THEATRE REVIEW:

Head: “THE GRONHOLM METHOD” IS A COMIC SUSPENSEFUL DAZZLER

Here’s some great news for Mexican theatergoers:  The formerly dowdy little Sala Chopin concert auditorium has been remodeled into the most elegant, comfortable and beautiful “boutique” theater (272 seats with perfect sightlines) in Mexico City.  The new theater has fittingly been inaugurated with a brilliant new play called “El Metodo Gronholm” (“The Gronholm Method”) by young (under 40) Catalan playwright, Jordi Calceran.  First presented in Barcelona, where he lives, a year ago, it has been an international success in Madrid and only some Spanish-speaking Latin American countries, and is scheduled to open in London and New York in English soon.  It’s going to catapult Calceran into global theatrical stardom.

The story concerns three pre-middle-aged men and a woman who, after three preliminary interviews, are the final candidates for a high-level executive job with a transnational company.  The personnel selection process follows the Gronholm method from Switzerland, which is noted for its chocolates, secret bank accounts and cuckoo clocks. Although nominally fictional, the method is based on its actual ubiquitous use by powerful government agencies, secret intelligence services and huge transnational corporations all over the world, and the author based it on his experiences with job-seeking friends.

The four characters meet in a pristine, high-tech, white conference room with an electronically controlled sliding door and overhead spotlighting, and a small decorative wall panel that regularly opens into a shelf containing envelopes with instructions and other objects, including a digital chronometer.  They must undergo a series of tests that last ten minutes each, and if any of them leaves the room under pressure, he or she will be disqualified from the job competition.  The author’s intention, as stated in his excellent program note, is “to let the characters interplay with each other and the audience in order to discover the truths and lies, if that’s possible.”

How great is your ambition?  How far would you go to get a good job? What lies would you tell to cover up your worst-scenario personal and professional secrets?  How much cruel humiliation can you stand? To what emotional and physical lengths would you go to destroy the competition?  Worst of all, the characters must decide among themselves who the best candidate for the job is.  Thus pitted against each other as merciless antagonists, with the information that one of them is a hiring company spy whom they must unmask, they go at it like pit-bulls.  The method is comic, tantalizing and eventually brutal.  The hiring company’s bottom line of personnel selection for the important position is:  “We need a real son of a bitch who can act nice, not a nice person who can act like a son of a bitch.”

The characters are fascinating. Fernando (played by Roberto Blandon) is a tall, handsome smoothie, the epitome of a cell-phone yuppie who can charm the hell out of you with his bright, campy wit and move you to tears with the sad story of his youth.  Mercedes (Anilu Pardo) is his feminine opposite, a tough modern gal who, when she gets a call that her mother is dying in a hospital, refuses to leave the room and competition.  Enrique (Emilio Guerrero) is a fat middle-class slob, who talks about traffic and cars and whose personal life is a can of worms. Carlos (Miguel Rodarte) is a young employee who’s looking for a new job because he expects to be fired from his current job when they find out he’s undergoing hormone therapy for a big change in his life.

Polite society is based on hypocrisy, and political correctness is based on who can tell and get away with the biggest lies, whoppers like “All men are created equal,”  “Enron is in great financial shape,” “Cigarettes are not addictive” and “Saddam Hussein has weapons of mass destruction.” But perhaps the most artful and biggest, though least immoral, liars of all are terrifically talented actors like these four, who are the essence of good theatre because they have the tremendous skill to make lies seem real and transform obvious truths into convincing illusions. “That’s what the characters in the play do,” the author adds in his program note, “they go to extremes and don’t care who we are or how we are, but only what we appear to be.  Our authentic identities are not important to them - or even to ourselves.”     

The Mexican adaptation by Alvaro Cervino and the clever, swift laugh-a-minute and suspenseful pace by director Antonio Castro are excellent. The set and lighting designs by Sergio Villegas make the shiny room the most gorgeous torture chamber in town.  Produced by Fernando Gonzalez Compean and Morris Gilbert, who have eight successful shows running now, this dazzling thriller is an intellectual booby trap that will blow your mind.  Whatever you do after you see it, please don’t reveal the final turn of the screw, a shocking surprise, to anyone who hasn’t seen it.  It’s a mind-boggler, the perfect ending to a highly entertaining, unforgettable hour and forty minute show.