a tragic
cabaret
by Douglas Messerli
Rogelio Orizondo (text, with
dramaturgy by Orizondo and Carlos Díaz), Antignón,
un contigente épico / Redcat (Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater), the
performance I saw was on March 15, 2017
Based on a very unreliable telling
of Sophocles’ Antigone, the Cuban
theater company Teatro El Público explores several issues of that play in the
context of Cuban history, beginning, in part, with the poetry of José Martí.
Yes, here two there appear to be two brothers, at once in love with each other
and warring against one another (they appear naked in the earliest scenes),
along with two sisters, also naked, presumably surrogates of Antigone and
Ismene.
We might imagine the brothers are similar to Che and Fidel Castro,
fighting over how the Cuban revolution should be defined; but there the
similarities stop, as the company explores, in cabaret-like skits the various
elements of contemporary Cuba, the often open sexuality, the macho-like battles
played out on the streets (performed deliciously, in this case, by two women
actors, with water bottles serving as their cocks), the importance of the scout
movement in government indoctrination, and, through old, grainy films, the
relationship of the island’s culture to its Soviet relationships.
Violence and camp alternate, as the
characters present their world in a kind of shadow-relationship with the tragic
epic of Sophocles play, while reminding us that they are diverted by
contemporary exigencies.
The great wonder of this production is
the cast, Giselda Caler, Daysi Forcade, Luis Manuel Álvarez, Roberto Espinosa,
and Linnet Hernádez, in and out of dress, more often as the play proceeds,
dressed in outrageous costumes that reflect their changing attitudes. Even
though their Spanish was highlighted on an English-language theater
light-board, those shifting values often went by so fast, that for the
English-language reader, they were sometimes hard to follow.
But the many absurd edicts and
proclamations that come down from on high translate well: “Most theater
directors, we learn are homosexual. Many actors are homosexual. All of the
actors of Teatro El Público are homosexual,” so one of these edicts proclaims.
Even the character of the beautiful Martí poem quoted in the program seems to
have a gay friend, a poet who “cleans houses in order to survive” and whom the
author finds “in front of the Capitol building…./ looking at, longing for (I
believe) those other dumb dirty boys / who make the Zona Rosa a fun place in the city.”
Playwright Rogelio Orizondo and director Carlos Díaz do not so much “discuss” these issues as to throw them out in the cabaret-performances as various possibilities, and probable alternatives to the tragedy behind Cuban history. If Polyneices is not permitted to be buried and Antigone is ordered to be buried alive, these sassy figures, nonetheless, transform Creon’s world in which they live. While film, we are told, is quickly censored in Cuban life, Cuban theater continues to present fresh and energized viewpoints as expressed by these excellent performers.
As critic Manuel García Martinez wrote of this production, “Throughout
the discourse they claimed freedom and sensuality for their own personal life.”
In general, the company members’ pizazz and sass made up for any of the seeming
incoherencies of their tale. Like dreamy carnival performers, these theatrical
hoofers made you want to believe in Cuba’s future.
Los Angeles, March 16, 2017
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (March 2017).
