Cara Mia Theatre Puts on Teotl: The Sand Show (Didn’t Dig It)

Theater companies and arts critics around Dallas have declared recent SMU drama grad Jeffrey Colangelo a budding genius as a playwright, director and fight choreographer. He’s certainly a genius at one thing: convincing people he’s brilliant with shows that are both boring and baffling in their lack of originality.

His latest empty vessel is Teotl: The Sand Show, written and directed by Colangelo for Cara Mia Theatre Company. Like Colangelo’s one-act Playtime at last summer’s Festival of Independent Theatres, a torturous hour of clowns, balloons and ear-piercing screams, Teotl is wordless. Just movement. A little grunting. A lot of sand.

Performed in a stifling warehouse off Singleton Boulevard in Trinity Groves, Teotl happens in a pit of white sand. Actresses Natalia Dubrov, Frida Espinosa-Müller and Graham Galloway wear crook-beaked gray masks to portray vultures, tossing sand around their mystical desert. A masked god, Quetzalcoatl (Ivan Jasso), rises from beneath the grit to interact with a “Westerner” (Lauren Mishoe). They throw sand and fight over a bowl of water. Another desert god, Tezcatlipoca (Dean Wray), pops up to battle Quetzalcoatl. They hop around, waving their arms and kicking up sand. The choreography, if you can call it that, is nothing special. No more inventive than kids messing around in a sandbox.

Sand flies from the floor and pours from the ceiling. After 80 minutes of this dust storm, I had grains of sand in my nostrils, ears and hair. But no clue what any of this was about or why anyone would want to see it.