SO MANY THINGS in life are purely a matter of luck. Birth for example. You may be lucky enough to be born to a family with loving and compassionate parents. Or at least one loving and compassionate parent. Or at least parents who don't abuse you, parents who clothe you and feed you and send you off to school.
In House of Tricks, Victor Lodato looks at the unlucky--a young boy unlucky enough to have only one abusive parent and no one else in the entire world.
Lodato gives us a look at life's seedy side. The side filled with prostitutes and drugs and violence. The side we turn away from because we so easily can. The side filled with weaklings and losers. The side filled with stupid people who just didn't "pick themselves up and do something with their lives." We'd never find ourselves there. We're so much better than that. Then Lodato shatters our arrogant, little world and shows us the real reason we aren't on the street pushing tricks for 35 bucks is just pure, dumb luck.
From the rafters of the stage in House of Tricks hangs an oversized swing where the childlike Lodato begins the tale of the boy. It's an incongruous childhood object in the middle of a young boy's real-life nightmare. The boy resolves his relationship with his abusive father the only way he can and ends up homeless and alone.
Lodato's young boy remains a nameless representative of so many young boys. His is the story of our ability to turn away from the ugliness in life; our ability to pass it by and keep walking; and worse, our ability to further strip the dignity of a human being then go home to the wife, kids and neighborhood barbecue with some warped sense of satisfaction.
Lodato, writer and sole performer of House of Tricks, talks of loneliness with such piercing simplicity you can barely stay in your seat. Perched on his swing, he asks in earnest, "Ever have someone do that for you? Get you a glass of water like people do for each other in the movies? It's really nice."
When you leave the theater, you want so badly to convince yourself
this was only the theater, a piece of fiction. Otherwise, how
could you go to your comfortable home and feed the cat and kiss
your child as if all were well?
The boy's happiness is particularly heart wrenching. After sharing seven months in a cold, cheap motel room with an older, wiser male prostitute, Tennessee, the boy says, "I was as happy as I think a person can be."
Later the boy finds more family in a drug-addicted, old drag queen. They set up house together in a dingy hotel room. As sad as this is, you are happy for the boy--and strangely relieved. Now he's got someone to take care of him like every boy should. And it's not you. What could you do anyway?
Tucson, however, lucks out because Lodato, a National Endowment for the Arts fellow, chooses to live and work here. He has premiered six other original works in Tucson.
Although local audiences are fawning over the magnificent seven-hour epic Angels in America Lodato's piece, in its quiet, unaffected way, is simply the most powerful piece of theatre to hit a Tucson stage in years--probably since Lodato's last piece.
