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By Christine Dolen. Cdolen@herald.com. Posted on Tue, Aug.
06, 2002 in The Miami Herald.
The laughter and loss of contemporary Cuban life shimmer and refract through
Lenin's Omelet, an umbrella title for two Rogelio Martínez plays being
done by the Cuban American Repertory Theater at the Miami Light Project's Light
Box.
Cuban American Rep, by the way, isn't a new troupe, just a new name for Oye
Rep, the company founded by John Rodaz (who also founded Miami Beach's Area
Stage) and actor Carlos Orizondo.
Adapting the Light Box's flowing space into a small traditional theater,
director-designer Rodaz plays stylistically with the absurdist strains of Martínez'
scripts as well as life in Cuba.
Writer's Union, the shorter first play, is set in 1991 Havana at a gathering
place for writers. Elyse (Jennifer De Castroverde), a very left-leaning
American, has come to interview two well-known older Cuban writers, Pepe (Ramón
González-Cuevas) and Tomás (Gonzalo Madurga). In truth, Elyse
isn't so much a journalist as she is a cheerleader-groupie for Communism and its
practitioners. Sharing her insights and history with her subjects, Elyse is more
revealing than she means to be: This is one silly woman.
Listening silently at first as the two veteran writers vie for Elyse's
attention, fellow journalist Miguel (Oscar Isaac) grasps the
Marxism-as-aphrodisiac aspect of her personality. He works it, putting the older
men down with the arrogance of someone young and good-looking, proposing to
whisk her off to her digs at the Hotel Nacional -- a place that he, as a citizen
of Havana, could not enter without her.
Before they leave, however, the play makes a U-turn as Tomás makes
revelations of his own: that he hasn't been in the Writer's Union in years,
given his refusal to play by the government's rules; that, in fact, he hasn't
written a word in more than 20 years. And that, in his view, ''. . . Communism
is a small room,'' one that stifles creativity and the soul itself.
Martínez' longer second play, June 3, 1961, Independent Library,
tracks a family's defiance, disintegration and capitulation.
Widower Román (González-Cuevas) runs an illegal library from
his home. Though his collection of well-worn books is small, many curious
readers find their way to his door.
More captivating than the books for a young sanitation worker named Tomás
(Isaac) is a disintegrating collection of old Life magazines that belonged to
Román's late wife, magazines with fading photos of long-dead American
movie stars. More captivating still is Román's deaf daughter Yolanda (De
Castroverde), who soon becomes Tomás' wife.
With increasing frequency, the world that the mournful Román has
tried to preserve is threatened, battered and finally consumed by the intolerant
one just outside his door. His good ''friend'' and neighbor, Pascual (Madurga),
is too instantly aware of every word uttered in Román's home.
Independence, and the library itself, yield to political and personal
pragmatism.
What the playwright, Rodaz and the performers share is a vivid vision of a
society in which the absurd is commonplace, one in which truth is hidden beneath
many protective layers. The sometimes-riotous, often sobering plays of Lenin's
Omelet look at how members of that scrambled society endure.
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater critic. | 
