Rosita's Jalapeño Kitchen

Rosita's Jalapeño Kitchen

Dougherty Arts Center, through Feb. 26

Everyone has met a Rosita, a vitriolic Mexican cook with mucho more 'tude than your garden-variety French chef who doesn't get fat. She always has a pot of menudo stewing with warm memorias and tortillas served on the side. In Teatro Vivo's staging of Rosita's Jalapeño Kitchen, originally a one-woman Chicanologue by Rodrigo Duarte Clark, a full cast acts as ingredients for recognized recipes to Mexican life.

We sit at her table waiting and drinking cafela (café con canela, Spanish for cinnamon) while Rosita packs and prepares her last meal on the day that she decides whether or not she'll yield her restaurant to a land developer. He's offering her up to three times the value of her property so he can demolish the shop and construct a strip mall, ultimately germinating the gentrification of the barrio Salsipuedes.

Teatro Vivo's production takes you to Austin's Eastside, where you may have seen graffiti that says "Stop gentrification now" and "Yuppies off the east side." The wooden window frame in her kitchen is reminiscent of the mom and pop shops where la Virgen de Guadalupe cozies up to Mr. Coffee.

Just about everyone urges Rosita to consider the comforts of living in el otro lado, the other side. Her friend Cuca, la chismosa, or gossip, is already "movin' on up" to the west side for "a piece of the pie" (although she comes back for the enchiladas). Even her daughter, Panfila, goes gringa, cutting up enchiladas into little squares and dishing them up to her neighbors with toothpicks. Her cultura catches up to her, though, since Panfila's daughter returns regularly to the restaurant and eventually gets pregnant with Rosita's youngest son, Jesus. Divorced, Rosita had three chicos tugging her skirt at the stove. Hoping to remarry, she went to her Spanish-speaking Irish priest – mirthfully pulled off by Charles Rand – but he denied it to her. She had since been sola.

If Rosita chooses to vacate, she'll be abandoning not only her home but her culture, her flavor, her sabor. Her dreams of heaven are austere, with a white picket fence and a white refrigerator filled with white bread, mayonnaise, and cauliflower. Restless and panting, she goes through chile withdrawal. She has to beg St. Peter to take her across the border to the cholo Diablo (or chola for the She-Devil) for some salsa.

Clark's dialogue is peppered with Mexican proverbs like "Con diñero, baila el perro!" meaning that money makes the dog dance.

JoJanie Segura as the titular character, Rosita, isn't quite maternal enough to be a Doña. Her advice to use vegetable oil to make tortillas because it is good for the cholesterol is sanguine and picante. Rosita's familia might be related to Petra Dominguez, the matriarch in Rupert Reyes' series for Teatro Vivo. The ensemble cast animates the stage with the familiar Latino horseplay, illustrating Rosita's confessional-cookbook. "Los duelos con pan son menos," Rosita says. With bread, pain is less.