The title is eye-catching, maybe even eyebrow raising – Manuel Oliver takes it on in the first few moments of the performance. ‘This is not Chipotle, you are not in the wrong place. But everyone likes ‘guac,’ right, it’s yummy stuff.” Explaining his son Joaquin’s nickname is the beginning of a portrait of his child.
His late child, Joaquin Oliver, who was one of the victims of the Parkland massacre at Majorie Stoneman Douglas High School on Valentine’s Day, 2018. “What do you do when you lose a son?” It’s a question that is the scaffolding for the 90 minute performance.
The subtitle is an inaccuracy, but it’s there to draw the audience into the whole frame of things that are not accurate. It is a basic wrong for children to die before their parents. It is wrong to say that massacres just happen, as if they were weather events, when national gun policy – and the total lack of control or accountability – is what causes them. Oliver points out the pathetic response of “active shooter drills” in our schools, “but somehow, we are okay with this?” To prepare for the next one is to accept that they will happen, and that is wrong. We do not have to live like this. We do not have to die like this.
His loving memories of Guac – his love of buttered popcorn at the movies, the way he played air guitar – will certainly open some some small cracks in the heart of any parent. Raising a child, watching them grow, helping them plan a future. Knowing how this story ends is what cracks a heart completely.
What do you do when you lose a son? Oliver has taken his grief out to share with others and transform it into action. The name of his non-profit organization “Change the Ref” comes from a story about Joaquin playing basketball, and being tossed out of the game after arguing against a bad call. Oliver likens the bad ref to the the lobbyists of the NRA. “Who is deciding what is fair? Why are automatic weapons so easy to get? How do we get leaders in there to make better calls?”
GUAC is the loving memory of a heartbroken father, who both physically and verbally paints a portrait of his son. Using a photo of Joaquin, he adds freestyle graffiti to the space around him. Telling his story in abstraction makes it all the more concrete. By the time the portrait is complete, Joaquin’s t-shirt has the words “I WISH I WAS HERE.”
The push to create a policy that stops the regular pileup of student corpses at schools across the nation is the foundational joy of GAUC. The personal, parental use of loss to question our cultural’s assumptions is a heroic response to pain.
GUAC is at the Kirk Douglas Theater until Nov. 2
For tickets, go to centertheatregroup.org
For more information on supporting an end to mass shootings, go to changetheref.org/
Judith Martin-Straw
