‘Ghost Limb’ haunts only semi-believably
In live theater, there’s a sort of mystical transfer that happens when a character is in physical pain.
How different, really, are you, the living, breathing audience member, from the living, breathing actor just a few feet away?
Set during Argentina’s Dirty War, Marisela Treviño Orta’s drama imagines in Javier (Tim Garcia), an impassioned painter, one of the conflict’s many desaparecidos, or “the disappeared” — dissenters abducted by the junta, then erased from public record, tortured and either left for dead or killed.
What drives “Ghost Limb” is his primal connection to his mother, Consuelo (Michele Apriña Leavy).
To get to these poignant scenes, though, “Ghost Limb” often drags through rote domestic drama, every character stock.
In a terrifying political moment, Consuelo just wants to furiously dust her picture frames and have her family members play nice.
[...] mostly this young actor shows promise for his ability to hold the whole stage in the grip of one character’s tension.
[...] as an incensed painter, delivering screeds about the unsung virtues of Goya, he flicks brush upon canvas like a seismometer recording tectonic shifts.