Theater Review: That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven

SARASOTA  On Friday, Urbanite Theater in downtown Sarasota presented the world premiere of Franky D. Gonzalez s That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven, which was commissioned by the company after winning its Charles Rowan Beye New Play Commission in 2020.

The play follows four immigrant professional boxers attempting to escape desperate circumstances via success in the ever-unforgiving fight game. Each is vying for an opportunity to become an unlikely world champion, hoping that the accomplishment will validate lives they invariably see as having come up short of their expectations and/or obligations.

Edgar, an undocumented immigrant from parts unknown, needs success to win a visa and validate his mother's sacrifices. Armando longs for the validation of his father who has not forgiven him for defecting from Cuba, or for falling on hard times in his career. Manuel wants to escape the shadow of his brother, a Mexican world champion who took his own life. Juan, a Puerto Rican journeyman, wishes only to die in the ring so that a life insurance policy might make good on promises to his wife and child that his career has failed to deliver.

There s a reason why when it comes to using a sport as the backdrop to storytelling, boxing has been the undisputed champion of both film and literature. A sport in which the odds are long and the price for failure just as steep, it can provide nearly endless opportunities for crafting allegories and metaphors linked to the human struggle of day-to-day life, especially when lived under less-than-ideal circumstances.

That said, sports, in general, do not tend to lend themselves all that well to the limitations of the stage, especially in black box theater, so I was very curious as to how Gonzalez would manage to employ it in the small space of Urbanite. To this end, the playwright has done a masterful job of approximating the high-stakes drama of the fight game under decidedly inopportune circumstances.

Gonzalez also manages to inject a plentiful dose of introspection as to the larger meaning of life and our existence that does not rely on boxing metaphors, my favorite being the nature of black holes, which gives the characters much more depth than a typical sports story, and I found myself much more invested in them as a result. His use of prose in short monologues delivered by the fighters at key moments helps to move the story briskly through its roughly two-hour run time.

That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven is not without its problems, however. While theater is generally more subtle than television and film, the play somehow manages to incorporate nearly as many sentimental tropes as the entire Rocky franchise, and even very casual boxing fans are likely to find some of the scenarios more than a little unrealistic.

Juan is Edgar s trainer at the onset, yet an implausible series of events lead to them fighting each other for the crown. Manuel s brother is said to have taken his life in despondence after moving all the way up from junior middleweight to heavyweight and not only defeating the Ukrainian, a giant of a world champion and obvious nod to either Vladimir or Vitali Klitschko but actually killing him in the process, an outcome that is simply too preposterous to imagine.

There are also some challenges in keeping the characters straight. Rodney Nelson, who plays Manuel, returns as Armando s trainer after Manuel loses, but I found it unclear as to whether this was part of Manuel s character arc or if Nelson was simply playing an additional role, which was clearly the case in other smaller parts. Chalk that up to the challenge of fitting a big story into a smaller production. The penultimate scene, which plays through various scenarios of the final fight s outcome drags a bit, almost like watching the alternative ending scenes on a movie DVD, but the play closes strong enough to overcome it.

Gonzalez benefits from a stellar cast with excellent chemistry. Nelson gives a powerful performance, bringing palpable intensity to every scene he s in, including a small role as a fight promoter. This plays well in his interactions with Edgar (Peter Pasco) and Juan (Juan Ramirez Jr.) who each give decidedly more subtle performances that help to reveal the vulnerabilities of their characters. Edgar Miguel Sanchez gives a strong turn as Armando, a character who wears his heartache on his sleeve.

In all, it felt like the play could have been cut by a good 15 minutes, but anytime I found myself the least bit frustrated, Gonzalez managed to pull me back in by way of the beautiful characters and gorgeous dialog. That Must Be the Entrance to Heaven is an engaging story, well told through memorable characters and an excellent debut by Gonzalez, an emerging talent for whom I will be very interested in seeing future works. Directed by Kathleen Capdesu