In Oliver Mayer's absorbing kitchen-sink play, the generically named Mama (Marlene Forte) reminisces about the comic-strip character Prince Valiant, her childhood hero. Now the 39-year-old Mexican wife to a 55-year-old working-class black man (Hansford Prince) and mother to a high-strung 10-year-old mixed-race son (Chastity Dotson), she's forced to redefine her notion of knights in shining armor. Mayer's delicate fable encompasses warmhearted humor, sharp poignancy, and instantaneous flashes of lyricism. Behind the civilized family skirmishes are tangled emotions, huge insecurities, and incestuous impulses--all raising the dramatic ante.
The first clue that there's more here than meets the eye is director Jack Rowe's casting of a female adult actor as the prepubescent Boy. This underscores the character's search for his identity, adding another level to a script that touches on fear of aging, jealousy in a marriage, the specter of violence, and the challenge of being a mixed-race child. Boy also harbors romantic fantasies about his mother, and Mayer's tasteful treatment of this makes it more a rites-of-passage incident than a shocking Freudian aberration. It feels exactly right within the complex dynamics of this loving though mildly dysfunctional family. This isn't a familial-torment opus of Albee or O'Neill proportions. It's a gentle seriocomedy, imparting quietly profound truths.
Sealing the deal are extraordinary slice-of-life performances. Prince is sheer perfection as a father with macho values who believes the only way to break through the communication barrier with his son is to teach the boy to box. Forte imbues her character with a wide range of incisive nuances, achieving a pitch-perfect depiction of the woman's strength in dealing with the family's roller-coaster emotions. Dotson is wonderfully convincing as the confused adolescent, creating an alternately humorous and heart-rending portrait of a kid with growing pains that are skating close to the breaking point. In this tiny Boyle Heights performance space, Rowe and company remind us that the magic of live theatre often has little to do with lavish budgets and state-of-the-art accoutrements.