Surveying Lives of Dads in Two Lands

Sunday is Father’s Day, so it’s prime time to reflect on what made our fathers our fathers.”By the Hand of the Father” peers down a deep well indeed. The latest ambitious multimedia music-theater project of About Productions, the show carries multiple meanings in its title: the hand of tradition, the literal hand of “discipline,” the hand of guidance and love. It is a meditation on the subject of fatherhood and on many kinds of fathers, in this case Mexican Americans forged by the century just past.

The previous About Productions offering, “Properties of Silence,” worked its most insinuating stage magic by way of allusion and metaphor. This new piece is different; though deploying similar collage-technique effects, it’s interested in a more direct emotional impact. Indeed, sniffles could be heard in the Margo Albert Theater during one of the opening weekend performances.

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The piece is divided into nine sections. The two actors, Rose Portillo and Kevin Sifuentes, begin with an incantation of city names, from each side of the U.S.-Mexico border: El Paso, Juarez, Los Angeles, Saltillo and more. “My father,” says Sifuentes, fought overseas in World War II but “he could still see all the way home.” Soon afterward Portillo speaks of the same father’s Los Angeles boyhood, in an era when “the L.A. rail system . . . took you from Long Beach to the mountains. As a boy you traversed a landscape that was good. And empty. Meant to be filled up by your life.”

Guided by the terrific live music of Austin, Texas-based singer-guitarist-songwriter Alejandro Escovedo, director Theresa Chavez’s production pays tribute to those men with “a foot in each country,” coming into manhood at a time when “the earth had but one scent” and “the vista was unbroken.”

Co-written by director Chavez, Eric Gutierrez and actress Portillo, “By the Hand of the Father” is undeniably nostalgic for the old days. Yet it is also clear-eyed about the hardships endured by the fathers in question: racism, the threat of poverty, everything that comes with borders crossed early in life.

Sifuentes speaks at one point of being “less Mexican than my father but, ironically, [being] no more American than he.” The man he speaks of grew up in South Texas. He fought for a country that was “barely even his.”

Later, Sifuentes and Portillo reenact a 1950s courtship, playing an El Paso couple heading back over the border to Juarez for “a laugh and a song,” and a cry.

The music is the main thrust of the storytelling. The seven-piece band takes its place center stage, led by Escovedo, a modest, comfortable presence whose plaintive vocals cut right to the heart of any matter. Throughout, Janice Tanaka’s video--often routinely integrated into the text and music--adds images of turn-of-the-century photographs, train travel, a host of faces from the past.

With all these elements at work, you want them to mix it up and collide more. The rhythm of “By the Hand of the Father” is on the becalmed side. Everything’s laid out a little neatly, and some of the writing hits familiar sentimental chords.

Yet there’s a soulfulness to this work, especially apparent in Escovedo’s gorgeous music, supplemented on two traditional Mexican songs by vocalist Mauro Garcia. Chavez and company are after a very tricky thing here; they want to honor fathers without glossing over their bruising experiences and their often-flawed actions. The poetically inclined text wants the abstract as well as the concrete.

Some of its grander generalizations are just that--generalizations. (It’s not enough, for example, to talk about U.S. border culture as a place of “chaos and contradiction.” Leave that sort of empty phrasing to journalists.)

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The most moving nonmusical passage is at once modest and utterly specific. Titled “59 Years,” it’s a monologue performed by Sifuentes looking back on a long marriage. As he begins, you think, nice--a nice, feel-good reminiscence. Then the character, who’s caring for his frail wife, says: “I wish she would remember what was good about how it started.” He lets slip a couple of telling, painful phrases--”angry silence,” and “I wasn’t a saint but I stayed.”

By way of a few judiciously chosen words, we experience a lifetime. At such moments, with or without Escovedo’s yearning musical accompaniment, “By the Hand of the Father” conjures up deep wells of feeling.

Editor’s note: “By the Hand of the Father” director and co-author Theresa Chavez is married to daily Calendar Editor Oscar Garza.

BE THERE

“By the Hand of the Father,” Plaza de la Raza, Margo Albert Theater, 3540 N. Mission Road, East Los Angeles. Thursday-Saturday, 8 p.m.; Sunday, 2 p.m. Ends Sunday. $13. (323) 655-8587. Running time: 1 hour, 25 minutes.