Longing for Cuba - with laughter
BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

It is a pain that has lingered for more than four decades now, an ache passed to new generations, a roller coaster of hopes awakened and dreams dashed: the longing for a lost Cuba. The realities of exile have been with Cuban Americans for so long now that we forget what it was like in 1960 when those who fled believed -- or fervently wanted to believe -- that they would be returning to their comfortable lives, to their history and their homeland, soon. So soon.

And remarkably, given Machado's profile as one of the best known and most admired Cuban-American playwrights, it is the first major production of a Machado play by a South Florida theater. (His earlier play, Revoltillo -- titled Broken Eggs in English -- was performed here in Spanish in 1988 by New York's Repertorio Español as part of the third International Hispanic Theatre Festival.)

''I hope having this play done in Miami makes the Americans understand the Cubans better,'' says Machado, who heads the graduate play-writing program at Columbia University. ``And I hope that Cubans understand that criticism isn't exactly a lack of love. Someone doesn't write 30 plays about Cubans without seeing all sides of the struggle. . . . I don't see Cubans in Miami or in Cuba as villains. I see history as the villain.''

Born in Guanabacoa on June 11, 1953 (''the day Castro landed in Cuba to begin the revolution,'' Machado notes), Machado and his younger brother Jesus were sent to the United States on a Pedro Pan flight in 1961, on the day before Halloween.

Like the characters in Once Removed, the Machado boys spent their first months in America in Hialeah, living with an aunt and uncle. After their parents arrived in 1962, the family moved to California, where Miami's fraught exile politics seemed very far away.

At odds with his father Othon over both his growing awareness of being gay and his desire to go into theater, Machado left home at 18 and married a 40-year-old businesswoman with eight daughters, a union that lasted a decade.

EARLY WORK

In 1979, he started acting at California's Padua Hills Playwrights Festival. And there, under the influence of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Sam Shepard and John Steppling, he began to create plays woven from his family's own history and his prolific imagination. Since 1983, he has lived and worked in New York.

By 1991, Machado had written four stand-alone plays -- The Modern Ladies of Guanaboacoa, In the Eye of the Hurricane, Fabiola and Broken Eggs -- that followed the history of a family much like his own from Cuba in 1928 to California in 1979. In 1994, the Mark Taper Forum -- the nationally prominent Los Angeles theater that Machado had grown up admiring -- decided to present the plays in a two-part, six-hour experience titled Floating Islands, epic theater ala Angels in America or The Kentucky Cycle.

It would require hefty cuts and rewrites, though. And in the end, it was, Machado concedes, a mistake.

''It's the only time in my life I've ever compromised,'' he says, sanguine at last after less-than-glowing reviews. ``It was the big theater where I grew up, and I wanted it. It was the wrong way to do them -- they should have been done in rep -- but with the best intentions. . . . I was so ambitious. There was so much press. Those 15 minutes of fame were crazy.''

SHEDDING ANGST

Today, Machado is much more at peace. He can joke, for example, about his own work: ``Fabiola is a great play to read that no one should ever do. Or ever have to watch.''

Some of his healing has come from finally returning to Cuba in 1999, a trip he made before writing Havana Is Waiting, a play about such a journey that premiered during the 2001 Humana Festival of New American Plays under the title When the Sea Drowns in Sand. Some of the change has come from Machado's shedding of angst: ''I don't need to write any more; now, I really like to write,'' he says.

That fellow Cuban-American playwright Nilo Cruz won this year's Pulitzer Prize for drama for Anna in the Tropics is something that would have left him ''. . . so pissed,'' he says with a laugh, if it had happened when Machado was still full of roiling ambition. Now, he says, ``I feel very happy for him. And in terms of the Cuban thing, it's always been me. Now, I don't have to be the only one.''

But he is, says Once Removed director and fellow playwright Michael John Garcés, ``a really good craftsman. He's fairly unique among Latino writers. He's not afraid of that unadorned moment that zaps like a knife.''

SITCOM RHYTHMS

Stylistically, Machado shuns the magic realism that is the stuff of plays by Cruz and many other Hispanic-American playwrights, instead writing plays of sharp drama and humor that sometimes vibrate to sitcom rhythms -- no surprise, he says, ``since my writing is influenced by everything from I Love Lucy to Federico García Lorca.''

How appropriate, then, that Arnaz -- daughter of those sitcom giants Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and herself a seasoned comic actress -- is playing Olga in Once Removed, which is for the most part a very funny if wistful play, one that Machado has rewritten for Miami since its 1992 production at Connecticut's Long Wharf Theatre.

''There's an enormous amount of humor in this, but Eduardo has raised the stakes,'' Arnaz says. ``This feels so deeply personal to me. I'm playing someone like my grandmother.

'My grandfather was the mayor of Santiago; they were upper class. But [they left Cuba] in 1934. My father was 16, so he had the shot at adjusting, and did it in a huge, big way. But his mother made his life miserable. It was always, `mi casa, mi casa.' She was a very distant woman.''

''I'm not interested in alienating audiences,'' Machado says. ``I got more and more excited, the closer we got to Miami. The Floating Islands plays are very tough. I wanted a play that this audience could meet me with.''

Actor Gary Perez, one of the founders of New York's hot LAByrinth Theater Company, plays Olga's husband, Fernando. It is his journey, Perez believes, that may speak to audiences of almost any background.

''He was transplanted to a place he didn't choose, and he has to live with the conflict of trying to make nice with that environment, transcend problems and make a good life,'' Perez says. ``Day after day, his longing for Cuba diminishes. He's not able to rely on the riches of his family. And he grows up.''

Machado, who will be at Friday's opening with eight Miami relatives and his partner of a year, has made that journey, too.

``When this play was done the first time, someone said it was about losing your youth. Letting go of the dreams and ambition. Surviving. We can all relate to that.''

Fuente: The Miami Herald
Abril 2003