Fantasy Island
by Ed Morales
Cuba is like the island in the Guy de Maupassant short story; you can almost see it across a narrow body of water, but it's more often obscured by fog, remaining virtually invisible. But every once in a while the fog-induced by over 30 years of anticommunist government policy-lifts and we're able to examine the island's alluring, complex geography. This month, three plays, from both native and exiled writers, representing different tendencies of the Cuban experience, were staged in Manhattan with mixed results.
Undoubtedly the event of the season at Repertorio Espanol, Ableardo Estorino's Vagos Rumores is an ambitious, lyrical study of the life of 19th-century poet Jose Jacinto Milanes. Set in a smoky, dreamy netherworld in which the poet reclaims and reanalyzes his life, the play covers a crucial part of Cuban history. It is an accounting of the ''vague rumors'' that surround a gifted writer's strange life. A fervent abolitionist hailing from the Afro-Cuban province Matanzas, Milanes's liberationist charisma prefigured that of Jose Marti. Estorino's rendering of his political philosophy is appropriately Marxist, steeped in references to exploited labor. But Milanes's personal life is really the center here-unusually close to his sister, and enamored with a first cousin, incest becomes a major subtext.
A veteran of Havana theater working with three established actors, Estorino doesn't miss his big chance to push his award-winning play to ecstatic levels. All three actors give excellent, uninhibited performances, expertly riding the ebb and flow of Estorino's elegant and poignant verse. As Milanes, Alfredo Alonso manages to convey both the poet's lucidity and psychosis. He plays well off Rene Losada and Adria Santana, who are consistently pleasing in their portrayal of 11 additional characters. Despite the actors' skill, their constant switching of roles does get a little confusing.
While there is much talk in Vagos Rumores about the crucial role that Africans played in Cuban society as laborers and priests of culture, there are only two, relatively insignificant, black characters in its text. A more Caliban-esque characterization of the New Man of the Caribbean could be found in Eduardo Manet's Lady Strass. Manet, who has been exiled in France since the pre--Castro Batista dictatorship, uses a kind of post-Surrealist approach to the pathology of colonization. Set in Belize, Manet's claustrophobic drama unfolds when two fugitive ne'er-do-wells break into the home of an aging, seemingly wealthy widow of an English businessman. It's high tea in the tropics, and the two famished con men are willing to do the Charleston, pretend they're in Paris, engage in all manner of charades for the chance to steal Mrs. Parkington Simpson's jewels.
While there are some fascinating narrative gambits that all but destroy linear time, with a Borgesian flair and precision, there is a problem with obviousness in this play-it may have lost something in the translation from the French. Robert Jimenez's mestizo Manuel seems to earn the right to demand an end to ''five centuries of humiliation'' of indigenous America. But although he is the most eloquent of these three pathetic souls, his transcendence is obscured by Parkington Simpson's self-loathing nostalgia. She seems to be Blanche DuBois stuck in a discarded chapter of the modern Latin American novel.
After studying for some time in Paris, Cuban scholar Lydia Cabrera discovered that ''one cannot understand our people without knowing the African.'' Cabrera eventually compiled a collection of fables that were adaptations of the religions the Yoruba people brought to the new world from Africa. Drawn from Cabrera's work, Cuentos Negros is a boisterous musical that manages to incorporate elements of opera and the waltz into African-percussion-driven singing and dancing. Alberto Morgan is most engaging, strutting as the supreme god Olofi, and moonwalking as demigod Babulu-Aye. In the early performance I saw, the actors rushed their lines a little, which muffled the play's lofty aspirations. Still, the spiritual power embedded in the songs and stories made the stage a joyful power center, casting an unflinching light on the mystery of Cuba.
Vagos Rumores
By Abelardo Estorino
Repertorio Espanol
Lady Strass
By Eduardo Manet
Ubu Repertory Theater
Cuentos Negros
By Lydia Cabrera
Repertorio Espanol
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