How to Eat an Orange

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When darkness becomes the ever-present condition of living, we seek out the moments of light from our memories to assist us in finding our way in that continuous darkness. These memories are not usually a continuous flow, like a tightly woven tapestry, but a path that weaves in and out of the darkness, sometimes here and other times there, creating patterns both now and then.

This is the story of Claudia Bernardi, a visual artist and activist, as told in a one-woman show, How to Eat an Orange. It tells of Bernardi’s time growing up in Argentina in the profound gloom of the military junta and the stories of the “desaparecidos,” the missing ones. It was written by Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American playwright who traveled to and wrote plays about human rights conflicts in countries worldwide. She brings a first-hand narrative understanding of what Bernardi experienced during and after the time of the junta and her work in other countries with this collection of desaparecidos’ stories.

Elena Araoz directs this intricate show, the narrative of which moves back and forth in time and place through projections and limited props. She guides Paula Pizzi as Claudia through the consequential events of Claudia’s life that shaped who she became as an artist and activist for human rights and social justice. The problem with the narrative is that it needs to engage the viewer to fully appreciate the emotional impact of the journey into the darkness of human depravity. The transitions from relaxed to intense are too smooth and even to appreciate the emotional conflict of the various experiences.

Claudia enters with an orange on a plate. She sits at a table and tells us how she learned to peel an orange. She takes a knife, cuts the ends off the orange, and then cuts the orange in half from end to end. At this point, the story takes its first step into the past with a memory of some happy moments from childhood. These two actions of lightness are a prologue to the next step, which is into the soul-crushing darkness of political repression.

Claudia introduces the audience to Rudolfo Walsh through his act of mailing a letter to the leaders of the junta in March 1977. He was an Argentine writer, journalist, and activist who disappeared shortly after sending the letter. Even though she did not know who this man was at the time of his disappearance, that event impacted her years later as she was uncovering the atrocities of the junta.

Claudia was 22 in 1977 and taking her university final exams. Only 40 students out of 200 showed up for the exams. The missing students had all been detained by the police. The apparent cause of the disappearance was a particular piece of identification missing from the students. She recalls a frightening encounter a week earlier when students without a specific piece of identification began to disappear. As she leaves the exam building, a man bumps into her, causing the contents of her purse to fall to the ground. He apologizes and helps her pick up the items. After he leaves, she realizes a vital identification card is missing. It is the same one that caused the disappearance of the many students.

She tells some friends of the event and says she will go to the police station to report the theft. They counsel her not to go. She goes anyway, and what she encounters in the police station starts, with small steps, her life-long odyssey to expose the acts of governments in their organized violation of human rights.

The story moves from darkness to light and back again. Each change reveals another element of Claudia’s experiences going from the time of the junta to her work in the United States. She introduces her mother, father, and, importantly, her younger sister Patri. She shows us how she and her sister explored things about the world that they found fascinating. A story about ants and her parents’ reaction sets an idyllic tone that contrasts a shift in time and place with questions from a reporter about the sister’s work with the Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team. Patri was instrumental in the creation of the team that was established to find and identify people who “disappeared” during the junta.

Each step, from light to dark, illustrates the depravity and inhumanity inflicted on people in many places. Each change reveals more about who Claudia is and how she came to be a woman who used her art to provide healing in the aftermath of the political violence she witnessed in the communities she visited. In the end, Claudia returns to the table with the cut orange and finishes her demonstration of eating an orange, closing the circle, and beginning with the opening scene. A sketch of Claudia has been provided, and a sense of the pervasiveness of the violation of human rights and social justice has been laid out, but the full emotional impact is missing.

Daniel Landez’s set is relatively simple, with a table and chair on stage right used in the opening and closing as the staging for eating the orange. Stage left is a recessed rectangular area surrounded by a translucent plastic curtain with a large table and desk. It stands in for an operating table, interrogation room, office desk, and more, some with ominous connotations. The back of the stage is a wall with a large rectangular opening representing a door. There is a clothesline with a white dress hanging on it.

Milton Cordero’s projection design uses elements of the set as projection screens. It is a design that includes historical images and footage used to illustrate critical aspects of the narrative. Two of these projections are of particular interest. The image of a young girl whose remains were found at a massacre site in El Salvador is projected on the white dress hanging on the clothesline. The other is the image of a skeleton projected on the back wall that slowly transforms into a painting done by Claudia of that skeleton as a symbol of the human atrocities that were being uncovered.

The rest of the creative team includes Nathan Leigh’s sound design, María-Cristina Fusté’s lighting design, and Suttirat Larlarb and Brynne Oster-Bainnson’s costume design. The lighting and sound design work seamlessly to support the narrative, with the transition from light to dark.

How To Eat An Orange (through June 16, 2024)

La MaMa ETC

Downstairs Theater at La MaMa, 66 East 4th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.lamama.org/shows/how-to-eat-an-orange-2024

Running time: 90 minutes without an intermission