Earthquake as a 2-part tragedy

“An earthquake is not an instant. In an instant everything falls apart, everything is lost. Destinies change, intertwine, disintegrate, all in an instant. But the earthquake continues days later.”

These words are spoken early in “En un Sol Amarillo (Memorias de un Temblor),” the meditative performance piece by the Bolivian Teatro de los Andes that opened Sunday at the Kirk Douglas Theatre, and they’re a tipoff that the aftershocks will be every bit as violent as the seismic eruption that sets the story into tremulous motion.

Written and directed by Cesar Brie, “In a Yellow Sun (Memories of an Earthquake),” as the title of this Spanish-language work is translated, harks back to the earthquake that devastated Bolivia in 1998. A co-production of Center Theatre Group and the FITLA-International Latino Theatre Festival of Los Angeles, the work translates the vocabulary of documentary drama into a purely theatrical tongue that’s more impressionistic than journalistic -- and a lot more discreetly analytic as a result.

Insights don’t explode but ripple with a kind of cumulative meaning. You might leave in a subdued state of mind, but your unconscious will still be processing this probing account of a disaster compounded by political wrongdoing.

In an unusually eloquent director’s note in the program, Brie writes that, in studying the history of these kinds of catastrophic events, he and his company discovered that “in every earthquake, disconnection, egoism and stinginess coexist with solidarity.” With the dispassionate logic of a man adding sums, he tells us that “[t]he abuses and robbery committed, especially by the authorities, [have] been a common denominator in the earthquakes in Latin America.”

As always, the least powerful in society -- women, children and the working poor -- are most vulnerable to calamity and its inevitable mishandling. Brie’s allegiance is with the victims of history, even when their behavior isn’t stainless (as in the case of a professor who briefly succumbs to his greedier instincts). The playwright saves his satiric contempt for corrupt leaders who are capable of exploiting a situation of mass suffering for personal gain. Conscience-free, they have the audacity to distribute a paltry portion of the foreign aid as though they were Santas hurling great big sacks.

The imaginative simplicity of the production, which unfolds on a darkened stage with two screens for the projection of English supertitles, never lets you lose sight of Brie’s sympathies. Yet the style could hardly be less heavy-handed.

When the earthquake hits, a few pieces of furniture fly up in the air on strings. A brown dusty substance signifying dirt is thrown across Gonzalo Callejas’ minimalist set and into the faces of the ensemble’s four actors, who breathe it in and out in streams of smoke. These people have been buried alive, and their first concern is for the safety of their children, who are represented by haunting dolls.

One moment that crystallizes Brie’s spare and uncomplicated aesthetic involves the stick-figure depiction of a child whose life was lost. The image is made with sand on a wooden table and slides into oblivion a few seconds after it has been formed.

Brie’s deftest move, however, is in contrasting the devoted, self-sacrificing concern of parents who will do anything to rescue their kids and the government, which should adopt the same stance toward its citizens but instead shamelessly takes advantage of them.

Politicians are portrayed as carnival barkers, promising the world during their photo-ops and delivering lies when the media have turned their sensationalizing focus elsewhere.

The audience gets the chance to toss balls of paper at these double-talking campaigners, an invitation that provoked a fair amount of exuberance from Angelenos. It’s one of the folksier occurrences in a production that has a distinctly handcrafted feeling. The unpretentious spirit, however, is carefully choreographed, and the actors’ commitment is palpable even in the lampooning bits.

Although ultimately more visually than dramatically satisfying, “En un Sol Amarillo” bears witness to a two-part tragedy, with one part natural and the other man-made. The experience, though specific to one country, reveals larger cross-cultural truths.

Perhaps most resonant is the sense that a country’s betrayal of its democratic principles is just as devastating as the earth swallowing up one’s home.

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charles.mcnulty@latimes.com

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‘En un Sol Amarillo (Memorias de un Temblor)’

Where: Kirk Douglas Theatre, 9820 Washington Blvd., Culver City

When: 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 1 and 6:30 p.m. Sundays

Ends: Nov. 25

Price: $20 to $40

Contact: (213) 628-2772 or www.centertheatregroup.org

Running time: 1 hour, 5 minutes