‘the Mathematics Of Love’ Doesn’t Add Up

Peaches (Rose Portillo) can’t remember where she is, why she’s there, that her kids have long grown up or that Daughter (Sarita Ocón) lost a partner two months ago. Celebrating her 50th wedding anniversary with Poppa (George Killingsworth) in the Los Angeles Biltmore Hotel, she compulsively scrubs toilets and folds towels, thinking she’s still the hired help she was in her youth at a Tijuana casino. Time-traveling to the 18th century, when she checks into that era’s version of the Biltmore, Mission Spa and Towers, she has her own slave, Girl (Portillo once again), who jockeys for space on a sleeping mat with Nana (Carla Pantoja), a stinky-footed hotel staffer and the only character to remain roughly the same, no matter the epoch of the moment. In childhood, Peaches wasn’t exactly sold by her mother to the predatory casino owner, the town’s “bossman, la tortilla and el frijol para la familia.” Each time characters suggest they care about something — that God might arrive soon, that Nana might tell Girl a secret, that Poppa, recoiling from Peaches’ barbs, has lost his appetite — its importance magically dissolves within a line or two. Pantoja’s Nana can tell someone off just in the way she silently plunks a straw in a glass, and Ocón, in a mostly thankless role, makes hurt into a whole range of experience. The Biltmore’s ceiling beams reflect magentas, bronzes and marigolds against a turquoise backdrop, endowing the world of the play with the faraway, slightly sad and kitschy feel of a well-appointed fish tank. If at first it’s disarming and refreshing to be at a show that lets its characters take their time padding in and out, before long you might get the urge to go Frederick W.