Audio By Carbonatix
Havana Bourgeois is an import from Los Angeles, with a
mixed cast of local actors and gifted carpetbaggers (including the
hunky Danny Pino, from television’s Cold Case). But spiritually and
emotionally, this is a Miami show. Some of the most extreme audience
reactions I’ve ever witnessed in a theater were during this show, when
I watched a row full of Cuban exiles gasp and clutch their chests and
cry. The older ones, especially — those were the ones who jumped
in their seats when they heard the sounds of televised gunshots, as the
performers gathered around an onstage TV set to watch Fidel Castro’s
first wave of public executions.
This is the kind of big-league ugliness dealt with in Havana
Bourgeois, yet the play begins with light and sweetness. David
Arisco’s directorial fingerprints are all over the first couple of
scenes, in which the actors laugh and schmooze with all the outsized
fakety-fakeness of the big-number musicals that compose Arisco’s fave
fare. Havana Bourgeois is set in an advertising agency owned by
Luis Calvo (Oscar Cheda), and playwright Carlos Lacamara devotes the
early scenes to office politics — to the exploration of the lives
his employees enjoy before Castro shows up and blows them all to shit.
The ordinary intrigues of a workplace — who’s banging who, who
wants whose job, who’s a brilliant worker, etc. — are subtle
things in life, but not here. Here the laughter is too loud, the banter
too pronounced, the emotions too intense. Even famous Danny Pino, whom
I assume is being paid a ton of money to appear, delivers his opening
lines with approximately the same amount of nuance and naturalism I
brought to my eighth-grade turn as Magical Mister Mistoffelees.
It gets better, though. Lots. Arisco obviously has a dark side,
because as he guides Calvo’s ad agency out of the halcyon days of
Fulgencio Batista — and what’s up with that, anyway; isn’t that
kind of like Michael Moore sticking those images of happy little Iraqi
kids playing on their swing sets at the beginning of Fahrenheit
9/11? — Havana Bourgeois becomes a horror show.
It’s strange to begin to enjoy a play only as its characters slip
beneath the yawning shadow of totalitarianism, but that’s how it
happens. The first we hear about a possible revolution comes from
Pino’s Alberto Varela, the agency’s resident commercial artist, whose
naturally empathetic character makes him susceptible to the rebels’
populist spiel. He is sharing the news with a young, black messenger
boy, Manuel Sierra (Joshua David Robinson), to give the boy hope that
some day soon he might rise above his station.
Manuel does indeed rise above his station. Suddenly given reason to
feel proud of his lowly farm boy origins (Castro’s much-touted
“Agrarian Reform”), he becomes a passionate revolutionary and, despite
being nearly illiterate, an important figure in his neighborhood
revolutionary brigade. Lickety-split, he mobilizes the office to oust
Mr. Calvo from his own company, and in minutes turns the ad agency into
an allegory for Cuba itself.
The employees’ responses are varied. Panchito Morales (James Puig),
an aging wag, sees it as just another thing to make fun of. He’s been
through revolutions before and knows precisely how seriously one should
take a utopian political program. Juan Mendoza (David Perez Ribada), a
shrewd self-promoter, sees the revolution as a professional
opportunity. Margo Mateo (Jossie Harris-Thacker, another L.A. import)
sees it as a way to end her subjugation at the hands of moneyed white
men and to get revenge on the specific moneyed white men who’ve jilted
her. And Pino’s Alberto Varela, who so welcomed the revolution on first
blush, sees it as an ever-mounting threat to his middle-class
aspirations.
It’s worth noting that all of these people seemed perfectly normal
and happy before Castro came to power. They were ordinary beings,
unaccustomed to making mortal, or even ideological, decisions. And so
it is jolting to see green-shirted thugs popping into existence where
only mild-mannered office workers were before, and heroism where there
was only neighborliness. It’s a credit to the actors that these
transitions — despite occurring with shocking speed — never
feel forced. They appear as the sudden fulfillment of long-subsumed
desire, which is probably what they are.
This is especially evident in the performance of Joshua David
Robinson, whose Manuel Sierra is the moral fulcrum of the show. He is
slinking and shy when we first encounter him, but watch how he suddenly
stands tall in his green fatigues. Watch how happy he is to be able to
speak intelligently about something — even if he is only
regurgitating and recombining bits of El Jefe’s official party line,
and mispronouncing words such as ideological — when before
he could barely read. And pay close attention to the way he responds to
his co-worker, Panchito. Panchito shows his bemusement with Castro
through a series of cartoons that he creates during his downtime
(which, in the post-revolution economic collapse, he has a lot of).
Castro in a dress; Castro with a pineapple up his ass. Manuel
ordinarily demonstrates an arrogant magnanimity — he wants to
give people a chance to talk, even if he knows already that what they
say will not change him at all — but confronted with these
drawings, he loses his shit. Panchito laughs; he is providing the
revolution with “satirical nuance,” he says. Manuel says, “I don’t know
what that means.” His voice is full of contempt so pure that I don’t
know any words for it. For him, the farm boy, and for all the farm boys
like him, the revolution is the promise they’ll never again be
outsmarted or looked down upon. In Havana Bourgeois, the first
casualty of the revolution is irony.
When it is gone, what is left is an almost-empty office inhabited by
two figures in green fatigues, looking so exhausted it’s as if the 50
years of boredom and fear separating them from the audience have
already elapsed. It’s though history has already closed in all around
them, or stopped altogether. With Panchito long gone, they can no
longer even find the words to describe what went wrong.
