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For Cuban American playwright Nilo Cruz, each line is poetry, and each couplet speaks to the socio-politics of his roots.
That may suggest the lyrical “Anna in the Tropics,” the play that gained Cruz the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and its story of cigar-making Cuban immigrants in Florida and the lector who organized labor forces whereas analyzing “Anna Karenina” to his people. Or it may imply the elegiac “Lorca in a green dress” and its mixture of social awareness and the Surrealist unconscious in its pondering of loss of life and an afterlife.
For “Two Sisters and a Piano,” his 1999 political ardour play — now directed by way of Cruz as a streaming work via New general Rep — the atmosphere is a busy Havana on the cusp. Simply before the Soviet Union disintegrates, Russians get rid of themselves from Castro’s Cuba, and heaven and hell are about to burst, circa 1991.
while poetry would consistently be the province of both artist-sisters serving time below condo arrest for minor innovative crimes — Maria Celia, a novelist, portrayed by using Florencia Lozano, and Sofia, a pianist played by using Daphne Rubin-Vega – it is Portuondo (Jimmy Smits), a lieutenant assigned to observe their each circulation and browse each correspondence, whose militaristic manner is laced with romantic notions, sensual grace and, finally, a biting spite ripe with Biblical torpor.
the object of Portuondo’s affection and ire: the lilting, imagistic phrases of Maria Celia, made appear in her physical attractiveness, her modern spirit and her own loving relationship to an exiled, off-display husband invested in discovering political asylum faraway from Cuba, for his wife and her writing.
So starts the cat-and-mouse interaction between Maria Celia and her lieutenant-jailer-lover Portuondo, a dynamic advanced by Maria Celia’s ties to her continuously restless sister, vacillating between ardent rumination and wild bronco-like bucking. Sofia is an object of obsession for piano tuner Victor Manuel, as portrayed by using Gary Nunez, a founder of The LAByrinth Theatre enterprise.
consequently starts off the playwright’s curious cultural observations — torrid ties from one generation of pressured lockdown, indignant misogyny and corrupted vigor constructions to a different. Fated to endure this obligatory captivity, from the drama’s alarming, violent starting to its futile finale, the best actual get away for its women-artists come through their vivid imaginations — a inspiration that finds them reciting, enjoying and rhapsodizing as frequently as it finds them talking.
The electrically dependent, very own connectivity here comes in two approaches. First, Cruz’s playful poetic language, even at its most harshly politicized, and his effortless path permit his actors a delicious freedom. Even when its characters aren’t free, enclosed in one cramped condominium with nothing but mangoes, rice and the occasional rum shot (and regardless of the virtual limitations of a desktop’s viewing reveal), “Two Sisters and a Piano” is as open as a Havana landscape, with all of its flavors, scents and sensory overloads at full tilt.
besides Cruz’s lyrical language is his connection to two of its actors: Smits and Rubin-Vega. Smits firstly collaborated with Cruz for the 2004 Broadway run of “Anna in the Tropics,” while Rubin-Vega’s Tony-nominated turn in that same 2004 creation adopted her efficiency as Sofia in the 1999 Off-Broadway most fulfilling of “Two Sisters and a Piano” at the Public.
Rubin-Vega’s top of the line second comes as her character tackles loneliness and sexual longing with Victor Manuel (Gary Perez). While each chatter nervously concerning the precise and imagined song in their heart, each bubble over on the simple glee of shoes provided as payment and the chance of stolen moments between them.
The Smits we see in “Two Sisters,” a mountainous man with a large face and lovely eyes, displays shades and tones we’ve hardly ever witnessed in the actor: shy, sly loverman, ardent protector, betrayed Romeo with only a smidgen of wool pulled over his eyes. When the dynamic between Portuondo and Maria Celia is compared (a bit heavy-handedly) to a pounding vessel on an open roaring sea, Smits’ Portuondo responds, “alluring, desirable, alluring,” and every repetitive ring is laced with its own set of emotions.
Smits’ is buoyed to such shadow and fog through his mesmerizing interaction with Lozano’s Maria Celia. The digicam loves Lozano and she loves the computer digital camera appropriate back, angling her face, arching her neck and tilting her head in ways exceptional within the virtual realm. If there is a lockdown streaming Tony to be had for facing a lens and taking advantage of it, its winner is Lozano, with Smits coming an in depth 2d. When she recites her persona’s goals of throwing off her shackles and holds up her arms, it’s as if she’s lifting the audience and herself in mid-air. Her pleasure and feel of freedom are palpable. So too is her personal gamesmanship, for she plays Portuondo as regularly and as avariciously as he does her.
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