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Sister. Brother. She's older. He always wanted to be first. She wears ballet flats. He wears steel-toed boots. They're both exercising their rights. His Second Amendment. Her First. She's an English teacher. He's an Army recon snipe.
Liza Raynal, a Bay Area native, began performing solo as a senior at Brown University. After graduating, she lived in the West Indies for a year on a research fellowship (writing the beginnings of her second show, Tropical Honkey). After she returned home, she became a middle school teacher on the Peninsular and was happily working on stories about carnival and Creole when her brother joined the Army; later becoming a sniper and was headed for Afghanistan. A week later, American Joe was conceived at the Marsh with David Ford. Come and listen to her story.
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2 reviews
By Carol Tyler, Independent Theater Critic
Liza Raynal's thoroughly polished and flawlessly deft "American Joe" performance, translating her own mature, deeply attuned scriptwriting masterpiece into a memorable, explosive solo performance of seamlessly transitioned, multiple characters' fatefully intertwined lives and emotions, will leave you gladly reeling, freshly questioning, treasuring take-home, indelible memory traces and (literally) home front and war stories aplenty to share with all who will listen, and listen, and listen. Raynal's audience was a live, unitary coral reef being, transfixed and swaying to the changing, subtle, and then powerhouse currents dealt by her fine-edged, full-bodied acting. Sharing form her core, Raynal became the very characters, here male, there female, from the corners of her life and center of her family experience, which stand as the philosophical schisms and underlying love-hate foundation of our nation's and our world's genetically endowed warring engagements. Rather than stoop to an us versus them, war versus peace, good versus bad solution, Raynal lets her audience viscerally feel a transformation of belief, by forcing audience identification with unlikely viewpoints via an immediacy of gut understanding, in the magical interplay of carefully painted characterizations which she switches in a heartbeat, switching from jubilant to stern to painfully bereft, in a snap as well. Raynal's show is locomotive fast-paced, yet with so many moments of careful, careful, oh-so-careful suspension of time, of languidly milking verbal and physical moments of pathos and meaning with an amazing blend of superbly crafted theatrical devices. Raynal commands a Five Star Word Warrior performance from the core of her professionally trained vocal and whole bodied acting skills. She never lectures, never thinks for her audience, just shares until it hurts all around, until we all can smell a common humanity, until we can safely ignore our prejudices for at least these moments, until we can gulp down tears for people we have loved to hate. Raynal's theater is live, it is life. Go live, go share live in this space.
Carol Tyler, Independent Theater Critic