Fernando Gazzaniga and María Fontanals. Photo by Tene Martínez.
In a nation in which the government has made the socioculturally and biologically inaccurate assertion that there are only two sexes (and, one assumes, no division between sex and gender) into official policy and is working not only to disenfranchise but even to erase mention of trans and genderqueer people, Fernando Travesí's play El espacio entremedias (The Space in Between) could not be more timely. Performed in Spanish with overtitles in English, El espacio entremedias is making its world premiere at the East Village's Teatro Círculo this month. And the fact that this run began on Valentine's Day coincides nicely with the centrality of love to the play's vision of resilience and progress.
El espacio entremedias drops audiences into the lives of an unnamed couple, compellingly played by María Fontanals and Fernando Gazzaniga, who have decided to raise their child, Alex, without assigning Alex to a binary gender role, a decision that involves concealing Alex's sex-assigned-at-birth in order to preserve the child's right to self-definition as Alex grows up. As early as the play's opening lines, we learn that Alex's father did not initially view raising a child in this way to be an important issue but became convinced in part because of his deep love for his wife, a mutual commitment made palpable by the performers. However, as the pressure mounts on the couple to abandon their defiance of heteronormative naturalization, from sources including the director of their child's school (also Gazzaniga) and disapproving parents and community members, Alex's father at times shows less willingness to keep up the fight than does his wife, who does not shy from the idea of going to court and sees their struggle as helping to pave the way for future children to live better lives. With even Alex's paternal grandmother (also Fontanals), though supportive, saying that she is parroting the correct things to say about being nonbinary without understanding them, Alex's father wonders whether their sacrifices in standing behind their decision are necessary or worthwhile.
The betweenness of the show's title points not only to the non-binary space occupied by Alex but also to the gaps between people, building on Alex's father's observation that science proposes that there is always, even if on the atomic level, space between any two objects that are touching. We might see the bridging of the latter space, then, as necessary to preserving the former as a liberatory space. Perhaps this idea of bridging gaps might be linked as well to the prominence given by the show to different modes of communication–in, it is worth noting, a heavily gendered language–a prominence emphasized by excellent production design. The (projected) windows behind the parents' respective desks double as screens displaying various phone calls, text messages, and the like (as well as, at times, some more abstract visuals), and the set's rear corner periodically hosts larger projections, including live feeds of the actors. The sound design, meanwhile, makes great use of songs from a range of genres.
Fernando Gazzaniga and María Fontanals. Photo by Tene Martínez.
While disappearing seamlessly into their secondary roles, the terrific Fontanals and Gazzaniga feelingly inhabit Alex's parents. Fontanals gives the audience a woman whose deep love and righteous anger are profoundly interlinked, and Gazzaniga keeps her husband relatable in his hesitancy and especially in the way in which a tragic personal loss impacts him. A time jump late in the play gives the audience–and these characters–closure, but of course the larger fight of which this play dramatizes an example has no end in sight. When Alex's father is tempted to compromise, he talks about the need to have the right timing and lots of support in order to enact change, and he is not wrong. El espacio entremedias reminds us how understandable and how temptingly easier and more comfortable it is not to make trouble, and in doing so highlights that this is a decision everyone is going to have to make, repeatedly, in the coming years and their renewed war on queerness; we should, like Alex's parents, make those decisions from a place of love, and we will need to make them together.
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