The first words of “The Potluck,” the reflexive, repetitive new musical by César Alvarez, are a complaint. A frustrated composer sits at a table, staring dolefully into a laptop. “I’m supposed to write this musical,” they sigh. This is the writer’s own avatar, César — played by Anthony Alfaro, lead singer of the glam-rock band Tony & the Kiki — doing their best to dramatize a weary case of writer’s block, claiming that everything’s against them, starting with capitalism.
César’s trouble doesn’t really lie with the private ownership of the means of production, as such. The problem is that the musical will need to carry unimaginable emotional freight. César has been commissioned to write about the 1979 Greensboro Massacre, in which members of the Ku Klux Klan and an American Nazi organization killed five marchers with the Communist Workers Party during a protest. The real Alvarez’s parents served in the party that organized the demonstration, although they weren’t in North Carolina during the slaughter. They moved back the next day. Shocked and grieving, the pair named one of their children César James Alvarez, in honor of two of their murdered friends.
It’s little wonder that such a musical would be difficult to write, though not, apparently, for the reasons we might think.
Alvarez makes sure to communicate the day’s horror — the show includes explicit documentary video from 1979, a sequence so excruciating that audience members are allowed to leave while it plays. (Despite the availability of this footage, two criminal juries refused to convict anybody.) But while the title refers to the community’s yearly celebration of the dead, Alvarez is often more interested in excavating their own experience as a queer and nonbinary kid, raised as a memorial to people they never met. Alvarez’s musical is full of false starts, in the same way their life has been. “My parents’ organization saw queerness as a distraction from the revolution,” César tells us, before adding dryly: “They feel bad about it.”
Loving versions of these parents, Mom (Barbara Walsh) and Dad (Rubén Flores), appear in a kitchen set, concerned that their tragedy might not be good fodder for their “navel-gazing” artist child. “I’m not navel gazing,” César shouts in exasperation, while also (ironically?) suggesting their parents may be correct.
To help with composition, César enlists an intern named Moss (Jasmine Rafael), and the writer and student form a sweetly funny double act. The two are loosely wound and tightly strung. Alfaro’s César lounges in poet-at-ease mode, wearing butter-yellow harem pants, a jaunty topknot, and a foxtail mustache à la Freddie Mercury. As their temperamental opposite, Rafael’s matter-of-fact Moss stomps around, primarily concerned with locking down lunch.
Eventually they build a shrine to the victims, invoking their spirits, and five members of the impressive onstage band step forward to embody the dead. (Tellingly, the scenic designer Emily Orling is also credited as the spiritual adviser.) This leads to the show’s standout song, an encounter between one of César’s namesakes and César’s father, who tells his old friend about everything he missed by dying young. “There is this giant conversation happening on computers between / nearly everyone on earth / It is a mess and it’s incredible,” Dad sings. Alvarez’s songwriting soars upward here, like a lark.
Still, the geometries of this production, directed by Sarah Benson and co-presented by Soho Rep and Intar, feel skewed. “The Potluck” operates like a cabaret, but the format’s been stretched out of shape. The two-and-a-half-hour show climaxes at the intermission, leaving later sections oddly superfluous. And while it’s strange to hear César metaphorically center themselves in the Greensboro narrative, Alfaro, a charismatic frontman, too rarely strides center stage to grab the microphone. Instead, César waits, first for inspiration to strike, then to cede space to the thinly imagined dead, then for affirmation. (Alfaro does get to wear a whole garden of vivid costumes, designed by Qween Jean.)
Is this performance politically effective? That’s not my requirement for a beautiful work, but it does seem to be Alvarez’s. At least, the writer sounds as if they’re reassuring themselves by having a character gravely praise the project. “Maybe it’s a speck of revolution we couldn’t think of,” says one of the ghosts, a statement that manages to twist a heartfelt ritual for others into something unappetizingly self-regarding.
At this point, though, Alvarez’s lyrics have also strangely tempered the idea of revolution itself. Rejecting violence, and even action, César sings: “The revolution will be waiting 15 years for a flower to form into a fractal with five petals. The revolution will be sad ….” Perhaps that attitude is why a piece that includes a galvanizing marching-band parade and some of the most enraging video footage I’ve ever seen can also feel so diffuse and inert. “I’m supposed to write this musical,” says César right at the beginning of the show. That sense of reluctance and refusal pervades the evening, even though, all the while, we’re told that we’re hearing a call to action.
The Potluck Through Aug. 2 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes.