Not a single word needs to be spoken for Spain’s Kulunka Teatro to make theatrical magic with André & Dorine, now paying an all too brief visit to The Los Angeles Theatre Center in Downtown L.A.

Married for decades, the play’s title characters face their greatest challenge as novelist André’s cellist wife Dorine begins exhibiting signs of Alzheimer’s.

She misbuttons her dress. She plays her cello with the bow hair side out. She confuses her purse for a hat.

And a visit to the doctor only confirms the cause of these worrisome symptoms.

Little by little, like the protagonists of Florian Zeller’s play The Father and Lisa Genova’s novel Still Alice (both made into Oscar-winning films), Dorine is fading away before her beloved husband and their adult son’s eyes.

I’ve seen more than a few stage and screen depictions of dementia, but never anything quite like André & Dorine, which tells its story without a single line of spoken dialog and with the faces of its three actors hidden beneath more than a dozen different masks that allow them to take on multiple identities as André & Dorine’s love story unfolds in both present and past tenses.

Flashbacks reveal the couple’s meet-cute. (An as-yet unpublished André approaches the already well-known Dorine for her autograph only to find that once again his pen won’t write.) Their wedding. (The bride is already conspicuously pregnant.) The birth of their only child. (Not surprisingly, he comes out looking like a Spanish Cabbage Patch doll.)

Meanwhile, scenes in the present take the devoted couple from the first hints of her disease to its diagnosis to the gradual loss of a lifetime of memories.

But don’t let the subject matter keep you from rushing to the LATC for one of the play’s few remaining performances.

This is live theater at its most enchanting, evoking not just tears but smiles, chuckles, and out-and-out laughter, much of the magic coming from Garbiñe Insausti’s whimsical masks, each of which speaks volumes about the character whose face it represents, among them the itchy patient André and Dorine come across in her doctor’s office waiting room, the priest who declares them husband and wife, and the caregiver who gives their son a reason to smile even as his mother fades away. (And if you’ve ever wondered what it’s like for an Alzheimer’s patient not to recognize a loved one’s face, there’s a remarkable moment in André & Dorine that puts you inside Dorine’s head to reveal exactly what she sees when her husband of forty years enters the room.)

Under Iñaki Rikarte’s incisive, nuanced direction, three extraordinary actors (José Dault, Insausti, and Edu Cárcamo, who cowrote André & Dorine with Rikarte and Rolando San Martín, and have been touring the world with it for a dozen years so far) prove themselves masters of physical theater, ensuring that not even one word needs to be spoken or written for us to follow every single plot point along the way. (I learned after the show that Dault and Cárcamo share the roles of André and his son, switching parts halfway through.)

Laura Gómez’s meticulously appointed living room set, Carlos “Sama” Samaniego’s evocative lighting, Ikerne Giménez’s character-perfect costumes, and Yayo Cáceres’s haunting original music only add to the magic.

André & Dorine is presented by Latino Theater Company. San Martín is assistant director. Mikel Insausti is general manager. Lucy Pollak is publicist.

I’ve never seen anything quite like André & Dorine. It is theater at its most imaginative and captivating. It will leave you breathless with wonder.

Latino Theater Company at LATC 514 South Spring Street, Los Angeles.
www.latinotheaterco.org

–Steven Stanley
June 11, 2022
Photos: Svend-Andersen, Gonzalo Jerez, and Manuel D.

Tags: Kulunka Teatro, Los Angeles Theatre Center, The Latino Theater Company