STAGE REVIEWS : ‘I AM CELSO’ ILLUMINATES ELOQUENCE OF FOLK ART

“When moonlight gets into your brain, it’s called madness,” observed actor Ruben Sierra in the title role of “I Am Celso.” “But when it gets into your heart, it’s called love.”

Something of both qualities characterized this second event in the UCLA College of Fine Arts’ Mexican Arts Symposium in the campus’ Macgowan Hall Little Theater. Adapted from the writings of New Mexican poet-artist Leo Romero by Sierra and director Jorge Huerta, “Celso” is rich in the sort of colloquial eloquence and universal depth that has come to characterize the best folk art.

As originally conceived by Romero, Celso is the classic Latino sinverguenza , the town drunk who lives, as he himself puts it, “according to the Gospel of the Holy Grape.” Scorned by villagers, he has assumed a comic sense of superiority, related in colorful tales of adventure that range from a shocking desecration of a Sunday Mass to an encounter with La Llorona, the Southwestern Medea said to roam the mountains wailing for her lost children.

As played by Sierra, Celso became something more, taking on the attributes of a Latino coyote figure--a veritable trickster “who scoffs at everything and never worries.” It is this aspect of the character that has lifted Romero’s lyrical, often hauntingly beautiful poetry beyond merely regional concerns, and Sierra and Huerta realized its trickster elements in strikingly visual ways--at times Sierra didn’t just act like a coyote, he practically looked like one as well.

It wasn’t all fun and games, however. Like all coyote stories, Celso’s were often told for serious ends. Here, as in virtually all Latino art, the specter of death lurked constantly nearby. “In life there is death, in death there is life--you hope,” mused Celso, who often spoke of “a winter chill in my bones” and in one story even made love to a skeleton. Darkness itself took on human characteristics, stepping, as Celso described it, “from behind the trees into the mountains.”

The juxtaposition of ecstasy and terror in such moments was unforgettable, made all the more powerful by the simplicity of Sierra and Huerta’s presentation. The result was an evocative, often uproariously anecdotal monologue, limitless in its appeal, that firmly established this “Celso” as a man for all seasons--and all peoples.