When it is revealed, the meaning of “The Hours are Feminine,” the title of José Rivera’s latest play, is an apt encapsulation of the work. A newly immigrated Puerto Rican mother is explaining the Spanish language’s gendered grammar to her neighbor within a larger conversation about how bored they are as housewives on Long Island: “Time is masculine, but …”
It’s a poetic phrase that is almost too perfect, bordering on trite. Yet it contains such insight that it evokes a nodding mm-hmm from the audience. Like this line, the whole play, in its premiere production at Intar Theater in Manhattan, strikes a delicate balance between truism and genuine feeling.
Rivera writes and directs it as a remembrance of his family’s move to Long Island in the summer of 1960, which ended with the arrival of Hurricane Donna. His stand-in, 5-year-old Jaivin (Donovan Monzón-Sanders), and his mother, Evalisse (Maribel Martinez), arrive in Lake Ronkonkoma from their native island a year after his father, Fernán (Hiram Delgado), has settled into their new home.
Fernán has secured for them a ratty, illegally rented shack in the backyard of a picturesque house owned by Charlie (Dan Grimaldi), an aging Italian American creep who taunts them with slurs he knows they don’t understand. (The three family members perform their Spanish dialogue in English, so that their language barrier is revealed, poignantly, as a ghost might realize he’s invisible).
At the diner where Fernán works for $99 a month, he overhears patrons worrying about the Black and Puerto Rican families moving into their white idyll. That’s also the reason Charlie’s son, Anthony (Robert Montano), has moved himself and his wife, Mirella (Sara Koviak), into the big house, fleeing an integrating Brooklyn.
Mirella, though, is worldlier than that, and eagerly strikes up a friendship with Evalisse. Their interactions, hinged on the commonalities of midcentury womanhood, form the play’s tender core, before the families’ increasing friction culminates with the storm’s climactic arrival.
Rivera elicits lovely performances from his cast, especially its two women. And the handsome Delgado, recently seen in the Broadway revival of “Take Me Out,” plays his character’s contradictions beautifully. His way of navigating deferential laughs for his landlord, then alternately pivoting to paternal care or spousal aggression, suggests a Nuyorican Walter Younger from “A Raisin the Sun.”
The costumes (by Lisa Renée Jordan) are charming and succinctly place each character at the tail end of the ’50s: Fernán in a line cook uniform, complete with paper hat; Mirella in svelte high-waisted pants; the Italian men in opened-up bowling shirts; Jaivin in “Little Rascals” shorts and striped T-shirts.
But the nostalgia they conjure, along with Izzy Field’s suburban scenic design — a backyard flanked by the starkly different homes — is a bit too utopian, and mirrors the play’s own tonal schism. There’s a righteous anger beneath its observations about the distress of assimilation, and yet the whole production feels like a grandfatherly hug.
If Rivera falls short of condemning the racist behavior of those who have antagonized immigrants, he sweetly honors the few who have helped them in small ways.
The Hours Are Feminine
Through June 9 at the Intar Theater, Manhattan; intartheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.
