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Plays 2000 |
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Caridad Svich interviewed about Letters From Cuba Maggie Mackay: In your joint book with Maria Delgado, Conducting a Life, you've said that Irene is typically Cuban. Cristina Garcia has told me that Irene is typically Cuban. What does it mean? What are you both getting at?
They've been comparing Letters From Cuba to Nilo Cruz's play Two Sisters And A Piano, which opened at the same time as Letters. Nilo's play also centers on the Cuban experience. It's about two sisters who are living in Cuba in 1991, and the effects of house arrest on their lives. It's a poetic but primarily in its construction a social realist play. The Village Voice, and to some extent the New York Times, did compare and contrast Nilo and Irene's plays in separate articles. They both opened in New York City around the same time. In both articles the overall impression conveyed was 'Oh Nilo's play is more Cuban because Irene's play is stuck in nostalgia and she's evoking a past that doesn't exist and therefore has no relevance to Cuba today, and it's just a little trifle.' And that seems to be the general feeling critically even though there was appreciation for the work. And Nilo's play was clearly taking it on, the real thing, which - of course - goes into the whole question of how we view realism, and how we take it as truth, and when an artist decides to be more oblique in commentary, how we don't see it, or we choose not to. When I saw Letters I was there with two of my students who had gone with me to Cuba, where I taught as part of the US-Cuba Writers Conference in Havana. I remember being flooded with memories whilst I watched the play: memories of having just been in Cuba. So much of experiencing Irene's work has to do with the fact that as a director of her own work you know as an audience member that a significant aspect of the play is 'written' in the manner in which it is directed. It is difficult to separate the writing from the directing when Irene directs her own work. In that sense, she is a true auteur. Whilst I was watching Letters I felt the overwhelming feeling that I was in Cuba again, and this had less to do with the content of the play than the form it took in space and time. I told Irene this "To me it feels very present, very immediate even though you are talking about a different generation." It's just incredibly present, and alive, and tactile in a way that I appreciated so much. Some audiences may connect more to the love story, so they go there. But I also think the love story and the central figure of the dancer, the dancer girl, the one that is sort of dancing between countries, and between memory and trying to make a life for herself in the States, also represents something about exile and the Cuban experience. It's just that it's done through movement, and through silence, and through longing. Whether you take the ending of Letters literally or not. And some people have: "Oh, you know they come back. They arrive!" - "Oh, it's a dream!" Interpret it as you will but there's a comment being made in the play about when the characters leave Cuba if it's wish fulfillment or as reality. I enjoyed the play very much. I liked the gentleness of it. In a city like New York, which is so aggressive, to have such a gentle play reach an audience is very moving. It made you sort of breathe in a different way. You have to enter that play in a very quiet manner and it's incredibly emotional, and you have no idea why. And, of course, she ends with Guantanamera. You've got to have it at the end. So people who don't know that, think it's just a cute song, are missing something very big. MM: For me, primarily it was about emigration, the sense of loss, of being an outsider which can follow from that. And the terrific sense of longing which all these characters had. Whether they had emigrated or not, they were affected and I thought that was conveyed so sensuously. It sneaked around you right from Donald's set which was a sensual experience from when you were just sitting in your seat looking, waiting for it to begin. It was like smoke around you, the whole thing. Everyone shared this longing, was disturbed by it. It was inescapable. That fantastic dancer. CS: That fantastic dancer. Amazing, amazing dancer. And also Irene's decision at some point in the re-writes (who knows what she'll do with the published version), of cutting everything that didn't have anything to do with truth or beauty. Making that decision even though the play starts out as a play about Art: "How you write a poem and what is it?" that the artistic impulse, the search for beauty moves the play and it is identified with longing so that the memory of the brother is gorgeous and painful. At the same time there's room for jokes and bits. She calls it 'a variety show.' So there's room, the longings just energise everything else that happens in the piece. From the pillow fights, to the chasing, to the learning how to dance - all those things. [...........] You talked about walking into Letters and feeling an atmosphere coming from Donald's set but it also has to do with Irene's awareness as a director and then it infuses her writing that a play exists in a space you create. So, it's not just the space you walk into, the theatre, 'Here's the space and it has so many dimensions and I walk into it' but also what you construct within that space, and how it is animated by the text. [...........] I know how Bonnie Marranca talks about how Irene works with language in space because of having actors think the line before they say it, and so it goes for response as well. So you have always this space, and the language, and you can see it in Letters and in other productions where a line is spoken and it sort of lives, hangs in the air for a little bit and then a character responds. All that's to do is taking away that automatic response that for some reason we've become accustomed to, in American theatre especially, words are just words and they do what they do. We got sort of enamoured of their rhythm and space and we forgot sometimes that there's cause and effect. Oddly enough she's a realist writer so that when a character says 'Oh' they can't just respond with anything. Whatever they come back with has to be true, an honest response to that.... So when she goes into production experience she tries to recreate that so that there is this considered quality to everything without being pretentious. Just a moment of consideration. "What are you saying? How are you going to say it?" Say the line, and then somebody else comes in and that effects the way she constructs movement on space as well. So that precision linguistically bleeds into the precision with action and gesture in space, and just trying to capture something with each character.' Many thanks to Caridad Svich for granting this interview, allowing its use on this website, and for her photograph. For her review of Letters from Cuba see Performing Arts Journal, No.66, Vol.XX11. No.3, (September 2000).
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