STAGE REVIEW : ‘Simpson Street’: Escaping a Bronx Dead End

If Edward Gallardo’s “Simpson Street,” at Nosotros Theatre in Hollywood, deals with the same subject as “The Glass Menagerie,” that’s perfectly OK. It feels as autobiographical as Tennessee Williams’ tone poem, and it’s a story that can stand to be told again. Knock on any door down this street and you just might find a grasping, self-centered mother who has devoted her life to her kids and sees no reason why they should not devote their lives to her.

In this case, the street’s in the Bronx, and the family is Latino. Amanda Wingfield becomes Lucy Rodriguez (a properly metallic Margarita Cordova), who drove her husband away, then a lover--because, she claims, her son didn’t like him. She has waited patiently for the son’s release from a mental hospital following a suicide attempt and doesn’t intend to let him slip out of her grasp again.

Son Michael, however, has changed. He no longer feels any necessity to be locked into the dead-end world of Simpson Street. He isn’t the poet Tom Wingfield was, but his new outlook on life has a little poetry of its own. Nelson Lesmo plays Michael expertly, with a low fire burning beneath his gentle surface, a fire that slowly begins to singe the edges of his cool and free him emotionally and, eventually, physically, from hopeless ties to the neighborhood.

If we’re left wanting Gallardo to tell us more about Michael, he does show us some of the influences that shaped him. Lucy is only the tip of the iceberg. Her friend Elva (Margarita Estrada) exists day to day in a sloppily drunken haze--she passes out face down in Michael’s homecoming cake. Her other friend Rosa (Louisa Moritz) is a tawdry type who dresses like a teen-ager and hates men, but picks them up if they’re young enough.

Even Michael’s sister Angela is falling into the social trap that binds the older women. She has left her cold husband and is following Rosa into the half-world of bars and one-night stands. As Angela, Orly Kate Sitowitz is vulnerable beneath her anger, a well-shaped portrait of a young woman going nowhere. Ramona Martin is also good as Rosa’s daughter who, like Michael, is getting out while the getting is good.

Director Marc Allen Trujillo sometimes gives the play flame where the script only indicates smoke, and creates an intensity in the final scene between mother and son that defines Lucy’s selfish love and Michael’s desperate need to be anywhere but on Simpson Street.

The production is double-cast; this cast misses few of its targets.

“Simpson Street,” Nosotros Theatre, 1314 N. Wilton Place, Hollywood; Fridays-Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 7 p.m. Ends June 9. $10; (213) 465-4167. Running time: 1 hour, 45 minutes.