As war rages in the Middle East, two Jewish-themed plays open in Miami

Keith Baker, left, and Teddy Warren, in GableStage’s “Old Wicked Songs”  previewing on Friday, Jan. 12, opening on Saturday, Jan. 13 and running through Sunday, Feb. 4 at the playhouse inside the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

Although both productions were in the works long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel, a pair of plays – each, coincidentally, with the word “Wicked” in its title – will open this coming weekend at two regional theaters in Miami-Dade County.

Inevitably, the war that has raged ever since that shocking incursion from Gaza and its retaliatory aftermath will thrum through the minds of many theatergoers as they watch Zoetic Stage’s world premiere of Miami native David Rosenberg’s “Wicked Child” and GableStage’s production of “Old Wicked Songs,” a 1996 Pulitzer Prize finalist written and directed by Jon Marans (the musical “Rent” won the prize that year).

Though neither play is specifically about the reignited turmoil in the Middle East – “Wicked Child” is set in 2022-2023, “Old Wicked Songs” in 1986 – powerful art invites context and connections.  With themes including antisemitism and the enduring trauma of the Holocaust, the plays have much to say in this volatile moment.

“Unfortunately, these plays always have resonance,” says Bari Newport, GableStage’s producing artistic director, who worked for two years to get “Old Wicked Songs” to its Miami-Dade debut. “Oct. 7 has re-catapulted so many deep-seated issues into the forefront again . . . That’s how the zeitgeist happens.”

Zoetic Stage’s producing artistic director Stuart Meltzer, who is directing “Wicked Child,” wants people to arrive at the theater ready to take in conflicting points of view.

“I hope audiences don’t come in with their dukes up. I hope they’re ready to listen,” says Meltzer. “We don’t want to anger anyone. We want to engage people.”

“Wicked Child,” which previews Thursday, Jan. 11, and opens Friday, Jan. 12, in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center, underwent a Zoetic developmental process in which Meltzer and playwright Michael McKeever, who appears in the world premiere, both played a part. Initially, the play seems to be a dramedy about an extended Jewish family gathering for a Passover seder in affluent Rye, New York.

The older generation – Fay (Jeni Hacker) and her husband Mark (McKeever), Fay’s sister Cindy (Margery Lowe) and her husband Leo (Wayne LeGette) – isn’t especially religious, but this tradition and family mean a great deal to them. The younger generation – Leo’s son Jake (Ben Katz), his Asian American girlfriend Amelia (Gracie Blu), Cindy’s son (and Jake’s stepbrother) Ben (Jeff Brackett) – are trying to launch their lives, though Ben has already snagged a lucrative 65-hours-a-week job with a law firm.

But as the seder comes to a close, Ben drops a bombshell:  He fell so deeply in love with Israel as a Jewish homeland during his recent Birthright trip that he has enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces.

The New York-based Rosenberg graduated from Miami Palmetto Senior High, then went to New York University followed by the acting program at Juilliard (he appeared in GableStage’s 2014 production of Joshua Harmon’s “Bad Jews”). He says “Wicked Child” flowed from his desire to write about his family (he’s staying with them in Coral Gables in the runup to Zoetic’s opening) and from an argument about Middle East politics that made him realize the limits of his knowledge.

“It’s a very difficult moment to be doing a play about Israel and Palestine, but also a good time,” says the playwright, whose play received a workshop and public reading at Zoetic’s 2022 Finstrom Festival of new work.  “I’ve been rewriting, not to encapsulate this moment but trying to be sensitive. I hope I can contribute to the discussion.  I believe theater is about questions, not statements….I have no intent to traumatize or yell at anyone.”

The title “Wicked Child” was suggested by Meltzer and McKeever as a more potent alternative to Rosenberg’s original, “Effect If Not Intent.”  The term for a self-destructive, challenging child is used in the maggid (telling) section of the Passover seder about the Jewish journey from slavery in Egypt to freedom, as related in the biblical book of Exodus.

“Stuart and Michael have been big dramaturgical assets.  The play is leaner, sharper and more refined in its message and structure,” says Rosenberg. “Stuart and I don’t believe all the same things, so that has sharpened the argument.”

Meltzer is a Miamian who lived on an Israeli kibbutz for a year during the time of the first Gulf War, working in the kitchen and learning Hebrew. He vividly remembers watching as a Scud missile flew from Iraq toward Haifa on his first night in Israel.

Of the current war he says, “It’s hard on our souls. I’m a Jewish male and a proud Zionist…You can’t not feel this, absorb this, have it tie you in knots. I can support Israel and still be critical of it  . . . How can we resolve this in a way that will be longer lasting? These conversations are tough, emotional and very difficult.”

“Old Wicked Songs,” which previews Friday, Jan. 12, and opens Saturday, Jan. 13, at GableStage, presents a host of different challenges to its two-man cast. The performers must be excellent pianists, singers and actors who can impressively play and sing (in German and English) Robert Schumann’s Dichterliebe, a song cycle that weds his music to the joyous, sorrowful poetry of Heinrich Heine.

“The music adds a whole other layer,” says playwright Marans. “It’s so haunting, electric, exciting.”

As Rosenberg did with “Wicked Child,” Marans drew from his own experiences in creating “Old Wicked Songs.” A Duke University graduate who majored in math and minored in music, as a student the aspiring lyricist spent a semester in Vienna studying singing, exploring a singer’s process and feelings from the inside out.

Marans’ play, his first, takes its title from one of several possible translations of the German word bösen in the phrase die alten, bösen lieder (the old, wicked songs).

In the play-with-music, burnt-out 25-year-old American piano prodigy Stephen Hoffman (Teddy Warren) has come to Vienna hoping to reclaim the passionate spark that propelled his career.  He plans to study accompaniment with a renowned professor but discovers – to his vast and often-expressed displeasure – he must first spend three months studying singing with eccentric Professor Josef Mashkan (Carbonell Award winner Keith Baker, who was artistic director of Florida Repertory Theatre when the company was located in West Palm Beach).

“Old Wicked Songs” plays out against the backdrop of former United Nations Secretary-General Kurt Waldheim’s 1986 run for president of Austria, an office he held from 1986 to 1992 despite the revelation of his past as an intelligence officer in the Wehrmacht (Nazi armed forces).

In the course of their lessons, Mashkan peppers his conversation with antisemitic remarks. The Jewish Hoffman, who promised his father he’d go to see the concentration camp at Dachau, is stunned.  But thus begins the gradual unraveling of a mystery.

“I haven’t directed the play in a while, but I did direct Keith in a production at the Bristol Riverside Theatre,” says Marans of Baker, who was artistic director of the company located a half hour northeast of Philadelphia, and who won a best actor Broadway World award for his 2010 performance.  “Some lines seem to land differently. So sometimes I’m ignoring the playwright’s stage directions, going for a more heightened version of the play.”

Marans’ mother, a history teacher, and father, whom he describes as “an angry letter writer who wrote at least 1,000 letters a year to different newspapers,” had saved a letter he wrote them after his own long-ago visit to Dachau, and the sentiments he expressed as an angry young man made it into “Old Wicked Songs” as a second-act monologue for Stephen.

“I was conditioned by my parents. They trained me without my realizing it,” says Marans, who often incorporates historical events into his theatrical storytelling. “My mom isn’t remotely religious, but my dad is, and quite political on the issue of Israel.”

Newport says she wanted to produce “Old Wicked Songs,” which she had seen when she was based in Los Angeles, because audiences were telling her they wanted to see a piece with music.  It also dovetails with GableStage’s commitment to including Jewish stories in its programming, something the company’s late producing artistic director Joseph Adler did for many seasons.

Now the Middle East is again enveloped in turmoil. Antisemitic and anti-Muslim incidents are spiking, while dueling protests – some in support of Israel, others critical of the huge civilian death toll and humanitarian crisis in Gaza – have taken place all over the world.

“To most Jewish people, this is so personal. It hits a very deep and sensitive nerve.  Antisemitism goes way back…We have so often been ‘othered,’” says Newport.  “But we’re a persistent people.”

Meltzer, who says he hasn’t been “this emotionally involved in a project” since Zoetic’s production of “Next to Normal,” finds solace and opportunity in art:  “I feel wonderful and blessed, because the times are as they are, to have the chance to make art. To be in a country that allows these artistic conversations to happen.”

WHAT: World premiere of “Wicked Child” by David Rosenberg

WHERE: Zoetic Stage production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: Previews 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 11, opens 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 12;  7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 2:30 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 2:30 p.m. Sunday (additional 7:30 p.m. show Wednesday, Jan. 17, no matinee on Saturday, Jan. 20), through Jan. 28

COST: $55 and $60

INFORMATION:  305-949-6722 or www.arshtcenter.org

WHAT: “Old Wicked Songs” by Jon Marans

WHERE: GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables

WHEN:  Previews 8 p.m. Friday, Jan. 12, opens 8 p.m. Saturday, Jan.  13; 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional 2 p.m. matinee Saturday, Feb. 3), through Feb. 4 (streaming version available during regular performances Jan. 19-Feb. 4)

COST: $40, $45, $50, $55, $60, $65, all with additional $10 service fee (discounts for students, teachers, artists, military and groups); streaming ticket $30

INFORMATION:  305-445-1119 or www.gablestage.org.

RELATED EVENT:    A conversation with Gerard Schwarz, artistic and music director of the Palm Beach Symphony and professor of music at the Frost School of Music, in honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, will follow the 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, Jan. 28. Visit https://www.gablestage.org/events/mosaic-miami-gablestage-lets-talk/ for details.

 ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Oolite Arts’ filmmakers focus lens on Little Haiti, social justice issues

“El Soldador,” directed by Alexandra Martinez, explores the life of a homeless welder and the care he receives from a team of street medics. The film will be screened as part of “Pass the Mic: We Will Tell Our Stories” on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at the Little Haiti Cultural Complex. (Photo courtesy of Alexandra Martinez)

Storytelling possesses the ability to disrupt preconceived notions and biases through the presentation of varied narratives and perspectives. With this principle in mind, Oolite Arts will screen the works of 13 filmmakers on Wednesday, Dec. 13 at Little Haiti Cultural Complex.

Through a series of short films that weave together a tapestry of diverse stories, the movie creators hope to draw the public’s attention on Miami’s Little Haiti neighborhood affected by gentrification and issues that many Miamians face daily.

Hansel Porras Garcia, Oolite’s cinematic arts manager, emphasizes the significance of featuring stories from communities such as Little Haiti. “It helps in preserving and celebrating their cultural heritage. It acknowledges their contributions to the larger societal tapestry, encouraging cultural preservation and pride.”

In discussing the narratives addressing social issues portrayed in the films—such as immigration, affordable housing, representation and inclusion challenges, and criminal justice reform—Garcia believes that they “also have the potential to motivate individuals and communities to take action.”

The short films, which be screened in the arts complex’s Proscenium Theater were made through two programs supported by Oolite Arts.

The first,“Pass the Mic: We Will Tell Our Stories,” returns for its third edition. According to Garcia, it was created as a collaboration between Oolite Arts and Community Justice Project. The three filmmakers had four months to complete the commissioned works and were paired with community experts from the Florida Immigrant Coalition, Miami Street Medicine, and Chainless Change. Each filmmaker received $7,500 to create the work.

The approach involves the subjects themselves serving as the storytellers, offering a firsthand perspective on the challenges they encounter.

In “El Soldador,” director Alexandra Martinez focuses on Ramon Duarte, a Nicaraguan welder who is now living on the streets struggling with alcoholism and depression. “The short documentary follows his journey to make better decisions for himself amid countless systemic failures, and how receiving care from the Miami Street Medicine team empowered him to hopefully make those decisions,” says Martinez.

The local filmmaker says she visited the public library to read archived newspaper articles and legal filings, gathering historical insights into the treatment of the homeless community in Miami.

To research Ramon’s story in particular, Martinez says she spent time with him—as much as he was comfortable with. “We spoke about his life in Nicaragua, the music he grew up with, his family, and how so much changed when he immigrated to Miami. He showed me the areas he spends time in, where he stays now, and where he used to work.”

The filmmaker confesses making the movie impacted her perspective on homelessness. “Just realizing how quickly and easily someone can become homeless, how dangerous and unstable conditions are, how rapidly someone can be sent to jail, then released back onto the streets without any support systems in place—it was jarring.”

Also included in “Pass the Mic” are Chad Tingle’s “Preemption,” which highlights the efforts of local advocates associated with Chainless Change, a South Floridan organization fighting mass incarceration, and Pamela Largaespada’s “Madre Sombra” chronicling a family’s efforts to attain legal status for their mother in the context of Florida’s evolving immigration laws, working with Florida Immigrant Coalition.

The second part of the program, “Local Love Letters,” which is in its second year, debuted in 2022 in response to a joint initiative by Oolite Arts and the City of Miami, urging filmmakers from Miami to create short films inspired by their city. Ten filmmakers were selected each receiving $5,000 to create short films set against the backdrop of Little Haiti.

This year’s “Local Love Letters: Little Haiti” includes Nadia Wolff’s “Chante Lapenn,” which is described as an experimental grief portrait, while Diana Larrea’s “Querido Pequeño Haiti” explores immigrant communities bidding farewell to a disappearing neighborhood.

Each film contributes to a vibrant tapestry of experiences within Little Haiti. In “Down to Zero,” Joshua Jean-Baptiste portrays a man navigating the challenges of aging through a candid conversation with his lifelong barber. Xavier Serrano’s “En la Pequeña Haití” follows a Cuban woman’s exploration in Little Haiti, and Alicia Edwards’ “Citronelle” features Edwidge Danticat reflecting on tradition, love, and motherhood.

In her short film centered around the author of “Breath, Eyes, Memory,” filmmaker Alicia Edwards explains that it was a natural choice for her to create a movie about the esteemed novelist, describing Danticat as “a stalwart supporter of her Little Haiti community.”

Edwards elaborates: “Edwidge Danticat has raised her family in the area, she’s fought for causes that are dear to her, and supported local businesses. When ‘Love Letters to Little Haiti’ was proposed, the idea of the film was inevitable. Little Haiti and Ms. Danticat are inseparable in my mind.”

The filmmaker hopes that viewers will perceive the author as a mother successfully navigating the balance between family and work, much like many others.

Noteworthy as well is Angelica Bourland’s “Kaila,” a short film following the challenges of a young girl who was compelled to leave Haiti and her endeavors to adapt to a new life with her aunt in Miami. 

Bourland, drawing from her own upbringing in Miami with a Brazilian refugee mother, expresses a profound understanding of her mother’s experience immigrating to the United States.

“In today’s world, she says, where displacement due to conflict and violence are prevalent, the film ‘Kaila’ humanizes the refugee experience. The narrative of a young refugee meeting her aunt for the first time was an opportunity for me to explore family dynamics with the themes of connection, trust, and eventually the start of building a new family unit,” says Bourland.

Beyond personal narratives, Bourland’s intention extends to advocating for the preservation of Little Haiti, spotlighting the “beauty, resilience, and cultural richness” of the Haitian neighborhood confronting the threat of aggressive gentrification.

“When Little Haiti was first established,” says Bourland, “the main purpose was to welcome Haitians in the U.S. I want this film to be a reflection of why it needs to keep on existing, to be a safe space for Haitians to come to when moving to the U.S. To have a community with their people and their culture alive and thriving.”

Garcia underscores the importance of screening the films, emphasizing that they humanize complex social issues by putting faces to the challenges individuals encounter.

“These stories provide a window into the lives of others, fostering empathy and understanding,” says Garcia. “By experiencing different perspectives and narratives, viewers can develop a deeper appreciation for the challenges and triumphs of communities like Little Haiti, ultimately promoting a more compassionate society.”

For Martinez of “El Soldador,” the films not only tell stories but, as she says, “speak truth to power.”

WHAT: “Pass the Mic + Local Love Letters: Little Haiti Screening”

 WHERE: Little Haiti Cultural Complex, 212 NE 59th Terrace, Miami

 WHEN:  7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, Dec. 13     

 COST: Free. RSVP at Oolite Arts

 INFORMATION: 305-674-8278 or oolitearts.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com

Review: A different Gilda Radner confronts mortality in ‘Enter, Grapefruit’

Charisma Jolly wrote, directed and stars in “Enter, Grapefruit,” a play getting its world premiere in at LakehouseRanchDotPNG through Sunday, Dec. 10. (Photo courtesy of Juan Gamero)

The late actor-comedian Gilda Radner was many things, but if you weren’t around to appreciate her in her heyday, maybe you don’t know much about her showbiz/personal journey.

As a member of the original Not Ready for Prime Time Players on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” from 1975 to 1980, she created indelible characters: nerdy Lisa Loopner, hard-of-hearing Emily Litella (whose catchphrase was “never mind” after she’d delivered a genteel rant about some news event she’d misheard), bombastic TV journalist Roseanne Rosannadanna (whose huge hairdo was almost in the shape of a pyramid) and Baba Wawa, an interviewer with a noticeable speech impediment based on the widely admired Barbara Walters, who at first didn’t like the parody one little bit.

Radner also waged a nearly lifelong battle with eating disorders. She had relationships with a number of famous men, including a comedy who’s who consisting of Bill Murray and his brother Brian Doyle-Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis and Martin Short.

Her first marriage, to musician G.E. Smith, didn’t work out, but the love-at-first-sight second one, to actor Gene Wilder, was happy before fate intervened and Radner was diagnosed with the stage IV ovarian cancer that would take her life in 1989 at the age of 42.  Thanks to the charitable efforts of Wilder and others after her passing, Radner posthumously became a significant figure in the fight against ovarian cancer.

“Enter, Grapefruit,” an almost-solo show by Charisma Jolly, doesn’t dwell on Radner’s biography in its LakehouseRanchDotPNG world premiere at Artistic Vibes in Miami.

Instead, Jolly – who wrote, directed and stars in the piece, as well as co-designing the set, lights and costume with stage manager Amanda Hernandez – gives the audience Gilda in a kind of comedian’s purgatory.  That’s in keeping with the company’s dedication to less straightforward, more absurdist/experimental theater.

When she was in remission during her cancer treatment in the spring of 1988, Radner was to have been the first female former cast member to host an episode of “Saturday Night Live,” but a writers’ strike ended the season early.  In “Enter, Grapefruit,” Jolly imagines that Gilda is getting something like that shot, albeit a nightmarish version of it.

In other words, whatever can go wrong does go wrong.

The fictional stage manager (Carlos Artze) sits on the set until Gilda dismisses him, then when she needs him, he’s nowhere to be found (yes, she even tries the bathroom).  Her nervous chit chat with the audience, meant to warm them up, is often met with silence or reluctant participation, dialing up the character’s unease.  Startling sound effects go off, seemingly at random.

And then there are the grapefruits – seen, hidden, omnipresent.

The title of the show refers to the grapefruit-sized tumor that was removed from Radner after her cancer was initially misdiagnosed, delaying the treatment that might have saved her life.

What Jolly gets so right in “Enter, Grapefruit” are the realities of living with – while knowing you’ll die from – a terminal illness.  Her Gilda forgets, putting on her tap shoes to entertain us, only to have another grapefruit appear.  A piece of her hair falls out; a grapefruit appears.  Wanting normalcy, the waiting Gilda gets grapefruits.

The closing moments of this half-hour show deliver a graceful ending, one inspired by the way Steve Martin paid tribute to Radner when he was hosting “Saturday Night Live” on the day her death was announced.  He shared an old clip of Radner and himself in a Fred Astaire-Cyd Charisse “Dancing in the Dark” parody. That dance combined elegance and goofiness.

In “Enter, Grapefruit” as Jolly and Artze dance their way offstage, the elegance prevails.

Jolly has noted that she wrote this play about an artist who continues to inspire her as a senior project at Florida International University. As a performer, she’s eager to please but skittish, appearing quite young in her pink overalls, white blouse and stylish loafers.  She doesn’t particularly look or sound like Radner, but she conveys the essence of a woman who battled demons even as she became a comedy goddess.

As is, “Enter, Grapefruit” contains plenty of truth. But there’s room for more, maybe with an expansion to 45 minutes or an hour, and using relevant bits of Radner’s biography.

WHAT: World premiere of “Enter, Grapefruit” by Charisma Jolly

WHERE: LakehouseRanchDotPNG production at Artistic Vibes, 8846 SW 129^th Terrace, Suite B (second floor), Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 10

COST:  $20 (discounts for students and artists)

INFORMATION: 786-427-4721 or Lakehouseranchpng

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Review: City Theatre’s ‘La Gringa’ is ‘muy maravilloso’

Mario Silva as Ramón “Monchi” Reyes and Emily Garcia Carrerou as María Elena García in City Theatre’s “La  Gringa” at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theatre through Sunday, Dec. 17. (Photo courtesy of Jason Koerner)

Among the great pleasures of theater is its ability to transport us, so thoroughly enmeshing us in the story and world of a play that we feel we’ve been on a vivid journey – without ever leaving our seats.

Carmen Rivera’s “La Gringa,” the longest-running Spanish-language play in Off-Broadway history, is graced with that magical power.

For its annual holiday season full-length production, City Theatre is giving Rivera’s play about a young Nuyorican woman’s exploration of her Puerto Rican roots the Miami debut it deserves.

Running at Manhattan’s Repertorio Español since 1996, the OBIE Award-winning “La Gringa” is both specific and universal in its treatment of timeless subjects, including the schisms within families, the search for identity, economic insecurity and blossoming love.

Staged by executive director Gladys Ramírez with intricate attention to detail and meaning, City’s “La Gringa” begins casting its spell from the moment the audience enters the infinitely malleable Carnival Studio Theater space.

[RELATED: Read Christine Dolen’s preview story of “La Gringa”]

The audience is seated around a circular stage adorned with the Great Seal symbol of the island’s ancient Taino people.  Just beyond the circle are rooms in a well-kept family home in rural Las Piedras, places where props and furniture reside when they’re not being used in a scene:  the bedroom where the seriously ill Manolo (Carlos Orizondo) lives out his days, and the kitchen and living area where his bossy sister Norma (Talita Real) delivers her orders (Manolo calls her “General Norma”).

Over the stage are monitors aimed at each section of the audience, with items evocative of Puerto Rico (a stop sign with the word Pare, various hats, a bicycle, Puerto Rican license plates, shirts emblazoned with the word “Boricua,” tropical greenery) surrounding them.

Because the central character – niece and cousin María Elena García (Emily Garcia Carrerou) – is a New Yorker not fluent in Spanish, the play’s dialogue flows back and forth between the two languages, as it does in so many Miami homes.  And because Ramírez, who collaborated with Rivera on this version of the script, wanted to be sure that anyone not fully bilingual could understand each moment of the play, captions on the monitor screens display every word in both English and Spanish.

This world is so evocative that you’d swear you can smell the salt air, feel the splash of a waterfall in the El Yunque rain forest, hear the noisy nighttime song of tiny frog-like coquís as stars glisten overhead.

Ramírez’s design team – scenic and property designers Jodi Dellaventura and Natalie Taveras Rosario, lighting designer Eric Nelson, costume designer Darío Almirón, sound designer Ernesto Gonzalez – have collaborated to create a kind of artistic love letter to Puerto Rico.

That’s appropriate because the central story of “La Gringa” turns on the Christmas season visit of 22-year-old María Elena García (Carrerou), the daughter of Manolo and Norma’s older sister Olga, who left Puerto Rico as an economic émigré.

Born and raised in New York, María has never been to the island, but she truly, madly, deeply loves all things Puerto Rican – much to the annoyance of her cousin Iris (Analisa Velez), who is constantly annoyed by María’s over-the-top enthusiasm.

At home, María has always felt Puerto Rican; here, she’s called “la gringa” and viewed as thoroughly American.  Her feeling that she is ni de aquí, ni de allá (neither from here nor there) has propelled her quest to solidify her identity.

As with anything so passionately imagined and idealized, María’s encounters with Puerto Rican life and her extended family aren’t always blissful.

Thinking she might stay if she can get a job in the Puerto Rican office of the New York insurance company where she works, she applies and gets turned down.

From the get-go, her Tía Norma (Real) is cool to her, keeping her at arm’s length but turning furious when a petulant María hurls her denim jacket adorned with the Puerto Rican flag onto the floor – Real’s sandaled foot practically vibrates as Norma fights the urge to smack her childish niece with her chancla.

“La Gringa” is a comedy suffused with many emotions – envy, tenderness, fear, loss, love in many forms.  If God is in the details, City Theatre’s production is blessed with an ensemble that navigates all those varying moments with precision and artistry.

The younger members of the cast – Carrerou, making her professional debut after graduating from the New World School of the Arts last spring, Velez as the truth-telling Iris, Mario Silva as the dreamy farmer Ramón “Monchi” Reyes” – are all vibrant presences in the story.  The blossoming romance between María and Monchi is an audience favorite, with lots of oohs and aahs every time their attraction almost leads to a kiss (no spoiler here).

Real and Armando Acevedo, who plays Norma’s good-guy husband Víctor, demonstrate their differences in the first scene when María takes leave of them by saying “bendición tía y tío (blessing, aunt and uncle).” Víctor responds with a sweet “que la virgen te acompañe (may the Virgin accompany you),” and while Norma says the same thing, her delivery is rote, devoid of emotion.  Later, husband and wife have the kind of blistering argument that long-married couples try to avoid because it cuts so close to the bone – or the heart.  Real and Acevedo are simply masterful in that scene.

Orizondo, a veteran actor with the region’s English-language companies, crafts one of the best performances of his long career as the ailing Manolo.  His voice gruff from Manolo’s age and illness, Orizondo becomes María’s funny, encouraging, knowledgeable guide to all things Puerto Rican, including his revered Taino goddess Atabey. The tenderness of the evolving relationship between uncle and niece is at the heart of  “La Gringa.”

As is typical at this time of year, celebration figures into the end of the play, with Manolo and then María scraping a palillo (a kind of pick with tines) rhythmically along a guiro (an instrument made from a gourd). Bomba, an invented-on-the-spot cross between music and poetry, is shared, as are dancing and food.

Then something sad if not unexpected happens.  But because Ramírez, this cast and the designers have been so adept at guiding us through María’s journey, we embrace the full spectrum of emotions stirred by Rivera’s play.  Qué maravilloso.

WHAT: “La Gringa” by Carmen Rivera

WHERE: City Theatre production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN:  7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 17

COST: $55 and $60

INFORMATION:  305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org  

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Identity is at the root of City Theatre’s latest play at the Arsht Center

From left, Armando Acevedo, Talita Real, Emily Garcia Carrerou and Analisa Velez in City Theatre’s production of Carmen Rivera’s “La Gringa” at the Arsht Center through Sunday, Dec. 17. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)

In vast and varied South Florida, cultural identity doesn’t get blended or homogenized within a proverbial melting pot.  Instead, we become part of what theater artist Gladys Ramirez describes as “a tapestry of cultures” – Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, Argentine, Haitian, Dominican and so many more.

Ramirez, executive director of Miami’s City Theatre, is staging the company’s about-to-open production of Carmen Rivera’s “La Gringa.” And as a Miamian born to parents who came to the United States from Peru, she has a deep understanding of the play’s protagonist.

The poignant comedy focuses on Bronx-born María Elena García, who will be played by Emily Garcia Carrerou in her professional debut.

María is a lifelong Nuyorican, a 22-year-old who decides to make her first trip to Puerto Rico during the Christmas holidays.

But despite her passion for all things Puerto Rican – her college major was Puerto Rican studies – María’s extended family views her as a decidedly American “gringa,” while in New York she’s seen as a Borinqueña (Puerto Rican).

So who is she? Ramirez understands that navigation, that dilemma.

“My agent wanted me to change my name,” says Ramirez, a New World School of the Arts graduate. “In Peru, I’m the American. Here, I’m the Latina.”

“La Gringa,” which previews at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, and opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1, runs through Sunday, Dec. 17, in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center.

It’s a play with an impressive history:  It has been running at Manhattan’s Repertorio Español since 1996 (it streamed during the pandemic), and is the longest-running Spanish-language play in Off-Broadway history.  Its original director, Repertorio Español co-founder and artistic director René Buch, worked with Rivera to translate a script she wrote in English into Spanish.  It also won Off-Broadway’s OBIE Award.

Yet this is the play’s debut in Miami, where many a play about Cuban roots and cultural identity has been produced, including Zoetic Stage’s world premiere of Hannah Benitez’s “GringoLandia” in the same Carnival Theater space in 2022.

“La Gringa,” which artistic director Margaret Ledford suggested as the company’s annual full-length play, deals with a different diaspora.

“This story is for everyone forced to emigrate for economic reasons.  What does that do to the people left behind?” says Ramirez. “And it celebrates the culture of Puerto Rico.”

Ledford traditionally directs City’s winter play and several pieces in the company’s annual Summer Shorts festival. But this time the Tennessee native felt Ramirez, who staged the family-friendly musical “Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds” in 2022 for City, was the better choice to direct “La Gringa.”

“I didn’t feel I was the best person for the job . . . The more we talked about it, the more Gladys got passionate about it,” says Ledford, who knows some Spanish but in no way considers herself bilingual.  “Originally, we chose the English version of the script.  Then we thought about doing the English version and the Spanish version, which would have required two separate rehearsal schedules.  Then we thought, ‘What if we integrated the languages?’”

A bilingual version was done in June 2023 by St. Petersburg-based American Stage. But when Ramirez contacted Rivera about wanting to incorporate both languages, the playwright told her to create a combined script and send it to her.

“In my family, we switch back and forth between languages. How does that happen organically?  The hardest part was getting the jokes right,” says Ramirez. “Carmen was so open that it set the tone for how we’d collaborate.”

So now, City’s in-the-round production will be a bilingual blend, with the entire show captioned in English and Spanish to make it accessible to everyone.

“That’s how we live.  It reflects our day-to-day. You’re not one thing or the other.  I hope it resonates with people in a way that brings them together,” says the director.

Rivera was impressed with the result of Ramirez’s work.

“I’m excited. The script just flowed. Gladys did such an amazing job,” she says.

“La Gringa” is the story of a young woman much like the playwright.  Born in New York to Puerto Rican parents who spoke to her in English, Rivera didn’t learn Spanish until she became a student at New York University.

Although she says, “I sound like a gringa when I speak Spanish. It’s the accent of the diaspora,” Rivera used her newly acquired Spanish to talk with her grandmother, who didn’t speak English, acquiring the cultural treasures and family stories the two hadn’t been able to share so completely.

“I wrote an essay about my relationship to Spanish,” says Rivera. “At first it was a language of incomprehension, then fear, then frustration. But as I started to understand my grandmother, it became a language of discovery . . . now it’s a language of freedom.”

At the suggestion of her husband, playwright Cándido Tirado, Rivera expanded her short two-character play “The Universe” into “La Gringa,” incorporating elements of her experience into the character of María Elena García.

“He told me, ‘You have to make this a full-length play. It’s about identity, and we’re still becoming, still asking where do I belong?’” she says.

Although her experiences with relatives in Puerto Rico were happier, like Maria, the playwright tried to get a job on the island without success.  Her grandmother had lost dreams of wanting to be a singer, like Maria’s aunt in the play.  Her uncle Manuel, like the play’s Manolo, was a very funny man.

After “La Gringa,” Rivera wrote the Off-Broadway musical “La Lupe: My Life, My Destiny” about Cuban singer Victoria Lupe Yoli. Together, Rivera and Tirado wrote “Celia: The Life and Music of Celia Cruz,” which played at the Arsht Center in June 2009. The two are also founders and codirectors of Educational Play Productions, which takes thought-provoking plays into New York City schools.

Thanks in part to the work of dramaturg Karina Batchelor, the cast and creative team of City Theatre’s “La Gringa” – a group whose heritage spans multiple countries – is steeped in all things Puerto Rican, many referenced in Rivera’s script.  They know about the coquí, tiny male tree frogs who sing their mating call all night.  They know the music of the Bomba, the indigenous Taíno who were in Puerto Rico long before Christopher Columbus arrived, the supreme goddess Atabey, the traveling holiday celebration that is the parranda.

Carrerou leads the cast just months after graduating from the New World School of the Arts in May. (One necessary note for those steeped in South Florida theater: The play’s central character is not to be confused with Carbonell Award-winning actor-playwright Elena Maria Garcia, who will be back on the Carnival Theater stage May 2-19 in Zoetic Stage’s world premiere of “Cuban Chicken Soup When There’s No More Café,” the sequel to her popular solo show “¡FUÁCATA!”)

Armando Acevedo plays María’s welcoming uncle-by-marriage, Victor Burgos, with Talita Real as her notably unhappy aunt Norma and Analisa Velez as María’s cousin Iris. Carlos Orizondo, who originated the role of Palomo in the New Theatre world premiere of Nilo Cruz’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Anna in the Tropics,” plays María’s ailing, funny, spirited uncle Manolo Cofresí.  And Mario Silva is the entrepreneurial neighbor-farmer Ramón “Monci” Reyes who becomes close to María as he helps her navigate the disappointments of her dream trip.

Like her character, Carrerou is 22. And like María, the actor – whose family is Cuban and Argentine – doesn’t speak Spanish. She had thought that post-New World she might move to Spain for a time to learn the language, but given her debut in “La Gringa,” she’s extremely happy she stayed.

“To make my professional debut at the Arsht Center means a lot. I’m a Miami girl. The Arsht is our Broadway,” she says.

WHAT: “La Gringa” by Carmen Rivera

 WHERE: City Theatre production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

WHEN: Preview 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30, opening 7:30 p.m. Friday, Dec. 1 (a pre-show Parranda on the Plaza with music, food and drinks happens at 6 p.m. on opening night); regular performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 17

COST: $55 and $60

INFORMATION:  305-949-6722 or www.arshtcenter.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

A.I. Is Top Topic At 10th Anniversary FilmGate Miami Festival

“Folding Harmonies” from Taiwan is one of the immersive audiovisual experiences that are part of this year’s FilmGate Interactive Media Festival held in various locations in Miami from Wednesday, Nov. 29 through Sunday, Dec. 3. (Photo courtesy of FilmGate Miami)

The conversations and programming at the FilmGate Interactive Media Festival evolve quickly. In fact, you could say that the landscape changes so fast that just as one trend is the hottest topic, another takes its place.

“FilmGate came out of curiosity,” says Diliana Alexander, executive director of FilmGate Miami, whose FilmGate Interactive Media Festival is in its 10th year and takes place this year at various locations from Wednesday, Nov. 29, through Sunday, Dec. 3.

It will be no surprise to anyone familiar with what’s happening in the world of immersive technologies that this year’s FilmGate will be at the forefront of the latest conversation point – artificial intelligence or A.I.

For perspective, just three years ago, Alexander says FilmGate was helping the masses make sense of the confusion over NFTs, an art, music, game, video or another digital asset that exists solely online. “And NFTs are still in it,” she says. “All of these technologies that are pushing in different directions are really pushing in the same direction. But A.I. is a major shift.”

Alexander adds, “(A.I.) is the closest to magic we’ve ever been, and it will be exciting to see what that means for the creative process. What it means for audiences. What it means for us.”

The theme for this year’s festival is Regenerate X, which includes talks, workshops, and, as has come to be expected of the festival, 35 immersive and experiential installations open to the public.

This year, FilmGate has partnered with the University of Miami where much of the festival, including immersive experiences, will take place at its Lakeside Village Expo Center. Other locations for VR/XR and interactive experiences are the Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, Downtown Media Center, Perez Art Museum, Bayside Marina, and a variety of outdoor locations in downtown Miami.

A virtual reality project that made its world premiere in June at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Film and TV Festival in Austin, Texas, comes to the FilmGate festival at Lakeside Village as part of the expo offerings. In “Body of Mine,” users put on a headset and body-tracking sensors for a full-body immersive experience that will allow them to inhabit the body of a different gender. Cameron Kostopoulos, the creator of the VR, describes “Body of Mine” as an exploration of the transgender body in virtual reality, adding that the inspiration for the project came from the political and homophobic atmosphere in the United States.

Alexander felt that its placement at FilmGate was essential. “It is an important topic to cover, and in Florida, because there’s not a lot of empathy at the moment around this issue.” The interactive demo prompts the user to touch their virtual body and audio clips from trans people can be heard describing parts of their bodies.

Time capsule messages meant for Miamians of the “far future” is at the center of South Florida artist Fereshteh Toosi’s audio interactive experience, “Voice Memos for the Future.”

The piece invites people to connect to nature in locations chosen by the interviewees: Katherine Jones in Legion Park, Blanche Spiner in Biscayne National Park, Yaneisy Reyes in Morningside Park, Ashley Kow in Hollywood Beach, Isabella Marie Garcia in Enchanted Forest Park, and Kasia Williams in Crandon Park. The recordings, which can be heard for free on mobile devices through the audio AR platform echoes.xyz are only accessible when the listener visits the exact places that are being discussed.

The project started when Toosi created a workshop for people in their 20s. “I wanted to hear what they had to say about what it’s like to live in Miami. A lot of people applied, and from that set of applications, I narrowed down the list,” says Toosi, whose pronouns are they and them.

They wanted to have a conversation about climate change and how living in South Florida is a place that continues to be impacted both financially and in the physical environment by ecological changes. “So, what do they want to communicate with the future? And there is a fear, and there’s already a lot of grief around what’s happening,” says Toosi.

For one example, Reyes in Morningside Park, addressing those in Toosi’s far future, says she can see “Miami Beach across the pond,” that “we’re finding ways to stay sane over here in the past,” and apologizes for “anything that we as a collective are failing to do now that may have landed you in a s—– situation in your present.”

At the Frost Science Museum, FilmGate gives viewers the chance to immerse themselves in three dome experiences, which include two from Taiwan: “Folding Harmonies,” an immersive audiovisual presentation that also includes a live performance which is meant to challenge conventional perceptions of time by creating a space where time is a flexible entity, and “Limbotopia,” which also takes up the issue of time and its place between utopia and dystopia. From Canada, “Biliminal” oscillates between meditative serenity and explosive chaos, according to its creators.

Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) shows up here and there in this year’s FilmGate including a workshop presented by Snapchat to show attendees how to use its software Lens Studio on a mobile device to create AI agents, basically intelligent virtual assistants.

And a virtual encyclopedia of AI knowledge, South Florida’s Rony Abovitz, who founded Magic Leap in 2011 and the co-founder of surgical robotics creator Mako Surgical Corp., will show his short film “Yellow Dove Aftermath: The World of Hour Blue,” which will introduce a synthetic being, Jako Vega, also known as Yellow Dove. “We’ve been incubating this world, ‘Hour Blue,’ for a number of years.  Jako Vega can parse between the current world and the Hour Blue world.”

The film is from Abovitz’s new company called Sun and Thunder whose focus is on AI characters and interactive storytelling.

During a talk he is scheduled to give on Thursday, Nov. 30, after the showing of his film at 5 p.m., Abovitz says he’ll speak about SynthBee, Inc., a sister company to his film production company.

“It is developing a human-friendly collaborative A.I. architecture that allows ambitious projects to get done,” he says. Citing films like “The Lord of the Rings,” Abovitz says a movie trilogy like “Rings” that would have taken decades to make with 10,000-plus people, can now use “synthies” (or synthetic beings) which would allow mammoth projects to be done by maybe a dozen people and a cadre of “synthies.” Abovitz says it is a way of democratizing computational intelligence.

He has a larger interest, he says, than capital and resources. There’s a fight for the soul of A.I. as the New York Times recently put it. Artificial intelligence has progressed so rapidly in recent months that leading researchers have signed an open letter urging an immediate pause in its development, plus stronger regulation, due to their fears that the technology could pose “profound risks to society and humanity.”

“I think A.I. itself, the underlying computational intelligence, could be harnessed in many ways for social good,” says Abovitz. “Think about the filmmakers that come to FilmGate, they may never get $500 million like a Steven Spielberg or a James Cameron and have (access) to that huge amount of capital and resources to make these sorts of grand movies. You’re a small team of five or six, so what if you were empowered to make a grand film? They’re not taking away anyone’s job because no one was going to give them that money or chance, most likely anyway. This is a way of creating empowerment to do something that never would have happened.”

This is the age of computing where you can make this a reality, says Abovitz, adding that AI characters will not replace people but instead will work in harmony with them, doing things that were impossible before, and pushing the envelope. “Jako Vega is the first tiny step that we’re showing the public within this much bigger idea that we’re going after.”

WHAT: FilmGate Interactive Media Festival “Regenerate X”

WHERE: University of Miami Lakeside Village, 12800 Stanford Drive, Coral Gables, Phillip and Patricia Frost Museum of Science, 1101 Biscayne Blvd., Miami, University of Miami’s Bill Cosford Cinema, 5030 Brunson Drive, Coral Gables, Perez Art Museum Miami, 1103 Biscayne Blvd., and other downtown Miami locations.

WHEN: 7 p.m., Wednesday, Nov. 29, VIP reception; 7 to 10 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 1, Dome experiences; 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 30 through Saturday, Dec. 2, immersive experiences and interactive installations; 3 p.m., Friday, Dec. 1, 11 a.m., 1 p.m. and 3 p.m., Saturday, Dec. 2, and 11 a.m. Sunday, Dec. 3.  Olympia Arts Bicycle Theater Adventure, “Tales of the Magic City,” 4 p.m. Sunday, Dec. 3, awards ceremony and boat sunset cruise. Download the complete schedule here.

COST: $220 ($5.39 fee), VIP access to all festival events, $85 ($2.69 fee), VIP student with current ID; $50 ($1.99 fee), Frost Dome experience, Thursday, Nov. 30; $30, Bicycle Theater adventure; free one-day passes available for FGI Virtual Portal Room at UM for Thursday, Nov. 30, Friday, Dec. 1 and Saturday, Dec. 2. Tech talks free. 

INFORMATION:  305-916-6973 and  filmgate.miami/fgix

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Review: GableStage’s ‘The Thanksgiving Play’ Roasts Holiday

From left, Stephen G. Anthony as Jaxton, Jeni Hacker as Logan and Anna Lise Jensen as Alicia in “The Thanksgiving Play” at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, through Sunday, Dec. 10. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

November is Native American Heritage Month, a time when the descendants of indigenous people who first lived on the land that became the United States commemorate their history and culture.

Did you know that? Did you know that Thanksgiving, celebrated this year on this Thursday, Nov. 23, is not just a beloved holiday but a myth-infused one?

Playwright Larissa FastHorse, a MacArthur “genius” grant winner, a member of the Sicangu Lakota Nation and the first Native American woman to have a play produced on Broadway, aims to enlighten as she entertains with “The Thanksgiving Play,” the piece that got her to Broadway earlier this year.

Running at GableStage through Sunday, Dec. 10 (and streaming online from Nov. 24 through Dec. 10), “The Thanksgiving Play” is not a somber rebuke to the long history of bloody tragedy involving indigenous people and white settlers.

Rather, FastHorse wields comedy and scathing satire as her weapons, her characters lobbing one trenchant observation after another about performative wokeness, inaccurate portrayals of indigenous culture, a perceived lack of Native American performers – and some of the more laughable aspects of putting on a show.

In bringing “The Thanksgiving Play” to life, GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport has assembled a small but mighty cast of four of the region’s most seasoned, multifaceted performers. What each brings to her or his role is immeasurable, a combination of inventive creativity and skills honed over countless productions.

As director, Newport honors FastHorse’s layered writing and the actors’ comedic prowess with a production that is also multifaceted:  flat-out hilarious at times, thought-provoking and, in a few key moments, deliberately shocking.

In “The Thanksgiving Play,” three well-meaning locals and an actress from Los Angeles have come together in a high school’s drama room in any town except the Los Angeles area.

Their mission is to devise a Thanksgiving play appropriate for elementary school students, which might sound easy but definitely is not.  To prove that point, FastHorse found real examples of such pieces on the internet, and she includes a few of the cheerful, jaw-droppingly offensive results in her play.

The devised play’s director Logan (Hacker) is a high-energy high school drama teacher who may have torpedoed her career with her recent age-inappropriate production of “The Iceman Cometh” featuring 15-year-old actors (at least the 300 parents who signed a petition calling for her firing thought high school sophomores shouldn’t be going anywhere near that particular Eugene O’Neill play.

Logan’s mega-woke lover Jaxton (Anthony), who has already achieved his career ambitions by acting at the local farmers market and practicing yoga (including tantric sex), has volunteered to act in the play.  So has elementary school history teacher Caden (Wahl), who arrives at the first rehearsal – or first script-devising session – with a massive box of research on Harvest Home/Thanksgiving festivals going back thousands of years.

Because Logan is far more savvy at applying for grants than she is at picking shows for her students, she has received a Native American Heritage Month Awareness Through Art grant to hire a professional actor for the project.  Alicia (Jensen) is that pro, a dark-haired beauty Logan and the others plan to showcase as the Native American presence and voice in their play.  Only things don’t quite pan out that way.

The topical content of “The Thanksgiving Play” is vast and varied.  The women, for example, ponder the value of having beauty vs. brains.  The horrific massacre of hundreds of indigenous Pequot men, women and children in 1637 is represented in a way that may make many in the GableStage audience recoil. Breaking down myths and stereotypes – of Native Americans, of Thanksgiving itself – is a noble intention that leads to a string of uproariously bad ideas about how to approach the devised play-within-“The Thanksgiving Play.”

So much of the pleasure of GableStage’s production flows from watching the four actors’ intricate, flawless delivery of FastHorse’s dialogue.

Jensen hasn’t been onstage since the COVID-19 pandemic hit, choosing to explore other career options.  She’s a great musical theater actor (she won the 2019 Carbonell Award for her performance in Slow Burn Theatre’s “The Bridges of Madison County”), but as she demonstrates in “The Thanksgiving Play,” she’s just as adroit at comedy.  Speaking consistently in the sort of sexpot voice used by multiple generations of seductive screen queens, Jensen plays the self-assured but generally dim Alicia as only a shrewd actor could.

Talking one-on-one with Logan, Alicia says, “…I know how to make people stare at me and not look away. And when I say something on stage, people listen and they believe me.”  Jensen shares that skill.

Hacker, who also choreographed the musical bits in “The Thanksgiving Play,” is another Carbonell-winning musical theater star (she received another on Nov. 13  for her performance in Zoetic Stage’s “Next to Normal”).  Just as memorable in straight plays and comedies, the petite Hacker uses her lithe body and endlessly expressive face to make Logan a woman so nervous about her shot at public school redemption that she mentally twists herself into a woke pretzel.

Anthony’s New Age Jaxton – if he were older, you know he’d have been among the throngs at the original Woodstock – is a companionable boyfriend to Logan, a man who wants what he wants but doesn’t want to work too hard for it. An accomplished musician/musical theater actor whose eclectic range includes “James Joyce’s The Dead” at GableStage and “Hank Williams: Lost Highway” at Actors’ Playhouse (and before that, Off-Broadway), Anthony infuses Jaxton with both magnetism and self-absorption.

Wahl, whose lengthy list of dramatic credits includes “The White Card” and “White Guy on the Bus” at GableStage as well as his Carbonell-winning solo performance in Zoetic Stage’s “I Am My Own Wife,” deftly leans into comedy as the nerdish Caden, who is nervously aglow as he sees his secret dream – becoming a playwright – about to come true.  Watching him chomp on an invisible ear of corn – part of the devising that’s going on – is just as hilariously joyful as seeing Lucille Ball stomping grapes.

When you walk into GableStage’s small space at the grand Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, you may be hit by a wave of nostalgia once you catch sight of Frank J. Oliva’s set.

Oliva, who also just won a Carbonell for his design of Area Stage’s immersive “The Little Mermaid,” has re-created a vintage high school drama room.  A checkerboard linoleum floor, an elevated stage with a navy velvet curtain, a private drama department “office” adapted from a still-in-use janitor’s closet make it hard to imagine any other set was ever there (though so many have been).  Natasha Lopes Hernandez’s set dressing and props design is of a piece with Oliva’s work, with more than a few visual jokes.

Sean McGinley’s sound design, Tony Galaska’s lighting, Casey Sacco’s costume design (which goes in the direction of L.A. flashy/tacky for Alicia) and Maura Gergerich’s special costumes and props (for the pageant-style portions of the show) are of a piece with Oliva’s set design – just right.

If you’ve ever seen Christopher Guest’s brilliant 1996 community theater-skewering mockumentary “Waiting for Guffman,” you’ll notice echoes of it in “The Thanksgiving Play.” But what FastHorse is up to, particularly in this age of public-school curriculum wars, is as potent and necessary as it is funny.

The work of this impressive, insightful writer will be back in South Florida May 7-12 when her adaptation of the classic musical “Peter Pan” plays Miami’s Arsht Center. But why wait?  GableStage has delivered ideal pre- or post-Thanksgiving fare with its sharp production of “The Thanksgiving Play.”

WHAT: “The Thanksgiving Play” by Larissa FastHorse

WHERE: GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables

WHEN:  2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday, 2 and 9 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (no show on Thanksgiving, no matinee Dec. 2), through Dec. 10 (streaming version available during regular performances Nov. 24-Dec. 10)

COST: $40, $45, $50, $55, $60, $65, all with additional $10 service fee (discounts for students, teachers, artists, military and groups); streaming ticket $30: $10 off with code THANKFUL on ticket orders for performances Wednesday, Nov. 22; Friday, Nov. 24; Saturday, Nov. 25 and Sunday, Nov. 26

INFORMATION:  305-445-1119 or www.gablestage.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Review: LakehouseRanch jumps into the horror genre with ‘rabbit’

Samuel Krogh as kade and Maleeha Nasser’s wren in the world premiere of Riley Elton McCarthy’s “rabbit,” a LakehouseRanchDotPNG production in Kendall. The show runs through Sunday, Nov. 19 (Photo courtesy of Juan Gamero)

Riley Elton McCarthy is a New York-based playwright whose instructions at the top of the script for the world premiere play “rabbit” are uncommonly detailed regarding gender, casting, the need for leaning into the queerness and violence of the piece.

The playwright uses the pronouns they/them, as do the characters in “rabbit,” so we’ll conform to that in writing about the LakehouseRanchDotPNG production. The play’s title and character names aren’t capitalized, so we’ll do likewise. Note that “rabbit” has just a two-weekend run, which translates into three remaining performances in the small second floor Artistic Vibes space in Kendall: 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 17, and Saturday, Nov. 18, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 19.  Hop to it and make plans if this one sounds intriguing.

The third world premiere in LakehouseRanch’s second season of presenting absurdist and experimental work, “rabbit” is a horror play with plenty of room for individual interpretation.

The characters in the play’s wolf pack could be runaway kids and teens, wolves, even rabbits who hunt their own.  Whoever they are, they have plenty in common with the boys in William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” as they have created a new and violent society led by an alpha wolf called kade (Samuel Krogh, who plays the character with an entirely appropriate rock star attitude).

Established by a now-absent founder the members call “the little one,” the pack lives in the woods, never leaving, though most have hazy memories of families or home or something that came before.

To survive, they hunt rabbits, which the eccentric sage turns into the filling for handpies. Sometimes, though, a predator becomes the prey.

In addition to sage and kade, the ultimate authority with a distinct appetite for domination and cruelty, the others are briar (Charisma Jolly), who seems to be kade’s mean-and-nasty acolyte; wren (Maleeha Naseer), who trains the new arrivals to become hunters; gale  (Alex Camacho), who looks truly frightening as they lick their chops; finch, described by the playwright as “a realist;” and cyprus, a frightened type who strums a ukelele as they try (and fail) to remember the lyrics to “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.”

Into this established order comes a force who will eventually change everything. After henri (Emily Valdes, strikingly mysterious) gets caught in one of the pack’s concealed bear traps, they’re taken in by the group, lusted after by some, made a target by others.

LakehouseRanch artistic director Brandon Urrutia, his design team (set by Indy Sullerio, sound by actor Naseer, costumes by Lucy Marie Lopez, props by Rachel Gil de Gibaja and actors Naseer and Chanel, lighting by Urrutia himself) and the performers keep the play’s unsettling, unnerving, at times horrifying and bloody vibe going throughout.

The kind of light you might imagine in a forest washes over a space plastered with child-like drawings of rabbits, an ornate cross marking the spot where “the little one” departed, and a tree that sometimes serves as a gallows. Creepy.

The Artistic Vibes black box space is tiny, with just two rows of folding chairs along each of two walls.  If the actors point prop “guns” (actually cap guns/rifles) in your direction or the chase after prey comes tumbling into the space beside you, you will jump.

The young theater artists of LakehouseRanchDotPNG are attracting audiences hungry for shows that aren’t the same old same old.  Some of which, like “rabbit,” may just startle the bejesus out of them.

WHAT: World premiere of “rabbit” by Riley Elton McCarthy

WHERE: LakehouseRanchDotPNG production at Artistic Vibes, 8846 SW 129^th Terrace, Suite B (second floor), Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 19

COST:  $20 (discounts for students and artists)

INFORMATION: (786) 427-4721 or Lakehouseranch-png

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Review: Miami connections in Maine-based ‘Sweet Goats’ give play a perfect home at Actors’ Playhouse

From left, Elizabeth Price as Georgie, JL Rey as Tio Eme and Melissa Ann Hubicsak as Beatriz in the Actors’ Playhouse production of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” at the Miracle Mile Theatre in Coral Gables through Sunday, Dec. 3.  (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

Before the show started on opening night, Richard Blanco began the festivities surrounding “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” like the great poet he is, reading “A Love Song for the Miracle Theatre” – a poem he was moved to write earlier that day.

Standing downstage in the Balcony Theatre, with set designer Brandon Newton’s vision of a small Maine community at the ready behind him, the Cuban American Blanco painted a vibrant portrait in words, evoking the look and spirit of a movie theater-turned-playhouse, a place he knows well from growing up in Miami.

Getting to the very essence of theater’s magical reflection of life and its transportive power, he observed that for decades, “we’ve found ourselves by forgetting ourselves…”

Blanco, the country’s fifth inaugural poet and Miami-Dade County’s poet laureate, collaborated with Miami playwright and fellow Cuban American Vanessa Garcia in writing “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas.” After a world premiere at Maine’s Portland Stage, the play is getting a second production from Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, where it will run through Sunday, Dec. 3.

Speaking of “Sweet Goats” in advance of its opening, Garcia observed, “This play roots from Miami. It is very much from here that the spirit of it comes.”

So true. Though the play is set in Maine, it is imbued with Cuban culture – food, music, dance, spiritual practices, historical touchstones, certain small speeches in impassioned Spanish.  The opening night audience got all of it, laughing, joining in song, some commenting in a whisper (or not so quietly) to one another.

Blanco and Garcia’s story centers on Beatriz (Melissa Ann Hubicsak), a Miamian who has moved to Maine and opened the Elegua Bakery.  She’s not quite a santera,  she explains to her best friend Georgie (Elizabeth Price), but she is (as her uncle describes her) a daughter of the Santería deity Elegua, the trickster god of the crossroads.

Beatriz is quite the trickster herself.  Estranged from her Cuban immigrant mother Marilyn (Barbara Bonilla), a woman scarred by a lifetime of loss, Beatriz sometimes phones her mom in Miami, altering her voice and pretending to represent a sweepstakes. But of course, she really just wants to hear her mother’s voice.

Having moved to Maine after the demise of her marriage to a man 20 years her senior – a son-in-law her mother scorned – Beatriz has found her people, a chosen family quite different from the Cuban bakers who first ignited her passion for making pastries.

Georgie, a woman of strong opinions, knows what she wants – and at this moment, she wants Beatriz to read the caricoles (cowrie shells) so the gods can fill her in on her future. Particularly her romantic future.

At one time, Georgie thought the quintessential Maine man Maynard (Michael Gioia) might be the one.  But something happened with his ex-wife Clarice, for whom his pet cardinal is named, so Georgie now does her best to pretend Maynard doesn’t exist, even when he’s in the same room.

Blake (Conor Walton) is a gay man from Kentucky who’s married to a veterinarian (Blanco has noted that Blake is the character most like himself). His homemade goat cheese inspires Beatriz to come up with a pastelito filled with goat cheese and guava – the “sweet goats” of the title.  His main activities seem to be bringing the snark when it’s needed and smoking. He knows he should quit, but does he want to? Hell, no.

Into this mix of kindness and eccentricity comes Beatriz’s Tio Eme (Rey), who has come to Maine from Miami to see if he can break through the stalemate between his sister and his niece. Both women are similarly stubborn and sometimes volatile, so things don’t exactly proceed apace.  He manages to fill his time by arguing with Beatriz about family, helping her bake and flirting with the smitten Georgie.

A 90-minute exploration of life and death, home and connection, “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” comes off like a distant cousin to Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town.”

As you might expect, given Blanco’s contributions to the collaboration, there are moments of poetry threaded into the drama. And some of the writing by both playwrights – who wrote what isn’t specified –  is heartbreakingly evocative.

Marilyn, who came to the United States on a Pedro Pan flight with her brother, tells Tio Eme how she felt when their parents were finally able to leave Cuba and join them in Miami: “They looked so old. Like the world had swept the floor with them. You were my mother. And my father. And they were . . . they were strangers.”

Newton’s set provides both small and communal playing areas defined by platforms and skeletal frames, the central one being Beatriz’s Elegua Bakery, which features colorful tile floors, a display case and Cuban coffee always at the ready (Jodi Dellaventura did the set dressing and properties design).  Lighting designer Eric Nelson paints sunsets onto the backdrop, finding a way to make different Maine moons striking and impossibly large.

Sound designer Reidar Sorensen brings Cuba into the space with music you might hear anywhere and everywhere in Miami, and the occasional thump of a beating heart underscores Marilyn’s worsening health. But one of Sorensen’s most significant contributions happens when he breaks the quiet with the beautiful song of a cardinal, a symbolic bird throughout the play. Costume designer Ellis Tillman’s choices are, as usual, spot on as they run the gamut from omnipresent flannel to a vibrant red dress for  Marilyn in the play’s final moments.

Director David Arisco, who collaborated with Victoria Collado on the staging and movement of the spiritually uplifting final scene, guides his adroit cast to performances that bring out the longing, quirkiness and emotional conflicts of the likeable characters.

Hubicsak anchors the play as Beatriz, enriching her newfound family with her steadiness and empathy.  As is so often the case, Price is superb, her masterful embodiment of Georgie an illustration of acting at its richest.  Bonilla as Marilyn is sorrowful, furious and, in one remark about a Whole Foods gift certificate, perfectly hilarious.

Rey somehow infuses Tio Eme with kindness and warmth even when he’s giving Beatriz a piece of his mind in high-volume Spanish. Walton, whose Blake is at least partially inspired by Blanco, crafts a character who is excitable, observant and caring. Whether or not the skillful Gioia actually knows how to whittle, he makes you believe he does, from the tippy top of his comically large hat with earflaps to his booted feet.

The play’s ending, which follows a tragic loss, uses the dance and music of the Cuban guaguancó to make clear that even in mourning, Beatriz is not done with joy.  Led by the spirited Marilyn, she dances with style and joy, her smile radiant as she registers a belief symbolized by the cardinal: Those who have left us in body remain in spirit.

“Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” is a play that could be produced in many regional theaters, given the universality of its characters’ search for home, identity and belonging. But the play’s corazón, its heart, is Cuban. In essence, it’s a love song to a treasured culture, a way to mourn generations of loss, an anthem to resilience.  And in greater Miami at the Miracle Theatre, its impact is amplified.

WHAT: “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” by Richard Blanco and Vanessa Garcia

WHERE: Actors Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre’s Balcony Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables

WHEN:  8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 3

COST: $40, $55, $65, $75, $85 (seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only; students with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Review: Armando Santana’s ‘Hoo Hah!’ gets a True Mirage world premiere in Miami Lakes

Darcy Hernandez-Gil as Mama and Milaimys Castellon as her daughter Lil in the True Mirage world premiere of Armando Santana’s “Hoo Hah!” (Photo courtesy of Thiana Berrick)

Miami’s True Mirage had a hit last March with the Robyn Brenner-Mackenzie Anderson song cycle “Songs from the Brink,” a world premiere piece about life challenges of people in their 20s. The not-for-profit company’s stated mission is to empower emerging artists, produce new works (mainly from BIPOC playwrights with BIPOC/Latinx casts), and present thought-provoking plays.

Now the company, which performs in different spaces, has returned to Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes with the world premiere of Armando Santana’s “Hoo Hah!,” which runs through Sunday, Nov. 12.

Santana, a New World School of the Arts grad, calls his play “a comedy of preventability.”  What he means is that in a piece set in the world of theater, the ego-driven characters could try to stop the obvious, imminent disaster of a preview night gone hideously wrong. Yet these narcissists, driven by emotional scars and raging ambition, stay laser-focused on themselves.

Stylistically, “Hoo Hah!” blends comedy, farce, absurdist theater, even melodrama.  Though the title refers to the name of a teen actress who may or may not make it through the first preview of a play titled “A Dress Dipped in White.” But it’s also a deliberate reference (despite the “h” on the end of “hah”) to the slang for a woman’s private parts.

To wit:  When Hoo Hah (Sara Jarrell) is writhing on the floor, struggling to breathe as she chokes on a walnut, the play’s director looks into her mouth and asks her mother, “How much deeper do I have to look inside your Hoo Hah?” That joke becomes the play’s running gag, never failing to get a laugh from some in the audience as others sit stony-faced.

The play’s time period isn’t made clear – director Daniel Gil describes it as post-apocalyptic, maybe after World War III has plunged the world back into a 1920s way of living – but it’s set in a gloomy dressing room with torn wallpaper and the well-worn, messy décor of a place in decline. When the story becomes particularly menacing, even deadly, Angelina Esposito’s lighting stands in for a growing bloodbath.

It begins with Hoo Hah and her leading man, R.T. Waldorf (Randy Garcia) singing the sweet Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald kind of love song that ends the first act of “A Dress Dipped in White” (the original music and lyrics are by Miamian Thiana Berrick.  Then the action shifts to the star dressing room at a theater in Savannah, Georgia, where Jarrell’s curvy Hoo Hah proceeds to choke and wheeze and agonize her way through nearly the entire play.

The only person who notices or seems to care about Hoo Hah’s predicament is her elder sister Lil (Milaimys Castellon), the visual opposite of her struggling sis.  Lil is dressed in a potato sack (her one and only item of clothing), her face and body smeared with dirt, her long hair thoroughly matted.  When her mother tells her she stinks, you believe it.

Ah, yes, Mama. Once a sparkling star of the stage, former actress Maddy Rawson (Darcy Hernandez-Gil, who stepped into the role just before opening and mastered extensive dialogue) makes Mama Rose in “Gypsy” look like Mother of the Year.  She lives to push Hoo Hah to ever-greater heights, but the glory is vicarious – she’d just as soon be on the stage herself and knows she’d be better.

To Maddy, sweet and loyal Lil is nothing but an encumbrance, a servant she doesn’t have to pay. Her long speech detailing how Lil ruined her life is a skillfully chilling repudiation of motherhood.

While Hoo Hah is choking, intermission is being extended, then extended some more.  That’s not a good thing.

The author of “A Dress Dipped in White” happens to be the President of the United States, Jacob Wringer (Ricky J. Martinez), a man who takes disappointment badly.  He’s there at the Merrik Theater (not named for legendary producer David Merrick, we presume) with nearly 1,000 other restless audience members. By the time he gets fed up and literally blasts his way into Hoo Hah’s dressing room, Ringer has counted each cherub on the theater’s proscenium arch.

Ringer, who is leading a nation at war, appears to be both an explosively violent lunatic and a man who could teach Hannibal Lecter a thing or two about deceptively soothing words. Martinez, the most experienced actor in the cast, is wonderful as infuses the production with artful energy.

Everyone else has to contend with Ringer’s volatility: Stagehand Charlie (Nick Valdes), who doesn’t have to put up with Ringer for long; a quaking “Dress Dipped in White” director Tobias Craw (Gil, who directed Santana’s play, designed the set, co-designed the costumes with Hernandez-Gil and did the sound with the playwright and Hernandez-Gil); the usually drunk Waldorf, choking Hoo Hah, predictably surprising Lil and Mama Maddy, whose domineering personality evaporates in the presence of the playwright-politician who once added her to his long list of conquests.

“Hoo Hah!” is an inside baseball sort of play, most fully appealing and accessible to those who find even the minutiae of the theater world fascinating.

Santana is a talented playwright who doesn’t need a joke title or crude language to make audiences connect with his script. Plenty of people in the first Saturday-night audience did just that, laughing a lot, gasping when President Ringer did his worst.  But could “Hoo Hah!” have used more rehearsal time, a bigger budget and a few more actors of Martinez’s caliber? Absolutely.

WHAT: True Mirage Theater world premiere of “Hoo Hah!” by Armando Santana 

WHERE: Main Street Playhouse, 6812 Main St., Miami Lakes

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 12

COST:  $35

INFORMATION: 786-484-4711 or www.truemiragetheater.com

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com. 

Actors’ Playhouse’s ‘Sweet Goats’ born in Maine but its roots are in Miami

From left, Elizabeth Price as Georgie, Melissa Ann Hubicsak as Beatriz, and JL Rey as Tio Eme in “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” by Richard Blanco and Vanessa Garcia opening at Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables in previews Wednesday, Nov. 8, and opening Friday, Nov. 9 through Sunday, Dec. 3.  (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

Home. It’s just a four-letter word, but one that encompasses so many emotions: joy, sorrow, warmth, longing, loss. Home is part of our essence, an ache if it’s lost, a quest for deep connection that so many in Miami’s exile communities know as well as anyone.

Celebrated Cuban-American poet Richard Blanco, whose literary life vaulted to another level in 2013 after President Barack Obama made him the fifth Presidential Inaugural Poet in the country’s history, says, “Home is not just a place. It’s a state of mind.”

Cuban-American playwright Vanessa Garcia, whose immersive “The Amparo Experience” made her a higher-profile artist with its months-long Miami run in 2019, likewise has devoted much of her writing to the longing for home and the exploration of roots.

The two Miami writers had never met when Blanco went to an “Amparo” performance and asked Garcia to chat over martinis at Tap 42 afterwards.

Blanco had been living in Maine, where he moved “on a whim.”

He says: “I had been searching for home, a place, belonging – the essential question of my work.”

Blanco was commissioned by Maine’s Portland Stage to write a play – the offer came after an onstage conversation with Pulitzer Prize-winning Miami playwright Nilo Cruz – but he wasn’t happy with his early draft.

He was intrigued by the site-specific “Amparo,” Garcia’s deeply impactful immersive story of the family behind Havana Club Rum, the Fidel Castro-led Cuban Revolution, and the diaspora that followed.  The poet and the playwright talked, met again and talked some more, and Blanco says that eventually, they decided to collaborate on the piece for Portland Stage.

“Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” was the result. The play about a Cuban American baker named Beatriz who has moved from Miami to Maine had its world premiere run Jan. 25 to Feb. 12, 2023.  Now “Sweet Goats” has come south to Miami for a major second production by Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables. Set in Maine but thoroughly infused with Cuban culture (and food), it explores the complexities of home as well as the estrangement of Beatriz and her unhappy mother Marilyn.  “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” will preview Wednesday, Nov. 8, and Thursday, Nov. 9, with opening night on Friday, Nov. 10.  The play runs through Sunday, Dec. 3.

“I am trying to find plays that speak to the community,” says artistic director David Arisco, who chose “Sweet Goats” to kick off the company’s 36^th season.  “So many theaters do world premieres, but a lot of plays don’t get a second production. I thought it would also be exciting for the playwrights to have it seen on their home turf….It was written for Maine, but its roots are in Miami.”

“Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” pulses with spirit and symbolism, tradition and the act of finding family in friendships.  With the exception of JL Rey, a Tampa actor reprising his world premiere role as Beatriz’s Tio Eme, the South Florida-based cast is new, with several making their Actors’ Playhouse debuts.

Melissa Ann Hubicsak plays Beatriz (or Bea), who invents the two Cuban-style pastries that give the play its title: Sweet Goats are pastelitos with Maine-made goat cheese and guava, Blueberry Señoritas a flaky pastry filled with Maine blueberries and custard.

Georgie (Elizabeth Price) is her neighbor and closest friend, Maynard (Michael Gioia) a classic salt-of-the-earth Maine character, Blake (Conor Walton) a gay southerner who brings style and wit to the land of plaid flannel shirts, and Marilyn (Barbara Bonilla), Bea’s ailing and lonely mom in Miami.

For Hubicsak – whose heritage is Hungarian, German and Irish on her father’s side, Cuban on her mother’s – snagging the leading role of Beatriz in her first Actors’ Playhouse show is part of a personal and career renaissance.

The 2008 Florida International University grad developed such a deep fear of auditioning that she stepped back from acting for a while. Then, after she lost her relationship, her apartment and her day job around the same time, she found solace in seeing a lot of theater, falling in love with the art form again.  She met playwright Garcia when she played a principal role in “The Amparo Experience,” which led her to explore her own Cuban family history.

“This play has a theme of forgiveness, of other people and oneself,” says Hubicsak.  “I’m the first-generation daughter of immigrants. I started digging into history of my own family; there were people who were political prisoners, who were tortured, but they didn’t talk about it….I had been asking. I was older and wanted to know.  Now I’m recording and documenting everything. Our family has fought and yelled and cried, all because of me.”

The actor feels the commonalities between herself and the character of Beatriz deeply, from a long-absent father (Hubicksak’s dad has battled addiction and homelessness) to navigating the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.  She praises Blanco and Garcia for the way the two convey the interactions in a Cuban family.

“The play has very Miami things and very Cuban things. It captures the dynamics of how we speak to each other. Richard and Vanessa’s writing is very real. One second, you’re screaming. Then you laugh,” she says.

Born in Cuba, Rey moved to Manhattan’s Inwood neighborhood (where “In the Heights” is set) with his family in 1969, then to Tampa in the early ‘80s.  He worked there for 25 years, then went back to New York, then post-pandemic went back to Tampa.  But he has fallen in love with Miami (“I’m thinking of moving to this part of the state,” he says) and his second group of “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” castmates.

“I love the character. I get to tell the Cuban side of the story,” says Rey. “He’s trying to be a bridge between two people he loves. He’s attempting to be a peacekeeper, someone who reminds (his sister and niece) that they love each other.”

Rey appreciates Arisco’s take on the play – “this is being led by a very capable, open-minded and collaborative director,” he says – and the way Garcia and other collaborators are continuing to work on the play’s final scene. The ending involves the dance and music of a Cuban guaguancó, a distinct type of rumba, as well as a deeply-felt spiritual experience that “becomes more visceral for the audience,” he says.

“Obviously, the audience will know about these things – the Pedro Pan program, Freedom Flights, the wonders of Cuban food. It doesn’t have to feel as expositional. It can be more emotionally grounded,” adds Rey. “In many ways, this is a new play. It’s beautifully moving.”

Arisco agrees that the scenes between Beatriz and Tio Eme are likely to resonate more powerfully with Miami-Dade County’s Cuban population than they might have in Maine. But he hopes audiences at the Miracle’s more intimate Balcony Theatre will also have another thematic takeaway.

“It’s more about people understanding that you can make a new community, a new family. In Maine, Beatriz is home,” says the director.

Born in Madrid to Cuban exile parents and raised in Miami, Blanco earned a Bachelor of Science degree in civil engineering and a Master of Fine Arts degree in creative writing at Florida International University.

(Above, watch an interview with ArtSpeak from 2015 with Richard Blanco)

While he notes “I’ve been a civil engineer for most of my adult life,” he adds that “once the White House called, it was a game changer.”

The inaugural poet tradition began with Robert Frost reading at President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 ceremony, and when he was chosen to read his “One Today,” Blanco was the first immigrant, first openly gay man and the then-youngest inaugural poet. (Amanda Gorman, the sixth inaugural poet, read “The Hill We Climb” at President Joe Biden’s 2021 ceremony and is three decades younger than Blanco.)

Now, Blanco says, his professional life is 100 percent devoted to writing.

His latest book of poems, “Homeland of My Body: New and Selected Poems” (Beacon Press, 216 pages), contains a mixture of previously published poems and new ones. He’ll discuss it with his former teacher and mentor, poet Campbell McGrath, on Sunday, Nov. 19, at 3:30 p.m. at the Miami Book Fair on Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Campus, Building 1, Auditorium 1261, 300 NE Second Ave., Miami.

Blanco has several other items on his artistic agenda, including an in-development TV pilot based on his memoir “The Prince of Los Cocuyos: A Miami Childhood” and a musical based on “Waiting for Snow in Havana” (playwright Karen Zacarias is writing the book, Benjamin Velez the music, and Velez and Blanco are co-lyricists).

In working with Garcia on “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas,” he says he learned a great deal about the mechanics of writing a play, the collaborative nature of theater and trusting the “spareness” of a play’s dialogue in comparison to poetry. Would he try playwriting again?

“I’ve always liked theater, the communal nature of it. To see something you wrote come to life, in three dimensions, making people laugh and cry. That’s addictive,” he says.

As for Garcia, she hadn’t thought that the second production of “Sweet Goats” would happen in her hometown, but as she sits in on rehearsals, makes small changes and workshops the ending, she sees that it makes sense.

“This play roots from Miami. It is very much from here that the spirit of it comes. Like the bird in the play, it came south,” says Garcia.

Garcia has another world premiere in the works, “1,000 Miles.” It will be produced by Fort Lauderdale’s New City Players (www.newcityplayers.org) and co-produced by the Abre Camino Collective, the arts partnership of Garcia and director Victoria Collado.  Elizabeth Price – Georgie in “Sweet Goats” – will direct the play, which will run March 7-24, 2024, at the Island City Stage space in Wilton Manors.

Garcia enjoys collaboration with other writers – “Jenna and the Whale,” which she wrote with Miamian Jake Cline, had its world premiere in August at the Ground Floor Theatre in Austin, Texas – and she says working with Blanco was great all around.

“Apart from being an amazing writer, he’s an amazing person,” she says, adding in so many words that he’s an admirable role model when it comes to juggling a thriving career and staying true to himself: “God, please keep me that humble.”

WHAT: “Sweet Goats and Blueberry Señoritas” by Richard Blanco and Vanessa Garcia

WHERE: Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre’s Balcony Theatre, 280 Miracle Mile, Coral Gables

WHEN: Previews 8 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 8, and Thursday, Nov. 9; opens at 8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 10; regular performances 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Dec. 3

COST: $40, $55, $65, $75, $85 (seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only; students with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit media source for the arts featuring fresh and original stories by writers dedicated to theater, dance, visual arts, film, music and more. Don’t miss a story at www.artburstmiami.com.