Playwright: Nilo Cruz
At: Apple Tree Theatre,
595 Elm Place in Highland Park
Phone: (847) 432-4335; $38
Runs through: Oct. 24
Nilo Cruz likes to write about men and women discovering passion through exposure to the written word in an atmosphere of erotic torpor. He also likes to write about lovers moved by their passion to endure great danger. And he likes to write about passionate lovers more than he likes to write about their obstructive foes. And therein is both the attraction and the problem with Two Sisters And A Piano, currently playing in a joint production presented by the Apple Tree and Teatro Vista theater companies.
The play introduces us to Maria Celia Obispo, a popular author whose anti-revolutionary sympathies have drawn the attention of Cuba's communist leaders (not unlike real-life Cuban dissident Maria Elena Cruz Varela). After two years of prison, she and her musician sister, Sofia, are confined to their house where officials routinely search for subversive material. This includes letters from Maria's husband, says Lieutenant Alejandro Portuondo, who then offers to read them to her if she will recite him one of her stories. But what begins as a double stratagem soon succumbs to the power of sensually-charged words.
Implacable parents, jealous husbands, warring nations—these traditionally provide romantic yarns their adversity. But the stakes are raised when the threat is the immediate government. In an actual dictatorship, Maria and Alejandro's covert affair might escape the notice of the latter's superiors. But given our notions of third-world tyranny, we cannot cease watching for uniforms at the windows during scenes where we should be lulled by the fugitives desperately forging their private universe. More intriguing is the younger Sofia, whose restlessness spurs her at one point to essay a midnight stroll disguised in her late father's clothes.
Under Henry Godinez' deft direction, Charin Alvarez and Sandra Delgado make a suitably sympathetic pair of dungeon-bound damsels, and Iván Vega contributes a nice cameo as a shy piano tuner. Tom Burch's scenic design, dominated by Pablo Perea's imposing mural, lends the action an epic scope. As the ambivalent Alejandro, however, Sammy A. Publes' vocal interpretation proves inadequate to a role demanding that he be, by turns, villain and victim in a play still too nebulous of tone and focus.