Review: ‘The Hours Are Feminine,’ a Family Braces for a Storm

When it’s revealed, the that means of “The Hours are Feminine,” the title of José Rivera’s newest play, is an apt encapsulation of the work. A newly immigrated Puerto Rican mom is explaining the Spanish language’s gendered grammar to her neighbor inside a bigger dialog about how bored they’re as housewives on Long Island: “Time is masculine, however …”

It’s a poetic phrase that’s virtually too good, bordering on trite. Yet it accommodates such perception that it evokes a nodding mm-hmm from the viewers. Like this line, the entire play, in its premiere manufacturing at Intar Theater in Manhattan, strikes a fragile steadiness between truism and real feeling.

Rivera writes and directs it as a remembrance of his household’s transfer to Long Island in the summertime of 1960, which ended with the arrival of Hurricane Donna. His stand-in, 5-year-old Jaivin (Donovan Monzón-Sanders), and his mom, Evalisse (Maribel Martinez), arrive in Lake Ronkonkoma from their native island a 12 months after his father, Fernán (Hiram Delgado), has settled into their new dwelling.

Fernán has secured for them a ratty, illegally rented shack within the yard of a picturesque home owned by Charlie (Dan Grimaldi), an ageing Italian American creep who taunts them with slurs he is aware of they don’t perceive. (The three relations carry out their Spanish dialogue in English, in order that their language barrier is revealed, poignantly, as a ghost would possibly notice he’s invisible).

At the diner the place Fernán works for $99 a month, he overhears patrons worrying in regards to the Black and Puerto Rican households shifting into their white idyll. That’s additionally the rationale Charlie’s son, Anthony (Robert Montano), has moved himself and his spouse, Mirella (Sara Koviak), into the large home, fleeing an integrating Brooklyn.

Mirella, although, is worldlier than that, and eagerly strikes up a friendship with Evalisse. Their interactions, hinged on the commonalities of midcentury womanhood, type the play’s tender core, earlier than the households’ growing friction culminates with the storm’s climactic arrival.

Rivera elicits beautiful performances from his forged, particularly its two girls. And the good-looking Delgado, not too long ago seen within the Broadway revival of “Take Me Out,” performs his character’s contradictions fantastically. His manner of navigating deferential laughs for his landlord, then alternately pivoting to paternal care or spousal aggression, suggests a Nuyorican Walter Younger from “A Raisin the Sun.”

The costumes (by Lisa Renée Jordan) are charming and succinctly place every character on the tail finish of the ’50s: Fernán in a line prepare dinner uniform, full with paper hat; Mirella in svelte high-waisted pants; the Italian males in opened-up bowling shirts; Jaivin in “Little Rascals” shorts and striped T-shirts.

But the nostalgia they conjure, together with Izzy Field’s suburban scenic design — a yard flanked by the starkly completely different properties — is a bit too utopian, and mirrors the play’s personal tonal schism. There’s a righteous anger beneath its observations in regards to the misery of assimilation, and but the entire manufacturing seems like a grandfatherly hug.

If Rivera falls in need of condemning the racist conduct of those that have antagonized immigrants, he sweetly honors the few who’ve helped them in small methods.

The Hours Are Feminine
Through June 9 on the Intar Theater, Manhattan; intartheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.