FLY ME TO THE SUN…
AND LEAVE ME THERE

I confess, playwright Brian Quijada was an unknown quantity to me, and after attending Fly Me to the Sun at the Fountain Theatre, I was of the mind that he could remain so. But, I’ve a good deal of experience with the Fountain, which is one of the jewels in the crown of the LA theatre community, and I have basked in the excellence of their many past productions.

However, Fly Me to the Sun left me scratching my head, wondering why the Fountain chose to mount this very problematic work.

So, a quick search and I discovered a video of Quijada performing his solo show, Where Did We Sit on the Bus, at the Kennedy Center in 2015. Quijada’s dynamic presence imbued that spacious venue near to bursting with his unique brand of poetic rap and choral vocalization that was like a synthesis of the throat-singing of Dave Pedersen infused with the essence of Michael Winslow, aka “The Man of 10,000 Sound Effects,” best remembered from his performances in the seven Police Academy movies.

Quijada spins the simple narrative of a nine-year-old Salvadoran American living in Chicago whose world is upended by an epiphany of racial awareness when his class begins to study the history of Rosa Parks and the Civil Rights Movement. On the Kennedy Center stage,  Quijada proved himself a dynamic and original wordsmith.  

Sadly, the qualities that made Quijada’s Kennedy Center performance so memorable were lacking from the show at the Fountain.  

Fly Me to the Sun is a production working against itself, which suffers from a variety of encumbrances, most of which have their sources rooted within the material of the piece.  

For example, they start with the set by scenic designer Michael Navarro, who has transformed the stage into the interior of a modest home with an “American kitchen” wherein the living room is affixed to a kitchenette.

The set is well-conceived, beautifully constructed, and, in that it lulls the audience into the mistaken assumption that what we are about to see is a realistic drama, absolutely inappropriate. Two young siblings, Brian (Gerardo Navarro) and Marvin (Noé Cervantes), characters based on the playwright and his older brother, rocket onto the stage, rushing about adjusting the cameras in the room, and establish that they are filming the “BQ Show” with the audience cast in the role of “the audience.”

It’s 1995, and eight-year-old Brian is the star of the show he and his brother are making about their lives. Brian promises there’ll be jokes, music, and a very special guest star – their Grandmother, Mama Julia.

When Brian and Marvin’s mother was fifteen, she left her own brother and Mama Julia in El Salvador and resolved to brave the journey to the United States, determined to make a better life for herself. Now, Mama Julia has traveled to Chicago, where she plans to help with the raising of her two grandsons. Mama Julia is a major character in Quijada’s drama, perhaps the core character, and she is also a hand-and-rod puppet operated exclusively by Navarro, who also supplies the voice.   

Navarro is not a trained puppeteer; no ventriloquism is involved here, and no effort is taken to distinguish the puppet as a distinct individual. As the bulk of the show’s dialogue comes from the interaction and discussions between the “young” boy and his Grandmother, and their relationship is crucial to the drama, the choice of burdening Navarro with both roles, while impeding his means of developing either character seeds the path of the creative process with pitfalls that neither the actor or director Raymond O. Caldwell can avoid. Heightening the difficulties is the fact that grandson and grandparent are essentially the play’s only characters, given Marvin has such a meager allotment of dialogue that he is less a dramatis personae and more a stage supernumerary, who provides music as the “DJ,” and assumes the occasional bit part. 

The one role Quijada never fully manifests is that of the older brother.  

The events of the piece are a mixture of exchanges between Brian and his Grandmother; clashes between Brian’s mother and her own mother centering on Mama Julia’s neurotic tinged overprotectiveness towards Brian (ah, the subtle hint of foreshadowing at tuba practice!); and some crumbs regarding the hurdles a Latino family faces in Chicago. But the high point of prejudice recounted is when Brian’s schoolmates laugh at Mama Julia’s brownies.  

Then there are the family’s road trips, to Disneyland in California during which they encounter a fellow countryman, who fled El Salvador to escape the gangs (there’s that tuba again!) and to Universal Studios in Florida, and the chance meeting of a refugee from Cuba who left that island paradise to break free of Castro’s repression. These encounters are meant to proudly demonstrate that Latinos have a presence in this nation from sea to shining sea.

Thus, time passes, it’s now 1999, four Christmases have come and gone, and Brian, now twelve, expresses his disappointment every year when his grandmother gives him the same present — socks. There are clashes between the boy’s mother with Mama Julia regarding the older woman’s increasing protectiveness of Brian, and throughout it all, the BQ Show goes on with the occasional song popping up, including the tune that gives the work its title.

“I don’t want to fly to the moon,
I want to fly to the sun,
Where the warm rays feel like home,
And where the light comes from.”

And so it goes.

Until it doesn’t.

We know the show has reached its end because there is a revelation. A revelation which was apparent about ten minutes after the show began. (Those tubas, remember?) Brian tells the audience that he and Marvin have been making the BQ Show in an attempt to save some portion of their childhood.

AH-HA!  

A quick sidebar:

The deadliest sin in the theatrical world is to bore your audience, and this is Gospel truth, take it to the bank. What is less mentioned is that after boredom, the next deadly sin is “uncertainty.” Not the uncertainty that produces suspense, but that uncertainty that results in a collective “huh?”

Running throughout Fly Me to the Sun, we have two young boys making a film… Or do we? The two actors don’t assume the persona of youngsters. There’s no shift in their physicality to achieve a youthful buoyancy, no rise in vocal pitch, no wider range of facial expressions to convey a less mature emotionalism. We spend “four years” with the two brothers, but observe no evidence of them evolving from youngsters to preteens. There’s no sense of increased height or body strength, no breaking of their voices. And it’s not until the plays end that we learn we weren’t watching adult actors portraying young boys, but adult actors carrying on like boys to keep from facing the loss of their childhood.  

This was information that should have been dispensed at the play’s outset.

If anyone is left in the audience who hasn’t realized the drama is finishing, the playwright has the character of Brian articulate the “author’s message” for all to hear.

Quijada informs us through Brian, communicating is good. Not communicating is bad. Communication is important, but especially between families and the generations. Tell them that you love them, because you won’t be able to after they die. Well, unless you can speak really, really loudly.   

Brian and Marvin attempt to devise a moving moment between the two siblings to show that they have learned the value of “communication,” and tenderly embrace. This moment falls flat, as Cervantes has never been integrated as a brother to Navarro; therefore, you don’t believe they are of the same blood. You don’t even accept Cervantes as an appendage to Navarro; at best, he was an adjunct. “Communication” was the goal of the play’s hero’s journey; therefore, the hug between the two brothers is soaked in irony that apparently soars right over the heads of both the actors and the director, in that the contrived moment to establish that the brothers have learned how vital communication is, however, neither of the brothers says anything to the other.

And if you didn’t see this (spoiler alert) coming, then someone has broken your white cane, and your loyal seeing-eye dog has been flattened by a Waymo. Mama Julia dies.

Navarro laments about his lost opportunity to “communicate” with Mama Julia when she was alive, but having spent the last four years with them, the audience is aware that all Brian would have to communicate to Mama Julia would be that her Brownies were really good and that he really appreciated the Christmas socks.   

To Navarro’s credit, he puts his soul into conjuring up the grief that the death of Mama Julia has fueled in him, but the effort rings hollow, as he too is unable to embrace the belief that would wrap Mama Julia in the satin of illusion and had enabled him to grieve. As it is, there’s little to mourn about at the death of a talkative sock. 

The work has not been done here. Quijada has not created a play, but produced a blueprint. The difference between the two is that blueprints are never very entertaining and have little magic in them.

Is it possible, over its run at the Fountain, that Fly Me to the Sun could be improved? I doubt it can be made into a good play, but it certainly could be made into a better one.

photos by Areon Media

Fly Me to the Sun
Fountain Theatre, 5060 Fountain Ave.
Fri, Sat & Mon at 8 (dark Sep. 29); Sun at 2; Sat at 2 (Oct 11)
IN SPANISH: Sun at 7 (Sept. 14, 28; Oct. 5); Sat at 2 (Oct. 4)
ends on October 12, 2025
for tickets ($25–$45), call 323.663.1525 or visit Fountain Theatre
pay-what-you-want and regular seating is available Mondays

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA