can hold all of that inside
Without making some serious NOISE.
Special shout out to costume designer Brooke Kesler, lighting designer Ashley Bietz, sound Matt Lescauld-Woodand and the entire creative team and of course the entire Moxie company for bringing “Red Bike”, an uplifting commentary on the world according to eleven-year olds going on twelve, to San Diego.
Be a part of the magic and enjoy the ride!
See you at the theatre.
Dates: Through Feb. 16th
Organization: Moxie Theatre
Phone: 858-598-7620
Production Type: Comedy
Where: 6663 El Cajon Blvd. Suite N, San Diego, CA 92115
Ticket Prices: Stare at $33.00
Web: moxietheatre.com
Photo Credit: Daren Scott
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Carol Davis is a freelance writer specializing in coverage of the arts. She may be contacted via carol.davis@sdjewishworld.com