The American melting pot reaches its boiling point in Elizabeth Irwin’s new bilingual drama

Next to the proscenium, there is no arena with which theater professionals are more familiar than a restaurant’s back of house. And as playwright Elizabeth Irwin humbly illustrates in The Playwrights Realm’s My Mañana Comes, the political, social, and emotional threads that bind and often strangle the members of the food-service industry are more intricately layered than a tiramisu. Irwin lays us down in the well-worn kitchen of an upscale restaurant on Madison Avenue (designed with expert detail by Wilson Chin), and holds her four characters captive in this confined space for the duration of the 95-minute play. As the restaurant takes on an increasing familiarity, we find Chay Yew’s concise direction shrewdly captures the sharp rhythms of kitchen life — the rhythms that keep lemons sliced, bread baskets filled, and workers irrevocably entangled in one another’s lives, for better or worse. The back-of-house “family” of busser/runners Irwin follows through a slow New York summer is composed of two illegal Mexican immigrants, Jorge and Pepe; a third-generation Mexican-American from Brooklyn, Whalid; and an African-American from Harlem named Peter. While all four would fall under the broad “minority” umbrella for the sake of political polling, Irwin successfully delineates the perspectives shaped by each of her characters’ complex cultural backgrounds. However, she keeps these cultural distinctions as subtle shadows underlying four unique individuals, each with his own compelling tale and personal approach to surviving (and potentially escaping) less-than-minimum-wage life in urban America.