By Bruce Weber. The New York Times. February 21, 2000
You would be taxed to name a show with a sweeter temper than "Letters From Cuba," a lovely and contemplative autobiographical morsel by Irene Maria Fornes that opened yesterday at the Signature Theater's Peter Norton Space in Clinton.
The story of Fran, a young dancer sharing a New York apartment with two men and receiving regular missives, somehow yearning in their mundane concerns, from her brother Luis in Cuba, the play conveys, with a gentle humor that is occasionally exquisite, the procession of separate lives being led
in spiritual togetherness but spatial disconnect.
At just over an hour, the play leaves you a bit hungry; the end arrives like a wake-up call in middream. But, to spin it kindly, that ache of unconsummation is what the characters are feeling as well.
Directed as well by the Cuban-born Ms. Fornes, a celebrated artist in the theatrical avant-garde, the play yields a rare organic sense that the production was conceived along with the script.
Donald Eastman's set, an almost empty Manhattan apartment spread in blond wood across the stage, with a Havana rooftop in shades of blue hovering above it, suggests, in its geometry, the layers of Fran's emotional life and, in its coloring, the heavenly consolation she has not quite duplicated
in her new home. The cast, delivering lines that are often forthrightly resonant with deep feeling, achieve a uniform poise in delicate dramatic circumstances.
The play's structure is careful and complex. It draws on actual letters Ms. Fornes received from Havana over 30 years, and time moves across decades on the Cuban roof. But in New York the action seemingly spans only months.
Fran's family, which includes Luis (played by Chris De Oni with a marvelous mournful dignity) and his son Enrique (the boy's mother, Ana, is never seen), is reconfigured in Manhattan in the personages of her roommates, the childlike, slightly dimwitted Marc (Matthew Floyd Miller) and the older,
brotherly Joseph (Peter Starrett), whose romantic yen for Fran she can neither entirely resist nor deny.
The parallel is underscored by the burly actor Peter Van Wagner in a charming dual role as the New York apartment super (who takes dance lessons from Fran) and Gerardo, a grumpy Cuban neighbor with a bad back. As the play proceeds the characters visit one another in poignantly staged dream
sequences; in a passage to New York by the teenage Enrique (Rick Wasserman), the youthful curiosity about America is a hoot.
Ms. Fornes's script is fearless in confronting profound concepts like love and art with both simple declaration and poetic imagery. The play is a mite stilted in conversations between Marc and Joseph. (It gets off to a rocky start in a discussion of poetry.) But the sentiments expressed from
Cuba, from Enrique ("Mother likes to wash her hair with rainwater") and Luis are touching and plainly authentic.
In any case, words may not be the playwright's most potent tool here. Fran (a lissome young actress named Tai Jimenez) has few lines, but she is soulfully revealed as she practices her balletic routines in the near-empty apartment; and the eloquence of sheer movement provides the play's most
moving scene, a dance, passed sequentially from character to character, to a slow 1940's swing tune.
"Letters From Cuba," which is receiving its premiere, is the final production of Signature's seasonlong examination of the work of Ms. Fornes, an appropriate look back over a life on the one hand, evidence of continuing vigor on the other.
As a portrait of the artist as a young woman, and in its elegiac treatment of the tug of home on an expatriate, the show is a happy-sad sigh, an appealingly understated conclusion to the collective efforts of the playwright and the company.
PRODUCTION NOTES:
'LETTERS FROM CUBA'
Written and directed by Maria Irene Fornes; sets by Donald Eastman; costumes by Teresa Snider-Stein; lighting by Matthew Frey; sound by Kurt B. Kellenberger; production stage manager, Paul A. Kochman; production manager, Brian R. Duea. Presented by the Signature Theater Company, James Houghton,
founding artistic director; Bruce E. Whitacre, managing director. At the Signature Theater Company's Peter Norton Space, 555 West 42nd Street, Clinton.
WITH: Chris De Oni (Luis), Tai Jimenez (Fran), Matthew Floyd Miller (Marc), Peter Starrett (Joseph), Peter Van Wagner (Jerry/ Gerardo) and Rick Wasserman (Enrique).
Copyright 2000 The New York Times Company |