Habladores

My high school Spanish teacher always suspected that the English verb "to blabber " came from "hablaba," Spanish for "he was speaking." She must have been thinking about Habladores, by Golden Age Spanish author Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra (1547-1616). Most noted as the author of "Don Quixote de la Mancha," Cervantes also wrote over a dozen intermedios, brief plays to fill the space between acts of a tragedy or other more serious stage work. Brooklyn-based Teatro TEBA returns to Fringe this year with this farcical look at a family of blabbermouths, in Jose Martinez Quierolo's update to present-day Latin America. Talkative Sarmiento (Hector Luis Rivera) brings loquacious country "cousin" Roldan (Harold Garcia) home, to the consternation of his chatterbox wife Beatriz (Alis Cruz), who is permanently glued to her telephone. The three motormouths -- four if you count maid Ines (Kathy Tejada) -- verbally slug it out. When one of them shouts out "Silenzio!", the silence lasts but a few seconds. They meet their match in a verbose Policia (Louie Jimenez), who can't bring order to the noisy house.

Director Harold Garcia elicits aptly exaggerated performances from the actors, but he overlooks the moralizing message that Cervantes intended for his audience in this skit-length piece. Eroilda Rodriguez's even briefer prologue as modified by Hector Luis Rivera introduces the above cast plus Belem Auz, who manage to drive a hapless stage director (Otto Montoya as Corchete) to just this side of insanity. Trini Ruiz's costumes are nicely whimsical.