Rich Characters Inhabiting ‘Bitter Homes’

The title “Bitter Homes and Gardens” is so right for Luis Alfaro’s slender but evocative new play at Los Angeles Theatre Center’s Theatre 2.

Yes, the family he depicts is bitter--although the mother, Camelia, denies it: “Bitter is for those who live in the past. I’m miserable. Miserable is the present.”

But as those words and the pun in the title indicate, Alfaro sees the dark humor in his characters, too. This is not a prolonged teeth-gnashing session; it’s a spare, intermissionless portrait of a group of characters--in the sense of richly sketched personalities. In Jon Lawrence Rivera’s staging for Playwrights’ Arena, they inhabit an ostensibly bleak but theatrically stimulating world.

That world is a suburban cul-de-sac east of Los Angeles. The family moved there in a misguided stab at middle-class mobility. But now, Camelia moans about missing the old neighborhood. She and her 25-year-old daughter Rosie feel like virtual prisoners.

Meanwhile, Camelia’s son Jimmy is a real prisoner, after he murders one of his supervisors at a convenience store. Her husband, Francisco, does get out of the house--to work two jobs, and to drink.

At least Rosie has plans--she wants to be a nurse. However, she’s taking a correspondence course instead of going to a bricks-and-mortar school, so she’s usually stuck at home with her mother. But then someone has to watch over Camelia. Although she looks physically strong at age 50, Camelia has a tendency to avoid wearing anything more complicated than a slip, and she enjoys showing off her private parts to strangers.

During most of the play, not much happens in traditional narrative terms, other than the unhappy return of Jimmy from prison. Although the characters feel trapped, Alfaro manages to make their psychological paralysis remarkably stage-worthy, through conversations and monologues that are rife with sly, telling details.

Tall and brisk, Ivonne Coll is a torrent of frustrated energy as the half-cracked Camelia, who believes that her daughter should take up stripping and smoking instead of nursing. It’s an irresistibly showy performance. Rosie is a more disciplined woman, but the pressure is intense on her, too, and Christina Malpero’s subtly measured performance keeps us guessing about when she might crack.

Winston Jose Rocha-Castillo’s Francisco is a sad sack whose attempts to find some meaning in life by reading “Iron John” are comically touching. Justin Huen, filling in for Marcos Padilla as the tightly wound-up Jimmy, spends much of the play in his cell at the side of the theater. Jimmy’s the only character without a comic edge; his tale is, almost literally, too woeful for words.

The Virgen (Kathleen Addcox) silently watches from the side of the theater that’s opposite Jimmy, sometimes dressing in full religious regalia, but sometimes letting her hair down and filing her nails. The family is aware of her and would like her to help, but she appears powerless to make a difference.

Rachel Hauck designed a tacky but bright living room. Robert Fromer’s stark lighting and Bob Blackburn’s ominous sound design help lift the experience above mundane realism.

Although Alfaro has worked in L.A. theater for years, this is his first play that’s set in the L.A. area to be seen here other than his solo shows. It premiered elsewhere, but it has gone through extensive rewrites--and it’s worth the long wait.

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* “Bitter Homes and Gardens,” Los Angeles Theatre Center, Theatre 2, 514 S. Spring St., L.A. Fridays and Saturdays, 8 p.m.; Sundays, 3 p.m. Ends June 24. $15-$20. (213) 485-1681. Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes.