The Alvarez family, Susan, Kris, and Jim in Banana Musik, Winterruption, Saskatoon. Photo by Andrew Bromell.
By Liz Nicholls, .ca
The homey smell of cooking hangs over the unusually hospitable show, developed at the Found Festival, that’s currently running at the Backstage Theatre.
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There’s dinner and there’s theatre in Banana Musik, launching Common Ground Arts Society’s new Prairie Mainstage Series. But this is by no means dinner theatre. There’s a rice cooker, a frying pan, crockpots stage right; the playwright’s mom presides over them, spatula in hand. At the end of the show you can stick around and share some dinner.
Meanwhile the playwright’s dad, a Beatles fan whose T-shirt says “I’m A Dreamer But I’m Not The Only One,” has picked up his guitar and headed for the couch to play and sing a “banana musik” song he’s written. His daughter occasionally breaks off from what she’s been telling us about growing up in Regina with her now Boomer-age immigrant parents from the Philippines, to join in for a chorus or two.
Banana Musik by Kris Alvarez, Common Ground Arts Society. Photo supplied.
I’m pretty confident that the casually charming free-form theatrical memoir devised by Regina-based actor/ playwright/ musician Kris Alvarez with (and about) her parents Susan and Jim Alvarez is unlike any other show you’ll see this season. Alvarez, an eminently likeable performer, talks directly to us; her parents, who aren’t actors, are onstage chatting to her or just carrying on imperturbably as if they’re at home just doing the things they do.
Alvarez isn’t talking about them behind their backs. Her mom and dad are right there as she explains that as immigrant parents, one of their major themes was a more reliable career choice than theatre for their kid. Be a nurse, they urge; “you can do your acting on the side.” Be a lawyer; remember your triumph in Grade 8 debating?.
Have they noticed us? Every once in a while Susan, amused, looks up from cooking to wave her spatula at Kris: “what are you telling them now?” Their presence onstage is a kind of testimonial of authenticity. They’re not just talked about; they’re living 3-proof of lineage. And they’re remarkably indulgent, and unfazed, about the withdrawals their daughter makes from the family memory bank.
‘Banana Musik’ is the name Jim Alvarez gave the songs he wrote and recorded in the family basement on cassettes in the 1970s. And this original creation of Kris, Jim, and Susan is an informal warm-hearted invitation into an immigrant family. And the unforced cheerful charm of it is especially heart-warming in an age of escalating anti-immigrant rhetoric on both sides of the border. As “a 50-year-old immigrant kid” with Filipino parents,” she pays tribute the sacrifice of parents who left their own lives to move across the world and “do whatever it takes” to ensure a better life for their kids.
Now it’s her turn to look out for them as they get older. And her affectionately comic exasperation in the show is something that everyone who has parents decades older than themselves, i.e. all of us!, recognizes. “There is never enough time,” says Alvarez. And what time there is gets cluttered with problem-solving: taxes, medical appointments and test results, a fridge crammed with unidentifiable containers…. Alvarez’s waterloo is the huge cache of their saved stuff under the basement stairs, the junk her parents never use but resist throwing out: a duct-taped gold club, chipped pottery, a formidable assortment of unusable pots and pans…. “What is the promise of a pan with no handle?” she sighs. “Why would we get rid of that? It’s in perfect condition!” says Jim, as Kris waves a broken-down plastic umbrella.
And then there’s technology. Who hasn’t spent time they don’t have on the phone trying to figure out why dad’s Apple password suddenly doesn’t work, or why Netflix has barricaded itself against mom? “If someone doesn’t take care of it, who’s gonna take care of it?” an inter-generational variation on the immigrant mantra “I’ll do whatever it takes.”
And when time gets eaten up with aggravating practicalities, Alvarez returns us to memories: making music with dad, happy childhood road trips through an America that was actually benign, playing 20 questions in the car, eating “gas station snacks,” or playing the very amusing Alvarez family game “That’s Your House!” that reduces them all to howls of laughter every time.
Banana Musik is unusual in form, but it trades in the familiar — the joys and stresses, and obligations, of connecting as an adult with the older generation as people. The familiar is what makes us share smiles with Alvarez. “There’s never enough time to ask all the questions,” she says of being an grown-up and getting to know her aging parents. It’s a poignant insight, and a reminder.
REVIEW
Banana Musik
Common Ground Arts Society Prairie Mainstage Series
Written by: Kris Alvarez
Performed by: Kris, Jim, and Susan Alvarez
Where: Backstage Theatre, Fringe Arts Barns, 10330 84 Ave.
Running: through Sept. 26, with Burnt Sienna Sept. 27
Tickets, full schedule, description of events: commongroundarts.ca
