A review
Cuban classic sweeps audience
Published: Sunday, April 28, 2013
Desiree Seebaran
For two weekends in April at the Little Carib Theatre, UWI theatre arts Production II students performed in Maria Antonia, a classic Cuban theatre piece written by Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa.
The play was an ambitious experiment that was very successful on a lot of levels. It was meant to work as a learning tool for the theatre students and a teaching tool for secondary school drama students, and it achieves that. Cuban theatre brings some familiar themes and locations to us, but present the challenge of having to decipher the subtle references and unlock hidden meanings before we can conquer the play.
UWI dance and theatre lecturer Dr Jorge Morejon directed, choreographed and translated the play. He did his work well; the physical direction and choreography was spot on. Every single cast member knew how to use the stage and how to move their bodies to advance the action and to set the tone.
The community holds hands and opens the play with a beautiful choral arrangement of Salve, adapted from a baroque composition by Esteban Salas, so that the first steps we take onto their territory are holy ground. The aggressively sexual way that Maria Antonia dances with and repels the men around her in a sort of my-balls-are-bigger-than-yours duel, is very funny and very sinister. And Robert Ashton Noel as Julian the boxer does a very good death scene; it’s very difficult not to get at least a few giggles from a local audience when you die onstage but he kept us swept up in the tragedy of the thing.
Syntyche Bishop (one of two actors who played in the role on alternate nights) had a powerful presence as Maria Antonia; we knew what she was feeling at every moment. And we felt her even when she was not on stage as we were meant to. She forced us to reconsider the stereotypes we carry in our heads of “women like that” and to mourn her when she ultimately runs up against the boundaries of her culture and her religion and her relationships to kill one lover and be killed by another lover.
And the other actors gave weighty performances as well: Daniella Sacha Johnson as a grieving godmother and Jarell Akini Alder as a stern, unforgiving Batabia, a Santeria priest. Marvin Dowridge, last seen in Proscenium Productions’ Little Shop of Horrors as a very credible Seymour Krelborn, was even more in his element here as a barrio youth trying to prove his machismo.
The dancing was effortlessly done; the stage really burst into flower during those moments, when the entire community is united by song and dance. I think the music is probably the best thing about this play; it holds a thread of understanding for the audience that the dialogue does not match. The play also portrayed Santeria in a context that many West Indians can relate to: colourful clothing, offerings, singing, dancing and going into the trance state to prophesy.
The only production flaw that really threw me was the dialogue, and by extension the translation. I am not a Spanish speaker, so I cannot pretend that the job that Morejon has done with the textual translation is anything other than the huge task that it is. But there were huge chunks of dialogue where, although the words were in English, I struggled to make sense and decipher the depth of what was really being said.
For instance, Maria Antonia and Carlo, one of her lovers, have a beautiful scene where they each have a different monologue but they recite their lines at the same time. It was executed flawlessly; neither detracted from the other, neither was distracted by the other and it successfully created a sort of surrealist dream world for the audience. But I’m positive that the dialogue made references to several important thematic touchstones that I should have picked up on, but didn’t because I couldn’t follow the thread of the monologues in English. It was actually easier to understand the prayers and chants spoken in Caribbean Yoruba; there, you get a sense of what is being said, and understand the spirit of the thing.
If the text were reworked again, I would go see this play a second and a third time. It dealt sensitively with the issue of poverty and marginalisation, without the hero complex we’ve learned to adapt from Hollywood and in full recognition of the spirit world that West Indians live with.
Maria Antonia, by Eugenio Hernandez Espinosa
Directed by Dr Jorge Morejon
UWI, St Augustine, Production II student production
Little Carib Theatre, April 4-7 and 12-14
LINK: http://www.guardian.co.tt/arts/2013-04-27/cuban-classic-sweeps-audience
