Breakfast Lunch & Dinner

Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times

Highly Recommended - "Fat and intimacy. Those are the principal subjects of Luis Alfaro's gently surreal tragicomedy "Breakfast, Lunch & Dinner," now in a beautifully realized Midwest premiere by Teatro Vista, the Latino company celebrating its 15th anniversary this season.

Alfaro is certainly not the first to connect the dots between food, sex and the quest for love. But there is something about his take on the subject -- and his subtle use of the magic realism style -- that sidesteps the pop psychology found on so many talk shows and in so many magazine stories. Instead, he transforms it all into a drama of crushing sadness, black humor and surprising theatricality.

And actress Sandra Marquez (so memorable in her recent role as a Latina nanny in "Living Out") demonstrates her impressive directing skills as she captures the play's delicate balance between hope and despair, and deploys her superb cast of four to ideal effect.

To begin with, there are two sisters. Minerva (the brave and unwavering Diana Campos) is a wife and mother who gradually grows more and more disfigured and immobile as she gorges on everything in sight, including her favorite marshmallow confections, Sno Balls. Alice (the high-spirited Sandra Delgado) is the slim, self-involved beauty whose hunger is for sex rather than food, although, like Minerva, her true quest is for love. Minerva's husband, Al (winningly underplayed by the very touching Tony Sancho) is a decent, somewhat oblivious everyman who probably would prefer that his wife were thinner, but who continues to love her even as she expands beyond obesity. He only regrets that his sex life vanishes as his wife's waistline expands -- a fact he confides to Alice in several hilarious and edgily suggestive scenes. As for Alice's new boyfriend, Officer Fernandez (Joe Minoso, perfectly on target), he is as terrified of commitment as she has always been, and while he loves the wild sex she offers, he cannot deal with her commanding spirit. Ironically, he is the one man who has allowed her to open herself up.

Minerva ultimately grows so fat that she begins to float into the ether -- a phenomenon heartbreakingly rendered as she is at first tethered to her sister's wrist by a string, and then, dressed in a pink fat suit (Christine Pascual's marvelous invention), she ascends the Coney Island roller-coaster ramp of designer Brian Sidney Bembridge's clever set. The writing -- poignant, poetic and funny throughout -- is matched at every turn by this winning production"