Ben Becher, Ana B. Gabriel, and Lucas Salvagno in The Whole of Time. Photo: Maria Baranova

The American theater canon gives you plenty of places to look for fevered, claustrophobic family dramas with a core of curdled desire: Sam Shepard, Edward Albee, Tennessee Williams, just to name a few. Argentine playwright Romina Paula’s 2009 play The Whole of Time (translated from the Spanish by Jean-Graham Jones) draws specifically on Williams’s The Glass Menagerie as a source, but both the play and director Tony Torn’s work seem to suspend the piece in dialogue with other works in this vein as well: a little of the macho energy of Streetcar Named Desire, a little of the twisted recursive fantasy life of Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, a little of the dirty rock-and-roll edge of early Shepard or the heavy shadow of violence in his Curse of the Starving Class. (It’s a densely intertextual work, all in all–also featuring prominently are Moby Dick, several paintings by Frida Kahlo, and the song “Si no te hubieras ido” by Mexican musician Marco Antonio Solís.)

Paula’s choice to make the play a four-way vortex of matched antagonists, where Glass Menagerie rotates around the gravity of Amanda Wingfield, makes the dynamics even darker and stranger; with all four characters bouncing off each other’s desires and feeding one another’s fantasies, the play spirals out in combustible directions. The basic foursome remains the same: a mother; her two adult children–an older brother and a younger sister, both living in the family home; and an outsider, a friend of the son’s invited into the hothouse. The mother here is Ursula (Ana B. Gabriel), who retains Amanda Wingfield’s habits of passive-aggressively judging her daughter’s isolation and single state but has an active social and presumably sexual life of her own. The son, Lorenzo (Lucas Salvagno), works in a restaurant but has the wardrobe of a glam rock idol and is reading Moby Dick; he’s thinking about moving to Spain, which he’s told his mother but not his sister. The daughter, Antonia (Josefina Scaro), may, like Laura Wingfield, never leave the house, but it’s a role she’s chosen for herself: she wants to control her own time; she doesn’t want to be forced into life as a capitalist pawn. (The overall level of economic security that permits this is acknowledged but not dwelt on; Lorenzo works at a restaurant because he feels like it, according to Amanda; they have enough to live on anyway. I’d have liked to see the play poke a little harder at this dynamic, especially when it seems like the outsider is a working-class guy with less elite cultural taste.) And the outsider, Maximilliano (Ben Becher), is a bartender at the grill where Lorenzo works; he’s got a biker jacket and a bit of Marlon Brando energy, but he’s also a straight shooter, a man who’s basically content with his life.

The currents of sexual energy spark in all directions right from the beginning: the play begins with “Si no te hubieras ido,” a song about missing one’s lover; Torn creates a glam-rock role-play out of it, with Lorenzo singing shirtless in a shearling coat, bathed in blue neon, with his sister feeding him the lines and then telling him it’s a story from the viewpoint of a man who’s killed his lover. When the song ends, Lorenzo strips off the coat and goes to get dressed for a night out, trying on a series of bright and sparkling tops before finally settling on a more staid red sweater; he and Antonia run through a “what-if” scenario postulating that ends with them almost kissing, until Ursula interrupts. When Maxi arrives, it at first seems like he’s heading for a date with Lorenzo, but Lorenzo then leaves Maxi and Antonia alone to go finish his book. Their scene–the philosophical heart of the play–starts with a discussion about what it means to live a “normal” life, but morphs into an encounter that rides the line between sexual desire and sexual assault (again given a glam rock edge by being scored with The Stooges’s “I Wanna Be Your Dog”). And by the time Lorenzo finishes Moby Dick and Ursula returns, late and drunk, you truly wouldn’t be surprised to see any pair in the room in either a passionate embrace or a fistfight. 

The tiny space, seating just over twenty people, helps establish and maintain the family’s unsettlingly intense intimacy, and the projection of Frida Kahlo’s portrait of her father looking back at the audience makes us feel even more implicated in the dynamic. The various cultural references keep the piece feeling a little unmoored in time–a song from the 1980s; classic nineteenth-century American literature; early twentieth-century Mexican paintings–which is fitting for a play titled The Whole of Time, and somehow contributes to the fishbowl atmosphere. 

Torn gets strong performances out of all four, though Becher and Salvagno show the most nuance; Scaro and Gabriel can lean toward the petulant or pouty. Becher’s Maxi serves as the emotional baseline; his language may be less articulate, filled with “like”s and “um”s to the family’s more precise and mannered way of speaking, but he helps ground the others when they start to spiral away: Scaro’s Antonia into a febrile intensity; Gabriel’s Ursula into drunken spite; Salvagno’s Lucas into the isolation of Ishmael at the end of Moby Dick. 

But at the end, the family will once again be together–not necessarily in a good way; they’re standing shell-shocked stage right–while Maxi sits apart from them. Have they been exactly here before, as they prepare to spit out another outsider, or is everything truly broken this time? (Are we in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf  or Curse of the Starving Class, perhaps.) They may be united in rage or despair; they may never be the same again, but their shared bond remains: a love that’s a little nasty, a little too erotically charged for family, a little too unsettling. It’s no wonder Torn keeps coming back to the aesthetic of glam.