BREAKOUT

Life begets art begets life: “It’s fiction. Meaning autobiography seen through weird, wavy glass.” So says playwright/performer Elena Franco to an interviewer minutes before her one-woman play Breakout is to premiere. That statement becomes the key to understanding this richly layered musing on the forging of identity. Cut from the interview to a scene some years earlier: 17-year-old Del has just faked her own death in order to escape her deadening life with the latest in a series of foster parents; she is recklessly optimistic, until a mammoth, LA-sized traffic jam brings her literally screeching to a halt. From these beginnings, the text moves back and forth from Elena’s play to Del’s enforced idleness, the former finding its seeds in the latter in an acutely artful comment on the parallels between the creation of art and identity. Fleischman presents in Del a character with no identity, a multiracial orphan whose gift for mimicry becomes first a desperate search for protective coloration, which becomes, in the end, a defiant embrace of her own uniqueness. A stunning tour de force. (Fiction. YA)