Review: Zoetic Stage’s ‘Next to Normal’ is an emotional, personal don’t-miss musical

Jeni Hacker as Diana and Ben Sandomir as Dan in Zoetic Stage’s production of the musical “Next to Normal” at the Carnival Studio Theater in the Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami, through Sunday, April 9.

The complex interactions within dysfunctional families have fueled great dramas since ancient times.  Hundreds of works by theater history’s finest playwrights come to mind, but Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey’s “Next to Normal” is an extraordinary one.

So is Zoetic Stage’s new production of the rock-pop musical, which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for drama in 2010, the year Zoetic was launched.  Since it began performing in its Carnival Studio Theater home at Miami’s Arsht Center, Zoetic has staged 37 shows – world premieres, plays, musicals, solo shows, revues – in that time, winning critical acclaim, a loyal following and dozens of Carbonell Awards.

But this 38th show?  “Next to Normal” is simply superb, every element combining to deliver a powerhouse artistic and emotional experience, one that manages to be both heartbreaking and exhilarating.

Kitt and Yorkey’s six-actor musical about a wife and mother’s long, deepening struggle with bipolar disorder has had several fine major productions in South Florida – by Actors’ Playhouse in 2012, Slow Burn Theatre in 2013, Measure for Measure/Infinite Abyss in 2018.  But whether you have or haven’t experienced the show before, Zoetic’s “Next to Normal” becomes must-see theater for many reasons.

Artistic director Stuart Meltzer, whose program notes refer to his late mother’s battle with bipolar disorder, brings a depth of understanding to staging the piece. Because of his personal history, he deliberately hadn’t seen a production nor listened to the original cast recording before starting to work on it for Zoetic.

Meltzer’s version is immersively intimate. Theatergoers seated in first row must feel enveloped in the family’s conflicts and in those rarer moments when memories or feelings conveyed in song become the catalysts for joy, wistfulness, and hope.  The up-close staging choice gives the audience the feeling of living each moment in tandem with the actors.

Accompanied expressively by music director Caryl Fantel and five other musicians, the six performers are stunning in every configuration – solos, duets, small groups, the entire cast.  Indeed, when they’re all singing together, it’s mind-boggling that just a half-dozen actors are creating such a glorious sound.

Five-time Carbonell winner Jeni Hacker plays Diana Goodman, the woman whose bipolar disorder surfaced after a sudden, terrible loss nearly 18 years earlier.  Though a twist partway through the first act reveals Diana’s major delusion, audiences deserve to experience that surprise firsthand, so we won’t spoil it here.

As Diana, Hacker’s face is often etched with anguish or confusion, though her mood changes are quicksilver and always appropriate to the moment. She is, unequivocally, among the most expressive singer-actors in the region, a truth highlighted as she sings “I Miss the Mountains,” “I Dreamed a Dance,” “Didn’t I See this Movie?” and more. Her Diana is another triumph in a career that has included such challenging roles as Fosca in “Passion,”  Mrs. Lovett in  “Sweeney Todd” and Helen in “Fun Home.”

Ben Sandomir plays Diana’s patient, loyal and supportive husband Dan, a man as long-suffering as his wife. Alternating between frustration (“He’s Not Here”) and hope (“A Light in the Dark”), Sandomir finds the tamped-down exasperation and longing in his character.

Two teens full of angst, insecurity and/or rage also inhabit the Goodmans’ home.

Gabe (Nate Promkul), just turning 18, chafes at his mother’s over-protective way of parenting and repays her most often with surliness.  Promkul, who was so memorable as Anthony Hope in Zoetic’s “Sweeney Todd,” has a powerful voice perfectly suited to this show’s score.  In “Next to Normal,” his defiant “I’m Alive” and disturbingly persuasive “There’s a World” illustrate the great range of his talent.

Gabe’s 16-year-old sister Natalie (Gabi Gonzalez) is an academic perfectionist and  pianist. Her punishing work ethic is designed to get her forever-distracted mother to notice her.  She rages as she sings of the sibling status quo in “Superboy and the Invisible Girl,” then segues into a kind of partying-and-pills rebellion after she acquires a supportive boyfriend named Henry (Joseph Morell).  Both actors have beautiful voices, and their scenes together have the friction of conflict as well as the sweetness of budding romance.

Robert Koutras plays a pair of therapists, adding his strong voice to the mix.  Dr. Fine (about whom Diana sings the lilting “My Psychopharmacologist and I”) juggles different medications and doses until finally Diana tells him, “I don’t feel like myself. I mean, I don’t feel anything.” He replies, chillingly, “Hm. Patient stable.”

After an impulsive decision to flush her meds down the toilet, Diana regresses, then goes to see a new therapist Dr. Madden (Koutras).  He has been described as a “rock star” shrink, and the delusional Diana has flashes of seeing him that way, as he awkwardly rips open his staid white coat to reveal leather and chains. It’s funny for a minute. But soon, frustrated by Diana’s lack of progress, Dr. Madden recommends electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) – and erases a great chunk of her memory.

Operating on the same high creative wavelength as Meltzer and the cast, the “Next to Normal” design team has outdone itself, artfully enhancing the show’s intimacy.

As you take your seat, you see a high-backed gray armchair resting on a black floor with jagged white lines, like the cracks from an earthquake. Black velvet drapes conceal part of the playing area, but they’re quickly pulled open to reveal the Goodman family’s house – which is upside down. David Goldstein’s first set design for Zoetic is genius, a visual metaphor for the state of a family in torment.

Preston Bircher’s sensitive lighting design reflects the characters’ roller-coaster emotions, and when he bathes the house in a colorfully dappled, almost psychedelic design, it reflects Diana’s delusional mental state.

Matt Corey’s sound design is perfection in this production.  The words, the music, the effects are crystal clear, and you may find yourself marveling at the intricacies of Yorkey’s book and lyrics.

Costume designer Marina Pareja dresses the petite Hacker mostly in blouses or long sweaters and tank tops with jeans, the suburban mom’s uniform. Sandomir’s Dan is an architect whose look is comfortable but professional.  The kids’ high school attire is convincingly age-appropriate.  Koutras’s sleek docs look like men full of confidence – or themselves.

In the world of musical theater, there are all kinds of shows. Some, as creative and visually dazzling as they may be, offer nothing more profound than entertainment and escape, exactly what their audiences want.  “Next to Normal” takes you on a far deeper journey, one that is observant, sometimes painfully truthful, ultimately moving in a way that leaves you thinking and feeling long after you’ve gone home.

And in the case of Zoetic’s production, you can add “thrilling” as a description.  This is South Florida theater at its best.

WHAT: “Next to Normal” by Brian Yorkey and Tom Kitt

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

WHEN:  7:30 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (no evening show Wednesday, April 5, additional matinee Saturday, April 8), through Sunday, April 9

COST:  $60 and $65

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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Review: True Mirage’s original ‘Songs from the Brink’ charts time in life transition

From left, Lauren C. Lopez, Eliasess Leon, Raul Andres Ramirez and Darcy Hernandez-Gil in True Mirage Theater’s “Songs from the Brink” at Main Street Playhouse, Miami Lakes, through Sunday, March 19. (Photo courtesy of Sara Jarrell-Quevedo)

The angst, hopes and life experiences of Millennials are at the heart of “Songs from the Brink,” a song cycle by Robyn Eli Brenner and Mackenzie Anderson.

Now getting its world premiere by Miami’s True Mirage Theater, the hour-long piece is being performed on weekends through Sunday, March 19 at Main Street Playhouse in Miami Lakes.

The not-for-profit company, True Mirage, was started in 2017 by New World School of the Arts grads Daniel Gil and Darcy Hernandez-Gil to present “relevant and invigorating” works reflective of issues in South Florida. Its other mission is to empower emerging South Florida artists by workshopping and producing original works.

What that all translates to in the case of “Songs from the Brink” is an exploration of the challenges faced by people in their 20s as they move from their student years into full-fledged adulthood.  Relationships (flawed, doomed, longed-for), depression, uncertainty about how to build a fulfilling life, finding the courage to take chances:  They’re all on the topically grouped menu of the 11-song show.

Instead of a musical theater book, each of the four-song segments is set up with the recitation of a thematically related poem.

Emily Dickinson’s lyric poem “Hope is the thing with feathers” sets the tone for the title song.  A.E. Houseman’s  “He Would Not Stay for Me” speaks to the breakup/bad romance section “The Other Person.” “Tears, Idle Tears” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson comes before “The Inner,” songs about mental and emotional struggles.  Ella Wheeler Wilcox’s poem “Courage” kicks off the final section titled “The Leap,” about summoning the courage to take chances.

Brenner and Anderson, dually credited with music and lyrics, are talented at both.  Brenner wrote his material while working as an actor in South Florida, and Anderson is a performer and musical theater writer based here.  Their lyrics are insightful, their music pop-theatrical in a way that would fit into many a regional theater.

Directed by Francesca Toledo on a black-box stage with little more than four chairs, microphones, a keyboard for musical director Nicole Odreman and an easel to display the section titles by graffiti artist Dex One, how the show comes across is clearly dependent on the vocal and dramatic talents of its singers:  Lauren C. Lopez as Woman 1, Eliasess Leon as Man 1, Hernandez-Gil as Woman 2 and Raul Andres Ramirez as Man 2.

Initially, when they sing solos or solo passages in duets, the performers sound almost reticent, as though they’re nervous about telling a musical story all by themselves.  But when they sing together, they make magic. The vocal arrangements are lush and just right for the style of Brenner and Anderson’s music. And that support from their fellow actors seems to fuel confidence, strengthening those moments when a singer is alone in the spotlight.

“What the Hell Is Wrong With You” is an ironic number sung by Lopez and Ramirez, who rhapsodize about having found the one and then negate their good fortune by musing that something has to be wrong with someone so seemingly perfect.

Hernandez-Gil sings a haunting song of intimate betrayal in “Bad Sex,” while Lopez is bereft over her ex in “Somewhere in the Dent.”  In a group therapy setting, the folky Ramirez wryly muses about “What It Means to Be a Man.”  Leon conveys a still newfound confidence in “At Least.”

Together, in “This Isn’t It,” the cast makes a collective declaration: It’s time to get unstuck, take chances, reach for a future.  That’s what True Mirage is doing in “Songs from the Brink,” which is worth a look and a listen.

WHAT: True Mirage Theater world premiere of “Songs from the Brink” by Robyn Eli Brenner and Mackenzie Anderson

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

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

COST:  $35, $30 for students and seniors

INFORMATION: 786-484-4711 or truemiragetheater.com

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Review: Miami New Drama’s ‘Defacing Michael Jackson’ well acted but misses its chance to soar

Xavier Edward King and Joshua Hernandez in a scene from Miami New Drama’s world premiere of Aurin Squire’s “Defacing Michael Jackson” at the Colony Theatre, Miami Beach, through April 2. (Photo courtesy of Stian Roenning)

Aurin Squire’s “Defacing Michael Jackson” is a memory play, at least in part.

Getting its world premiere by Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road, the piece is about five teens trying to navigate life, love and a turbulent world in Opa-locka circa 1984. It was sparked by the playwright’s memories of himself and his friends doing the same, albeit some years later.

Squire, who is also a successful television writer (“Evil,” “The Good Fight” and “This Is Us”), blended fiction with lingering memories, then juxtaposed his coming-of-age story against another element: the way we escape by idolizing music superstars.

In this case, the beloved icon is the late King of Pop.

Squire’s characters are members of a Michael Jackson fan club, and they’re soon tasked with creating a mural to pay permanent tribute to “MJ” in their Miami-area city, a place dotted with famous Moorish-style buildings.  Sounds exciting and easy enough, but the kids are soon busy squabbling over, well, everything.

Obadiah or Obie (Xavier Edward King) isn’t the fan club president, but he is the leader of his pack of friends, a handsome kid whose family has a little more dough — “ghetto fabulous, that’s us,” he says.

Frenchy (Sydney Presendieu) is the control freak who heads the Opa-locka chapter of the club. She’s got a detailed dreamy future mapped out, one that includes marriage to her idol and then, maybe eventually, Obie.

Twins Yellow (he stutters) and Red (he’s violent and a thief) are regularly beaten by their father (Dylan Rogers plays both, as well as a slimy city commissioner).

The status quo gets upended when a kid named Wesley (Joshua Hernandez) shows up.  Most obvious is that he’s white (duh), while the others are Black, hence the name his new friends bestow: Jack, as in Cracker Jack. He hates it, but Obie’s attitude is “too bad, so sad” since they all go by nicknames.

Soon, something else becomes obvious: Jack has begun exploring his sexual orientation under disturbing circumstances.  And he goes for Obie, big time.

Coming out, colorism, post-riot looting, sexual violence, racism, parental cruelty – those are just some of the issues in “Defacing Michael Jackson.”  The kids are often funny, sure, but their words also shock and insult and pierce like daggers.  Plenty are aimed at Frenchy, as when Red says, “Dark, midnight-looking-gorilla Black bitch…” And later, Obie chimes in, “You think anyone will ever love your ugly midnight ass?”

Director Shaun Patrick Tubbs gets strong, compelling performances from the young adult actors playing high school kids (more on that in a moment).  But what he and Squire don’t quite achieve is finding a seamless, compelling way to incorporate Michael Jackson as an unseen presence.

Yes, thanks to composer and sound designer Quentin Chiappetta you hear that intoxicating bass line from the beginning of “Thriller.” Different kids do the briefest snippets of MJ songs.  Everybody dons one sequined glove, and the actors perform a short but killer dance sequence at the curtain call (King gets to moonwalk).  What choreographer Randolph Ward has dreamed up is the kind of longed-for moment that makes the often-silent crowd go wild.

Designer Frank J Oliva, a Cuban-American Miami native, has created sets for theaters throughout the country as well as locally for Miami New Drama, Area Stage and GableStage. But this one is just baffling, as it ignores Opa-locka’s distinctive look with an environment that provides zero sense of place.

The “Defacing Michael Jackson” set looks like a temple designed in the Brutalist or industrial architectural style, a place appropriate for idol worship.  Different levels and ways of accessing the space give the cast a variety of playing areas, which are further defined by Nicole E. Lang’s vividly colorful lighting.

Eventually, the large visage of Michael Jackson appears, but it looks more like the Wizard of Oz than the King of Pop. In Squire’s script, the teens are supposed to be creating a mural, then they switch to something that sounds more like a mosaic. What’s onstage at the Colony is a bas-relief version of Jackson’s face, but as Squire has Frenchy observe, the end result was “sloppy,” flawed and didn’t last long.

Back to the actors who, thanks to director Tubbs and their own arsenal of skills, deliver performances full of boldness, subtlety, fearlessness and abundant energy.

As Obadiah or Obie, Chicago-based King radiates the sort of magnetism that understandably attracts Frenchy and Jack. He is vulnerable and unsure as the new kid presses for a different kind of sexual exploration (the sensitive intimacy choreography is by Nicole Perry), he’s anxious to find a way to make peace between Frenchy and Jack, and when his sexual orientation is called into question, he goes on the attack in the ugliest way.

Also serving as the play’s narrator, King conveys the hindsight that comes with age and the too-early 2009 death of the Opa-locka kids’ idol.  Enhancing that aspect of Obie’s role might deepen the storytelling and further blend its Jackson/coming-of-age threads.

Presendieu, in her second professional production since graduating from Miami’s New World School of the Arts (the first was “Mlima’s Tale” for Zoetic Stage), is initially more soft-spoken than the men. But as Frenchy begins to express her longing for love (she’ll randomly grab Obie and ask for a hug or kiss) and as Jack is seemingly dethroning her from her power position in all things Michael Jackson, she turns far fiercer.

Costume designer Grier Coleman has created a signature childlike look for Presendieu’s Frenchy: bib overalls worn over a variety of cute mid-‘80s tops.  But once a lascivious Red explicitly threatens to attack and rape her, she fights back ferociously in an adrenaline rush survival mode (Lee Soroko’s excellent fight choreography dials up the intensity whenever disputes turn physical).

Dylan Rogers, another Chicago actor, more than meets the challenge of playing three distinct characters.  His Red is a thug in the making, while Red’s twin Yellow (Coleman dresses the twins in color-coded looks) is a more decent soul with a penchant for showing up unannounced and startling the bejesus out of his friends.  Rogers’s brief turn as the adult commissioner conveys another sort of duality: the public charm and true personality of a two-faced politician.

Hernandez, a Miami actor now based in New York, gives a wonderfully detailed performance as Jack.  Having played upper-class characters in two race-themed plays at GableStage (“Admissions” and “The White Card”), Hernandez must navigate far shakier ground as Jack. He’s damaged, lonely, eager to make friends and find a deeper connection in this wholly new environment.  He evolves from nervous to resolute in his desires to a kid who eventually shows his own true colors.

“Defacing Michael Jackson” runs an hour and 45 minutes with no intermission.  That’s not especially long, but the play occasionally drags, despite the best and most energetic efforts of Tubbs and the cast.  Much of Squire’s insightful writing does fly by, so perhaps some editing and an enhanced thematic blend would take care of the slow spots.  As is, the play could be staged anywhere. But more of Opa-locka and Michael Jackson would make it a stronger, more distinctive piece of theater.

WHAT:  “Defacing Michael Jackson” by Aurin Squire

WHERE:  Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach

WHEN:  8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through April 2

COST: $46.50-$76.50 (includes service fee)

INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

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Play ‘Tebas Land’ at Miami-Dade County Auditorium is multi-layered, says director

Daniel Romero and Ariel Texidó in Sergio Blanco’s play “Tebas Land,” which Arca Images presents in Spanish with simultaneous English translations from Thursday, March 16 to Sunday, March 19 at the Black Box Theater in Miami Dade County Auditorium. (Photo courtesy of Alexa Kube/Arca Images).

 A playwright visits a prison and requests permission to speak with a prisoner found guilty of killing his father. The writer and the parricide eventually meet on the prison’s basketball court when the authorities allow the request. The prisoner believes the author doesn’t care about him at all because all he wants to do is exploit him. A relationship then develops.

The play “Tebas Land,” by the Uruguayan writer living in Paris, Sergio Blanco, will debut on stage for the first time in Miami from Thursday, March 16 to Sunday, March 19 in the Black Box Theater at the Miami Dade County Auditorium (MDCA). There have been more than 30 productions of the play from Montevideo, Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, and Barcelona to London, Paris, and Tokyo.

Ariel Texidó plays the writer, and Daniel Romero is the parricide in the play produced by Arca Images. The show will be in Spanish with simultaneous audio translation into English.

The staging was entrusted to Cuban-Spanish theater artist Carlos Celdrán, who, in May of last year, directed Arca’s production of “Abismo,” by Abel González Melo on the same stage. The author of “Tebas Land,” Blanco is currently one of the most recognized Latin American playwrights worldwide for works like “Narciso’s Wrath,” “Traffic,” “When You Walk Over My Grave” and “Darwin’s Leap.”

Celdrán says he’s always wanted to direct a play by Blanco.

“I’ve been a friend of the author for many years,” says Celdrán. “We have had a very close relationship since I read his first works. There was always the idea that I would direct something by him, but due to several circumstances, I postponed it, and the opportunity was not given until now.”

Celdrán says that once the opportunity presented itself, the work he would direct was going to be “Tebas Land.” He considers it Blanco’s most important play and a turning point in his dramaturgy.

“I never saw ‘Tebas Land’ performed. I read it, and I fell in love with it from the very first moment,” says the director. “I like its compositional intelligence, the way he structures all the material playing with autofiction, which allows him to present himself within the story, and how that generates a reflection on the theater itself.”

The concept of autofiction is not new. It came from literature and was coined in 1977 by the French novelist and literary critic Julien Serge Doubrovsky when he was trying to define his novel “Fils” (Sons). Although he refers to the ambiguity of the sources of the story — to what extent the fictional episodes are fed by autobiographical experiences — the resource surely goes back to the first expressions of literature, theater, and visual arts.

Blanco dared to trace it in his book “Autofiction, Engineering of the Self” (Punto de Vista Editores, Madrid, 2018), where he says that it is a “war device against oneself.”

According to Doubrovsky, autofiction is “a fiction of strictly real events and facts.” There is a famous precedent in the phrase attributed to Flaubert, “Madame Bovary c’est moi” (“Madame Bovary is me”), but it is well known that there are serious arguments questioning if it was, in fact, a phrase by Flaubert.

“Blanco puts that as an antecedent in his book, and he also quotes Rimbaud when he writes ‘I am the other one,’ which would be the key to everything,” says Celdrán.

The director explains that “in ‘Tebas Land,’ Blanco is talking about himself, about the theater, and he shows all these tools and creates structure where, in addition to telling a story, he presents several levels of reality. There is the theater, Blanco’s vision that is presented on stage; there is the story of the parricide. It is a multifaceted work, it is told from many angles, and I love that,” he says.

The fascination that “Tebas Land” has sparked in so many nations, according to Celdrán, is primarily due to the playwright’s structural game.

“The important thing is not only the story of a theater director interrogating a parricide,” he comments. “That’s the basic issue, but the key is also how all that is depicted, crossed through autofiction.”

“Autofiction starts from fiction. It is fiction where I invent a self to strengthen the story,” explains Celdrán. In other words, autofiction gives complete freedom to mix real and imagined events.

“That is the key to Sergio Blanco’s poetics,” says Celdrán. “Blanco presents you with a story, and you know that half of it is a lie. It is based on a few true events that he strings together. With that, he creates great confusion, a great disturbance around something, and you are left wondering if it is true and where the border between truth and fiction lies.”

Lately, Blanco has dedicated himself to offering theatrical conferences that are, in fact, shows in which he talks about violence, love, or death. As per Celdrán, these are conferences-performances-theater, “something very rare,” he says.

“It is no longer a conference, but it isn’t a monologue either: it is a hybrid thing, where he appears on stage surrounded by a great production and tremendous audiovisual work to talk, for instance, about death through history,” says the director. “Then he starts showing you works of art, explains them, and mixes those explanations with intimate personal experiences, sometimes erotic ones. He talks to you about the relationship of his body with death, and you wonder: Is it real, or is he making it all up?”

In the end, it is a theatrical game, and that is precisely why “Tebas Land” brings such a rich experience to the spectator. Actually, “Tebas Land” was where this all began. “Little by little, you discover that what is happening on stage is that he is rehearsing and writing what we are seeing,” says Celdrán.

In the play, the writer rehearses with an actor who is the same one who later plays the parricide in the prison interrogations. Based on what the young man tells him, the audience will see that he is writing fiction and that the work is being created in front of his eyes, explains the director.

“You are in front of the murderer, and, at the same time, you slowly realize that this is also the actor,” he says. “The writer interrogates the parricide; he immediately comments with the actor what he saw and begins to add details to the scene that can make it more interesting. He re-introduces you to another scene, and then you realize it elaborates the actual encounter you’ll never see.”

Here comes  Sophocles’s “Oedipus Rex,” Dostoevsky’s epileptic character in “The Karamazov Brothers,” Mozart’s troubled relationship with his father, and the connections to Freud.

“For me, what is interesting about this work is that it studies how to build a living relationship and how through dialogue and interest in others, an intense relationship between opposite people can be established, in this case, an intellectual and a marginal,” says Celdrán. “How, through interest and empathy, it is possible for the viewer to experience the journey of friendship that arises between people from such dissimilar worlds; the need to understand the other, to look for him and to get closer to him.”

There’s a game reminiscent of Truman Capote when he investigated the murders for “In Cold Blood,” Celdrán reveals. However, he claims “Tebas Land” is the anti “In Cold Blood,” the anti-Truman Capote.

“Capote is not mentioned at any time, but it is floating in the work,” reveals Celdrán. “The boy is filled with doubts, and what he thinks of the writer is: ‘You come here so that I can tell you what I haven’t told anyone; you come to plunder my story to make your book because it was a crime widely reported by the press.’ Little by little, he realizes that the man is genuinely interested in him and that he can become his friend. It is a journey towards understanding and trust and, amid all that, about the role that art plays in life.”

WHAT: Miami premiere of the play “Tebas Land,” by Sergio Blanco. In Spanish with simultaneous English translation.

WHEN: 8:30 p.m. Thursday, March 16, Friday, March 17, and Saturday, March 18. 5 p.m. Sunday, March 19.

WHERE: Black Box Theater at Miami Dade County Auditorium, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami.

COST: $30; $25 for seniors and students.

INFORMATION: 305-547-5414 or arcaimages.org

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Icon impacts Opa-locka teens in world premiere of Miami New Drama’s ‘Defacing Michael Jackson’

Xavier Edward King, Joshua Hernandez, Dylan Rogers and Sydney Presendieu star in Aurin Squire’s “Defacing Michael Jackson” getting its world premiere by Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre. (Photo courtesy of Furiosa Productions)

When Aurin Squire was growing up in a neighborhood near Opa-locka in the 1980s and ‘90s, the future playwright-screenwriter and his friends revered consummate entertainer Michael Jackson as the idol he was, an ever-evolving King of Pop.

“We had a VCR, and people would come over to watch the ‘Thriller’ video with my sister and me,” the peripatetic Squire, a writer and co-executive producer on the Paramount+ series “Evil” and “The Good Fight,” recalled in a recent Zoom interview from Los Angeles.

Could Squire have imagined how Jackson would eventually figure into his now-thriving career? Probably not.

A journey that began with a simple writing exercise at Manhattan’s New Dramatists in 2004 will culminate in Miami New Drama’s world premiere of Squire’s “Defacing Michael Jackson.”  The play, a coming-of-age tale about five Opa-locka teens, opens in previews Thursday, March 9 and Friday, March 10, then opens to the public Saturday, March 11 and runs at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road through Sunday, April 2.

The play came about this way:  Squire was a New Dramatists intern in 2004 when playwright Rogelio Martinez (whose “Elián” had its world premiere at Miami New Drama earlier this season) had the interns do a quick writing exercise. Each came up with a list of three childhood rituals, then wrote a short script about the one the group chose.

Watching “Thriller” is the one that got selected. “You never know how interesting your life is until you open it up to other people and see what they respond to,” Squire says. Later, when he was stuck in his dorm room at The New School one day, he took out that skeletal version and expanded it to a one-act play. That version was produced at a New York festival and picked by by publishing company Samuel French.

Jackson’s death at the age of 50 on June 25, 2009, set off a series of events that took Squire and the play in a new direction.

“I was in a restaurant that day when a bike messenger came in and announced, ‘Michael Jackson just died. My friend works as an EMT in Los Angeles.’ I called my sister, who’s a doctor, and my mom to ask if they’d heard anything, but they both said no,” Squire says.  “Later, after I got out of a meeting, I walked from 23^rd Street to Union Square, and I saw people looking at their phones and being hit with the news in real time. It brought people back. They had very emotional reactions.”

A director asked Squire to expand his Jackson one-act to a full-length play, which he did over the course of a month while sitting at his parents’ kitchen table, but that director passed on doing a production.

Squire submitted the script when he applied to the playwriting program at The Juilliard School. He gained admission, and the script helped him get theater and television agents, along with the first of many television writing jobs.

In 2018, the small Chicago-based Flying Elephant Productions performed a showcase version of “Defacing Michael Jackson,” but Squire – who was on a monthlong silent meditation retreat – wasn’t involved.  This time, at Miami New Drama, he is.

“Defacing Michael Jackson” is not a play about the late icon, who was both adored and reviled.  The characters are members of a Michael Jackson fan club in 1984, and their quest to cooperatively make a mural that would pay lasting tribute to their hero becomes a big point of contention – but hardly the only one.

Miami New Drama artistic director and cofounder Michel Hausmann read “Defacing Michael Jackson” before launching his company in 2016. Back then, he imagined the play being done in an intimate, black-box space rather than the 415-seat Art Deco Colony Theatre. But Hausmann began championing and commissioning Squire.

Thus far, the company has produced “Confessions of a Cocaine Cowboy” (by Billy Corben and Squire) in 2019, “Blackfish” (part of the Drama League Award-winning “7 Deadly Sins” project) in 2020, and the world premiere Louis Armstrong musical “A Wonderful World” in 2021 (Squire wrote the book for that show, which will have tryout runs in New Orleans and Chicago in October).

Miami New Drama has commissioned another Miami-connected script from Squire, but when the director Squire requested had a conflict, “Defacing Michael Jackson” slid into this season’s lineup.

Squire’s dialogue is intricately crafted, emotionally raw, funny, vulgar, and sometimes startling.  He is not a writer who pulls his punches.

(Video interview with Austin Squire is courtesy of Florida International University’s Inspicio Arts e-magazine.)

Of the colorism that figures so prominently in Jackson’s life story, he says, “Almost all Black superstars strangely become whiter, their noses smaller, their features more Eurocentric, their hair longer and straighter. It is an unspoken, uncomfortable issue involving the nuances of colorism versus saying ‘I don’t want to be Black anymore.’ When I was growing up, it was implied in the media that Black people were dumb, worthless and ugly. That’s why Black lives matter. Black is beautiful.”

The world premiere of Squire’s play is being staged by New York-based director and actor Shaun Patrick Tubbs, whose next project will be directing the sweeping Tony Award-winning musical “Ragtime” for the Union Avenue Opera of St. Louis.

“I had ‘Thriller’ on vinyl, and the first concert I ever attended was a Michael Jackson concert in Cleveland when I was 10 or 11,” Tubbs says.  “He provided the soundtrack to my adolescence.”

As a child, Tubbs wondered about Jackson’s ever-changing appearance: the porcelain skin, surgically reshaped nose, the long wigs he wore after the singer’s hair caught fire when he was shooting a Pepsi commercial in January 1984.

“I wondered why he didn’t want to be black anymore,” Tubbs says. “The remarkable thing was that he never changed his eyes. The eyes were who he was. He was looking at the world through those same eyes.”

Squire, Tubbs says, “did an incredible job. His writing is so authentic. These are the real voices of youth doing what everyone did then. It’s set in Opa-locka, but it could take place anywhere.”

The friends are Obadiah (Xavier Edward King); Frenchy (Sydney Presendieu), president of the fan club and a girl hell-bent on becoming Mrs. Michael Jackson; and twins with very different personalities, Yellow and Red (Dylan Rogers plays both).  When a white family moves into the Black neighborhood, new kid Wes (Joshua Hernandez) starts hanging out, upsetting the established order and fixing his gaze on Obadiah.  The others dub Wes “Jack,” as in Cracker Jack.

The actors, all in their 20s, are from South Florida and Chicago.

King and Rogers were part of the acclaimed TimeLine Theatre Company production of Tyla Abercrumbie’s “Relentless,” which was presented at Chicago’s famed Goodman Theatre a year ago. Hernandez, a Miamian now based in New York, grew up in suburban Westchester and previously appeared in two race-themed GableStage productions, Joshua Harmon’s “Admissions” and Claudia Rankine’s “The White Card.”  New World School of the Arts grad Sydney Presendieu made her professional debut earlier this season in Zoetic Stage’s production of Lynn Nottage’s “Mlima’s Tale.”

“I wanted individuals who made me think of people I grew up with. I searched everywhere…Some (roles) came fast, the first voice I heard, and some took 30 to 40 auditions,” Tubbs says.  “They’re very young. I love the fact that they didn’t grow up with what I did (regarding) Michael . . . Michael Jackson isn’t in the show.  Each character carries him from moment to moment.  Where you are in your own life will change your perspective.”

Though their lives didn’t precisely intersect with Jackson’s rise and tragic fall, the actors have strong feelings about the unseen superstar at the heart of “Defacing Michael Jackson.”

“Michael Jackson is my favorite musician and entertainer of all time.  There’s nobody like him – no one before him, no one since,” says King, who passed on a few plays before saying yes to this one.  “I wanted to dive into more about who he was and how he affected people.”

Obadiah serves as narrator and anchor, guiding the audience from the present back to the characters’ teen realm in Opa-locka. As Squire puts it in the character’s opening monologue, most of the play is set in “the year of the eternal future: 1984.”

King says he appreciates Tubbs’s energy, humor and the acting skills that feed into his direction. He also appreciates Squire’s willingness to collaborate with the director and actors.

“He’s so busy.  We did a run-through, and he just sits there and listens. I looked at him listening and wondered what’s going on in that wonderful brain of his. He’s able to let go of certain ideas,” the actor says.

Choreographer Randolph Ward, fight choreographer Lee Soroko and intimacy choreographer Nicole Perry are working with the cast, with Perry particularly focused on an evolving relationship between Obadiah and Wes/Jack.

“I have experience with intimacy coordinators in film and TV, but this is my first time working with one in the theater. She’s there to make it comfortable. Xavier and I have open conversations about everything,” Hernandez says.

“My character is exploring his sexuality. At first, it’s comical, then more serious.  I’ve tried to figure out his back story . . .He’s probably the child of sexual abuse. He’s lonely, doesn’t have many friends…The play is very truthful.”

Now in her mid-20s, Presendieu gets the depth and breadth of Jackson fandom.

“When I was growing up, I loved Michael Jackson – his talent, his shine, his perfection.  I have four brothers, and when we performed we called ourselves the Presendieu Five.  I would definitely have been a huge fangirl. The music is timeless, both Michael Jackson and the Jackson Five. So many people remember where they were when he passed away,” she says.

The actor calls Tubbs “a radiant ball of energy” and Squire “so funny – the jokes in his writing are very intentional. There’s always a meaning.”

And she’s thrilled to be playing Frenchy.

“She’s an incredibly bold, passionate character.  She’s so determined to get what she wants. She imagines a fairy-tale future: She’ll marry Michael Jackson, but Obadiah is also in her future,” Presendieu says. “She demands the space she’s in. She’s not afraid to take up that space, even though a lot of people oppose her.”

Rogers plays not only the troubled full-of-himself Red and the reserved stuttering Yellow, but he’s also an Opa-locka commissioner who’s morally two-faced.  When he first heard the play’s title, he thought it would be an exploration of Jackson’s life. Not so.

“This is a unique coming-of-age play. They’re all outcasts, but they share a love of Michael Jackson. Despite the things that make them ostracized, he gives them the strength to get through the day,” Rogers says.

“It’s about how you lose a lot of yourself in hero worship. When you realize who your hero is, you have to reinvent yourself . . .Over time, the image of Michael Jackson gets changed, warped. What happens to the mural is a representation of their evolution”

The ultra-busy Squire will be traveling to Hilton Head Island, S.C., after “Defacing Michael Jackson” opens for another world premiere running March 16-26. Lean Ensemble Theater will debut his play “Mitchelville,” about a young man whose efforts to save his Gullah family home lead him to a deep exploration of family history, the Civil War and the first American town of black freedmen.

Of the kids in “Defacing Michael Jackson,” Squire says that yes, there’s some of himself and people he knew in the play.

“These are composite characters.  You begin from an honest place and put drops of real moments here and there.  You find the absurd truth, then extrapolate with the craft of fiction. It’s a lot of untangling of the ball of energy which is our creativity,” he says.

Says director Tubbs: “I know the audience will see themselves in it, regardless of their age.  It’s funny, and we need to laugh.  Laughter opens us up to every other feeling.  That’s why tears come so quickly.”

WHAT:  “Defacing Michael Jackson” by Aurin Squire

WHERE:  Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach

WHEN:  March 9-10, opens March 11 (opening sold out); performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through April 2

COST: $46.50-$76.50 (includes service fee)

INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

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3 Documentaries at Miami Film Festival Delve Into Cuba’s Voices Heard Through Music

Cuban exile and saxophonist Paquito D’Rivera in the film “Bebo,” a documentary about Cuban musician Bebo Valdés, which will be shown at the 2023 edition of the Miami Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of 40th MDC’s Miami Film Festival) 

In the Cuba of the Revolution, culture has been an often brutally disputed battlefield. Creators make for unruly subjects and present autocrats and dictators with profound challenges and elusive targets. Guns and torture particularly don’t do well against music.

Three films at the 40^th Annual Miami Film Festival, opening Friday, March 3 and continuing through Sunday, March 12 at various venues throughout the city, offer a view of the costs of those battles for some artists — irreparable might-have-beens, never-will-be’s, and exile — and, implicitly, for the country — but also hope.

“AfroCuba ’78” (5:45 p.m., Saturday, March 4, at Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE 3^rd Ave., Miami) tells the story of a once-promising jazz group, a never-released album, the breaking up of the original band, and the resulting scattering of some of its members.

“Bebo” (7 p.m., Tuesday, March 7, at Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE 3^rd Ave., Miami; also streaming beginning noon, Monday, March 6) offers a view of the life in exile in Sweden of the pianist, arranger, and bandleader Bebo Valdés, a towering figure of the Golden Age of Cuban music. In disagreement with the path of the Revolution, he left the country in 1960. He died in Sweden in 2013 without ever returning to Cuba.

“Patria y Vida: The Power of Music” (5 p.m., Sunday, March 5, 6:45 p.m. and 9:45 p.m., Tuesday, March 7, at Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE 3rd Ave., Miami) documents the creation, impact, and consequences for those behind a song that exploded in Cuba through social media and became an anthem in the historic protests inside and outside the island on July of 2021.

For the Cuban American director and producer of “AfroCuba ’78,” making his film wasn’t just about documenting the music of a band.

“This film is also about how political manipulation and the games the system in Cuba creates destroyed a project that had the potential to be wonderful, extraordinary,” says Emilio Oscar Alcalde.

Government suspicions about some members wanting to defect ended the chances to travel, killed the release, and created tensions within the band. The original AfroCuba, a group of young virtuosos who blended Afro-Cuban musical traditions and post-bop, came apart. Some members regrouped under the same name but became the band accompanying singer and songwriter Silvio Rodriguez. Others indeed chose exile. “It finished them,” says Alcalde.

Bebo Valdés, a hub in the music life of the Havana of the 1940s and 50s, left for Mexico in 1960 under the pretext of fulfilling a non-existent contract. While on a tour of Europe, he fell in love with a Swedish woman, married, and settled in Stockholm. He made do for years playing modest piano bars and hotel lounges. His story seemed destined to fade to oblivion — until he was rediscovered with the release of “Bebo Rides Again,” an album produced by fellow Cuban exile Paquito D’Rivera in 1994. He debuted in the United States in 1996. He was 78. By the time he retired, Valdés had won four Grammys and five Latin Grammys.

“Bebo” is a glimpse of his story in Sweden. It includes footage from an interview he granted Swedish journalist Stina Dabrowski in 2005, interviews with Valdés’s Swedish sons, Raymond and Rickard, and footage from a tribute concert organized by Bebo’s grandson, Emilio Valdés, in Union City, New Jersey, in 2019.

Ultimately, however, “Bebo” is as much a celebration of Bebo Valdés as a meditation on resistence and life in exile.

“I’m concerned with documenting the Cuban diaspora. It’s a mission for me,” says Cuban American filmmaker Ricardo Bacallao, director of “Bebo,” from his home in Berlin, Germany.

“Nobody asked me to do it, but I see all of us Cubans living outside of Cuba, around the world, doing things, and it’s not being documented.”

He notes that the European press still covers the Cuban Revolution with sympathy.

“Their view seems fixated 60 years ago . . . and it’s so far from reality now, and that’s a problem. You might be a tremendous musician, but if you are a Cuban living in exile, you won’t get the kind of support that other exiles might get. There is suspicion.”

That might explain, in part, why a Cuban master musician lived for decades in Sweden, surviving at times doing menial non-music jobs, unrecognized. “How Bebo lived for so long in Sweden and never got the attention he deserved is a question that is still open,” says Bacallao. “I’d like somebody to answer it.”

There is a powerful moment in Valdés’s interview when he reflects that “there are two words that must be erased: Hatred and rancor. And the other one, worse yet, vengeance. That is the vilest word there is.” For the filmmaker, the message is clear.

“This documentary is about us, Cubans living outside the island, and how hard it is to live in exile and the resistance,” he says. “I have interviews with people who knew Bebo from the 1950s, the 60s, and the 70s, and they told me about different Bebos. He was angry. This is a human being, not a superhero. But this (the Bebo Valdés in the interview) is the wise Bebo. You need a certain level of thinking and experience to get to the point of saying: forget about resentment, frustration, and vengeance. We need to have this healing process for the good of the Cuban family.”

But before getting to that moment, some battles remain.

In “Patria y Vida: The Power of Music,” Beatriz Luengo, a Spanish actress making her debut as director and scriptwriter, offers a privileged view of the creation of the song “Patria y Vida” (“Fatherland and Life”), how the collective that produced it came together, and the impact of the music on both its creators and the people inside and outside Cuba.

The very title of the song turns an old Revolution slogan, “Fatherland or Death,” on its head, and the lyrics include lines such as “No more lies, my people ask for liberty/ No more doctrines, let’s no longer shout Fatherland or Death, but Fatherland and Life,” or “May no more blood flow for wanting to think differently. Who told you that Cuba is yours? My Cuba belongs to all my people.”

The song also rails against the government’s attempts at censorship, such as Decree 349, which establishes that all artistic activity had to be authorized in advance by the Cuban culture ministry. “Patria y Vida” appeared painted on walls and became the slogan of the opposition in Cuba and cities around the world, including Miami. The video was viewed millions of times on YouTube.

Success comes with costs. The scenes of the repression in Cuba following the people’s embrace of the song’s message are chilling and infuriating. Rapper Maykel Osorbo and visual artist Luis Manuel Otero Alcantara, who participated in the project while still living in Cuba, are now serving nine and five years sentences in maximum security prisons. Both are also members of the Movimiento San Isidro, a group of artists, journalists, and academics formed in 2018 to protest censorship.

The Patria y Vida collective also includes Yotuel Romero, a founder of the Paris-based hip-hop group Orishas; Alexander Delgado and Randy Malcom, who comprise the reggaeton duo Gente de Zona, composer Descemer Bueno, and rapper Eliécer Márquez “El Funky.”

Luengo is the non-Cuban insider. An artist herself, she contributed to the birth and development of the song. She’s also Romero’s wife.  The global phenomenon started in the couple’s house. Romero had been thinking for a while about “how to turn the government’s symbols around,” says Luengo, and a conversation about flipping “Patria o Muerte,” which she had seen splashed nearly everywhere while on a visit to Havana “led us to the piano in our living room, and we started.”

For Luengo, “this is a story of a song — and the internet. They thought it would all stay between four walls because they knocked down the internet — and as soon as they turned it on again, those images were everywhere. Now if you put the hashtag Patria y Vida on the platforms, you immediately get police abuse, the pain, real people making social denunciations.”

She chuckles as she recalls questions about the grand plan of “Patria y Vida.”

“There was no playlist, no marketing budget, calculation on followers, algorithms. There just wasn’t. It really began, as I believe great stories begin without a pretense. You watch the documentary and realize that they had no pretenses,” says Luengo. “Their big ambition was to help get the voice of Cuba heard.”

WHAT: 40th Annual Miami Film Festival

WHEN: Friday, March 3 through Sunday, March 12. Complete schedule at miamifilmfestival2023.eventive.org. 

WHERE: Silverspot Cinema, 300 SE 3rd Ave., Miami, Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave, Coral Gables, and Cosford Cinema, 5030 Brunson Dr, Coral Gables

COST: $13 for general admission; $12 for seniors; and $10 for Miami Film Society Members, students and veterans.

INFORMATION: 305-237-FILM (3456) or miamifilmfestival.com

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Review: Nothing’s fragile in GableStage’s wildly entertaining ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’

Elizabeth Dimon as Anne Marie and Rachel Burttram as Nora in Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” directed by Bari Newport, at GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel through Sunday, March 19. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

The stage looks nearly empty, not counting arguably the most famous door in all of drama.  A fleeting refresher via oversized projected words reminds the audience of the play that inspired the one it’s about to watch. Then four actors, beautifully dressed in period clothing, enter dancing and twitching, seemingly transported from the 19th to the 21st century.

Welcome to GableStage’s wildly entertaining, engaging production of Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2.”

Director Bari Newport and her artistic collaborators have wholeheartedly embraced the modernity of Hnath’s 2017 Broadway follow-up to 1879’s “A Doll’s House” by Henrik Ibsen, the hugely influential playwright considered the father of theatrical modernism.

In imagining what might have happened to Nora Helmer in the 15 years since she left her husband and three children to begin a journey of self-discovery, Hnath utilizes contemporary language (vulgarities included) and notions (Nora’s ex, Torvald, dives into mansplaining) to draw the audience into a boisterous comedy brimming with thought-provoking ideas.  Women’s roles and options, marriage as an institution, self-delusion versus self-knowledge are just some of the concepts up for debate in “A Doll’s House, Part 2.”

Newport, in her second season as GableStage’s producing artistic director, delivers a crisply assured version of Hnath’s play, and it’s among the best work she’s done to date since her arrival.

The cast blends tonally in-synch performances from a trio of theater veterans and a newcomer.

As Nora, who suddenly returns after a decade and a half of being mysteriously incommunicado, Rachel Burttram paints an adroit portrait of a complex woman.  She’s wide-eyed, calculating, manipulative, funny, sometimes cruel.  Listen as she describes the “few” lovers she’s had – the list is a bit longer and more detailed than expected – then follows that with gasping-for-breath laughter when Torvald tells her of his one relationship with a widowed neighbor.  For the wife and husband who parted so suddenly, the settling of scores is clearly incomplete.

Brendan Powers, Burttram’s real-life husband, plays Torvald.  The two were paired in a 2020 production of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” at Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers, but the COVID-19 pandemic forced that company to film and stream its dress rehearsal. It’s wonderful that Powers and Burttram are able to circle back to bring their characters to life for rapt, delighted audiences in Newport’s vision of the play.

Tall and striking, Powers portrays a man of Torvald Helmer’s place and time, someone determined to preserve his good reputation at all costs.  Though scarred by Nora’s abandonment, he maintains emotional control while tossing cool digs her way.  So, when he loses it – and he does, justifiably, thoroughly – it’s a grandly dramatic moment.  Knowing he and Burttram are happily married, watching them play Ibsen and Hnath’s unhappy duo is all the more impressive.

As Anne Marie, the former nanny and housekeeper who raised Nora and Nora’s three children, four-time Carbonell Award winner Elizabeth Dimon deploys her vast array of skills in portraying a woman who gave up a life of her own to tend to the Helmers.

She gets laughs on her first entrance from the back of the theater, responding to the unseen Nora’s repeated knocking, when she gives the audience the stink eye as if to say, “What? You couldn’t answer the door?”  Her Anne Marie combines warmth with a brutally honest assessment of Nora’s behavior and its enduring consequences.

Making her professional debut, New World School of the Arts grad Yasmine Harrell plays the Helmers’ youngest, their engaged daughter Emmy.  With zero memory of her mother, Emmy says politely, “It’s very nice to meet you.”

Ill-at-ease but determined to enlist her daughter’s help in getting Torvald to sign a life-altering document, Nora applies her intellectual wiles, only to discover that her clever daughter is a formidable opponent.  Harrell convincingly conveys Emmy’s strength and self-possession as she talks about how her mother’s decisions helped shape her own.

Throughout the brisk 90-minute play, the four characters engage in one-on-one debates, exchanges that land with power or humor or both thanks to Hnath’s craftsmanship and Newport’s staging.  When Nora and Torvald are verbally duking it out, they take turns snapping their fingers, changing the lighting to signal who’s in control.

The invisible fourth wall separating the world of the play from the audience doesn’t exist here.  Nora and Emmy take big steps off the stage and into the audience.  You never know where Anne Marie will turn up.  The message: We’re all having this artistic experience together.

In terms of design, the traditional look of Jacquelyn Loy’s costumes (the period is specified in Hnath’s script) contrasts with every other element.  Nora’s ensemble is especially grand: a huge red hat bedecked with feathers and flowers, an elegant coat and gown in rich red with black details. The scarlet hue isn’t meant to suggest a “fallen” woman; rather, her striking style conveys her success and the different person she has become.

The deceptively simple set by in-demand Frank J. Oliva, whose career began at nearby Area Stage Company and now includes work throughout the country (Broadway included), is a clean open space in which those big projections of words (by Jamie Godwin) can live.

The “furniture” consists of simple cubes, at one point boldly employed by Burttram’s Nora in a way that suggests she’s marking her territory.  Tony Galaska’s terrific, change-on-a-dime lighting and Sean McGinley’s great sound design (which inspires Powers’s Torvald to do something that looks like an awkward version of the macarena) are impeccable.

In “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” Hnath looks through contemporary eyes at the world Ibsen created. Now at GableStage, thanks to Newport and company, so do we.

WHAT: “A Doll’s House, Part 2” by Lucas Hnath

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

WHEN: 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional matinee Saturday, March 18), through Sunday, March 19 (streaming version available March 3-19 during regular performances). Free reading of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House,” 2 p.m. Saturday, March 11.

COST:  $45-$75 (streaming ticket $27)

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

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GableStage’s ‘A Doll’s House, Part 2’ imagines what happened after Nora walked out

Yasmine Harrell, Rachel Burttram, Brendan Powers and Elizabeth Dimon in Lucas Hnath’s spin on Henrik Ibsen’s classic “A Doll’s House” at GableStage. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

The slamming door that brings Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” to its shocking close has been reverberating on stages since 1879, when the masterpiece about a Norwegian wife and mother who dared to defy societal conventions ushered modernism into theater.

Fast forward to 2017, when one of America’s “it” playwrights, Orlando native Lucas Hnath, imagined what might happen if an incommunicado Nora Helmer came back 15 years later, knocking on that very same door.

“A Doll’s House, Part 2,” which will get its first Miami-area production at GableStage Feb. 24-March 19, isn’t precisely a sequel to the classic that inspired it. Rather, it’s a clever four-character, 90-minute exploration of one way the story of a 19th century woman who controversially left her home, husband and three children might have played out.

One of the most-produced plays in American regional theaters (the Maltz Jupiter Theatre did it in 2019), “A Doll’s House, Part 2” marked the Broadway debut of the topically and stylistically eclectic Hnath, whose subjects have included the ethical shortcuts of a would-be Olympian and the horrific kidnapping of Hnath’s mother.

Among his works are “A Public Reading of an Unproduced Screenplay About the Death of Walt Disney” (done at Fort Lauderdale’s Thinking Cap Theatre in 2016), the Obie Award-winning “Red Speedo” (presented by Plays of Wilton in Wilton Manors in late 2022), “The Christians” (staged by Outré Theatre Company in Pompano Beach in 2018), “Hillary and Clinton,” “Dana H” and “The Thin Place.”

Though Hnath wasn’t available for an interview prior to the new GableStage production, in a 2017 Vogue story, he told writer Adam Green that when he asked participants in a workshop what they thought happened to Nora, “Almost everybody said that she went off to work in a factory or became a prostitute and died.”

Hnath’s play resoundingly turns that expectation on its head.

GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport is staging the new production and says of Hnath, “I really love Lucas’s writing. He has such a sense of humor. It’s wry and smart.”

What audiences should anticipate about “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” she notes, is that “it’s not only a comedy, it’s not only a drama, it’s not only based on a classic. It lives within so many styles…It’s a humanist play, not just a feminist story about the price of individual freedom.”

Married actors Rachel Burttram and Brendan Powers will play the long-parted Nora and Torvald Helmer, with Carbonell Award winner Elizabeth Dimon as housekeeper/former nanny Anne Marie and recent New World School of the Arts grad Yasmine Harrell making her professional debut as the Helmers’ engaged daughter Emmy.

Burttram and Powers, longtime company members at Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers, were to have done the play there in March 2020. But when the COVID-19 pandemic hit and the world was about to shut down, Florida Rep made a video of the final dress rehearsal, streaming it and earning a glowing review from the late Wall Street Journal critic Terry Teachout, known for championing the high-quality work done in the country’s best regional theaters.

“This modernization is delicious and fabulous. It was such a heartbreak not to share it with a live audience,” says Burttram. “Three years later, you approach the text differently because of what we went through.”

Adds Powers: “We’re all changed in ways you aren’t really able to articulate. In our scenes, there are different nuances, things that hit in a more poignant way or that you remember differently.”

Burttram was an apprentice at Actors Theatre of Louisville and Newport associate director at Florida Rep when they met 21 years ago, and Newport has directed the actors – whom she calls “my dearest friends” – either solo or as a couple in many productions since.

Powers and Burttram, now based in Birmingham, Alabama, consider themselves fortunate to be able to work in the same production as often as they do. They have squared off as the warring priest and nun in John Patrick Shanley’s “Doubt” and have appeared together in numerous other productions, most recently in the world premiere of Mark St. Germain’s “Public Speaking 101” at Great Barrington Public Theater in Massachusetts and “God of Carnage” at North Carolina’s Flat Rock Playhouse.

During the run of “A Doll’s House, Part 2” the couple will make another joint appearance when GableStage presents a reading of Ibsen’s original at 2 p.m. March 11 (tickets are free, but subscribers get priority; register at www.gablestage.org).

“We have a shorthand, a great chemistry and connection,” says Burttram. “We know each other so, so well, even our body language. You can dig in and play and have trust.”

Burttram describes the role of Nora Helmer as iconic. Childlike in her dependency, first as a daughter then as a wife, Nora feels her blinders falling away when a crisis reveals the true nature of her marriage, igniting that journey toward self-awareness at the end of “A Doll’s House.” The Nora who returns in “A Doll’s House, Part 2” is a very different woman.
Powers, who played Torvald in a production of Ibsen’s play several years ago, describes Nora’s husband as “a fairly upright person in a system that’s flawed. He’s naïve and clueless. He comes off very badly…But as the story unfolds, you discover he’s a perfectly human character. It’s fun to play someone who has two sides.”

GableStage’s resident dramaturg, Karina Batchelor, has played a key role in immersing the company in the worlds created by Ibsen and Hnath. The Miami native and Florida International University graduate met her husband, British actor Iain Batchelor (who was in GableStage’s “The White Card”), when she was earning her master’s degree at the Shakespeare Institute at Stratford-Upon-Avon. Her thesis subject, on point for her current assignment: adaptations.

“I try to make sure I remove my own opinions. I provide facts [such as] what it was like to be married then, to get a divorce, the worldwide effect of the industrialization period. I’m choosing what they get, and you have to make sure you’re not biased,” says Batchelor, whose deep-dive research also provides links to Victorian primary sources as well as topically relevant newer works.

She is, she says, very appreciative of what Hnath achieves in his dramatic postscript to “A Doll’s House,” which features period costumes but an otherwise minimalist look, contemporary language and artfully conveyed information from Ibsen’s original.

“This play is amazing. Everyone is right. I very much understand Nora – I’m a mom myself – but I don’t want to be unfair to Torvald, Emmy and Anne Marie,” Batchelor says.

“From the moment Nora walks in the door, she’s already being judged. Lucas created a play where you change your mind so often… ‘A Doll’s House’ ends with Nora choosing herself, and at the end of the day, there are consequences. Nora has the bravery to come to terms with that.”

Another aspect of Batchelor’s work is audience education. She and Newport will share in doing the company’s popular preshow talks before each performance of “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” and one of Batchelor’s will be filmed and made available to anyone who chooses to watch the streaming version of the play. (Some subscribers are taking an even deeper plunge via a pilot program dubbed “Diary of a Production,” which offers six classes on various aspects of the play, attendance at a technical rehearsal and a group outing to a performance.)

Anyone thinking about seeing “A Doll’s House, Part 2” may be wondering whether not knowing or remembering the details of Ibsen’s play will affect their enjoyment of Hnath’s carefully crafted follow-up. Powers notes that “all the important bones of the story are relayed in Part 2.”

Newport and Batchelor agree, with an asterisk.

Knowing “A Doll’s House” can enrich the experience of seeing “A Doll’s House, Part 2,” but Batchelor calls the latter “very different. I look at it like a boxing match. Each character has [their] own perspective. It feels very much like an argument, with everyone putting forth [their] case.”

“Lucas mitigates his play so it’s not an enigma for those who don’t remember ‘A Doll’s House.’ It’s very accessible,” Newport says. “With all of our preshow talks, we give a broader, deeper lens into the work. The more you know, the more you can appreciate.”

WHAT:  “A Doll’s House, Part 2” by Lucas Hnath
WHERE: GableStage in the Biltmore Hotel, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables
WHEN: Preview 8 p.m. Feb. 24, opening 8 p.m. Feb. 25; regular performances 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (additional matinee March 18), through March 19 (streaming version available March 3-19 during regular performances) Special Event: Free reading of Henrik Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” 2 p.m. March 11
COST: $45-$75 (streaming ticket $27)
INFORMATION: 305-445-1119 or www.gablestage.org.

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Review: Strong family drama ‘The River Niger’ flows at M Ensemble

Roderick Randle and Tyquisha Ariel Braynen in M Ensemble’s “The River Niger” at the Sandrell Rivers Theater through Sunday, Feb. 26.  (Photo courtesy of Christa Ingraham)

Miami’s venerable M Ensemble Company was founded in 1971, the year before Joseph A. Walker’s “The River Niger” had its off-Broadway premiere. That first production by the Negro Ensemble Company won a best play Obie Award, transferred to Broadway in 1973, then captured the best play Tony Award in 1974.

Now, for its Black History Month season opener, M Ensemble has given new generations of actors the chance to explore and embody this 51-year-old piece of theater history.

Still led by Patricia E. Williams and Shirley Richardson, two of its three founders, M Ensemble has continued to enrich South Florida’s cultural life with professional productions of great Black plays and lesser known (or less often produced) ones. Despite its Tony Award, “The River Niger” falls into the latter category. It is resonant and relevant, but not enduringly impactful like “A Raisin in the Sun,” “Ceremonies in Dark Old Men” or “A Soldier’s Play,” for example.

Staged by Carbonell Award-winning actor-director André L. Gainey, Walker’s sprawling drama takes place inside a Harlem brownstone that the extended Williams family calls home.

Reflective of its early ‘70s era, the script explores issues that endure, disturb and haunt us still – the sacrificing of dreams, expectations we place on our offspring, the different ways Black men and women cope.  The fraught, sometimes tragic relationship between the Black community and law enforcement – a story that never seems to end – is also part of “The River Niger.”

Multiple storylines intertwine, and at a running time of more than three hours (a single brief intermission comes more than two hours into the action), the production is in need of strategic tightening and a quicker pace.  Too, the playwright’s device of having most scenes or segments begin with someone pounding on a door becomes so predictable that you start waiting for the next character to arrive.

Those 11 characters and the way this cast plays them, however, largely keep the audience engaged.

Patriarch John Williams (Chat Atkins, giving one of his strongest performances in his long history with M Ensemble) keeps food on the table and supports his wife’s extended family by painting houses. He discarded his dreams of becoming a lawyer but clings to his true passion: writing poetry.  But late in the play, as he delivers the poem that gives “The River Niger” its title, we experience the powerful vestiges of what might have been.

His stalwart, loving wife Mattie (Jade L. Jones, who radiates a loyal warmth) has been complicit in John becoming an alcoholic.  She pretends to fuss, to keep him in line, but she knows how much a lifetime of sacrifice has cost and wants him, in his 60s, to grab all the happiness he can.

Mattie’s mother Wilhelmina Brown, played with masterful comedic flair by Carbonell winner Carolyn Johnson-Davis, is there to get in everybody’s business, pass judgment and compete with her son-in-law at sneaking hidden booze.  She lives there, but their Jamaica-born next-door neighbor Dr. Dudley Stanton (Keith C. Wade, another M Ensemble veteran who is an adept grounding force in this production) practically does, popping in and out to trade joking insults, debate politics, drink and loan John a little money when Mattie isn’t looking.

Everyone is waiting for a homecoming, the return of John and Mattie’s 25-year-old son Jeff (the magnetic Roderick Randle, so adept at conveying Jeff’s quicksilver emotional changes) from his time in the U.S. Air Force as a navigator.  Among the surprises awaiting Jeff is Ann Vanderguild (Tyquisha Ariel Braynen), a South African-born nurse who met Jeff in Canada and aims to marry him.

Less welcome is Jeff’s old Harlem gang, a mixture of militants inspired by the Black Power movement and armed thugs ready to take what they want.  Leader Big Moe Hayes (Jean Hyppolite) wants to draw his lifelong friend Jeff back into the group’s police-baiting criminal life.  Jeff is determined to take on the law school part of his father’s abandoned dream and change his community that way.

Inevitably, tensions mount and explode. The gang members – junkie Skeeter (Martin Davis), sexual predator Chips (Xavier Latorture) and volatile Al (Kedar Myers) – bring danger with them every time they come through the door, though Moe’s girlfriend Gail (Nairobi) proves to be a positive force.

Set designer Mitchell Ost has created three key playing areas: a neatly kept living room (set dresser Patricia E. Williams wraps the sofa covered in protective plastic) and, just one step down, a neat kitchen.  An extremely tall staircase leading to the upstairs bedrooms becomes part of the action more than once, and you feel for Johnson-Davis’s Wilhelmina, who must climb up and come down it repeatedly.

Richardson and Chasity Hart collaborated on the costumes, making Braynen’s Ann look particularly ’70s chic.  Quanikqua “Q” Bryant’s lighting underscores the emotional content of Jeff’s eventual confessional about his Air Force experience, and Marcus Banks threads a subdued yet ominous bass through the show.

Something else you should know about “The River Niger” though, particularly since a number of young kids were part of the opening night audience.

Walker’s language, which can be poetic and quite funny, is also shocking and offensive at times.

John and Dudley go at each other verbally, tossing insults, hauling out the n-word and far, far worse. They’re not mad, just kidding each other in a kind of nonstop roast, but that’s how they do it.  The sexual talk and threats among the younger characters is equally raw. Consider yourself warned.

“The River Niger” still needs to gel. The actors have most, but not all, of their lines down.  Braynen’s supposed South African accent sounds nothing like one, and Nairobi is too soft-spoken.  More tightening, more confidence should make for a better experience for the actors and the audience.

Walker’s most celebrated play may not have stood the test of time as firmly as “A Raisin in the Sun” and others.  But watching the final scene, taking in the aftermath of a sacrifice as blue and red police lights whirl outside, your heart sinks as you acknowledge that a half-century later, such tragedies go on and on and on.

WHAT: “The River Niger” by Joseph A. Walker

WHERE: M Ensemble production at the Sandrell Rivers Theater, 6103 NW Seventh Ave., Miami

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 26

TICKETS:  $36 (student and senior discounts available at the door)

INFO: 305-200-5043 or themensemble.com

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Review: Actors’ Playhouse Has a Ball Turning Miracle Theatre into ‘Margaritaville’

Jordan Bell, Cindy Pearce, Sam Sherwood and Kayleen Seidl in “Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville” at Actors’ Playhouse at the Miracle Theatre. (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

While it may have been fitting for Actors’ Playhouse to celebrate its 35th anniversary by presenting the musical the company started with, it certainly wouldn’t have been as much fun.

It was Feb. 3, 1988, when its first production, “Man of La Mancha,” opened in a converted Kendall movie theater – a space where the company would perform for its first seven years until its move to the Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables in 1995.

Thirty-five years to the day, on Friday, Feb. 3, 2023, Actors’ Playhouse marked its anniversary not with Don Quixote, but with a character on a different quest. There’s only one pursuit for Tully Mars (Sam Sherwood, who has magnetism and charisma, plus musical talent to boot) and the rest of the cast  in “Jimmy Buffet’s Escape to Margaritaville” – to maintain their “license to chill.” And for Mars, it’s no impossible dream, it’s his reality.

The plot follows the guitar-slinging ladies’ man who sings at Margaritaville’s hotel bar on a Caribbean island. Vacationers stream in and out but the island workers and a barfly named J.D. (the ultra-talented Stephen G. Anthony getting the laughs as the guy who keeps losing his shaker of salt) are ever-present.

Marley (the affable Kareema Khouri whose comic timing is impeccable) runs the place with the help of Jamal (Elijah Word proving he can play any character he’s given). Behind the bar and always ready to concoct an island special of the day: Tuesday’s “Sex on the Beach” or Wednesday’s “Mountain Dew Me” is Brick (Jordan Bell, gifted with the juiciest comic role in the show and maximizing every opportunity with aplomb).

While women have obviously come and gone, none stealing Tully’s heart, it takes a level-headed scientist, Rachel (Kayleen Seidl, who has the most difficult task as the only character who takes anything seriously), whose only purpose to visit the island is to collect dirt and celebrate her best friend, Tammy’s (Cindy Pearce, a perfect fit as the bride-to-be), last few days of single womanhood before getting married. They’ve left Cincinnati for the trip but not before Tammy’s future husband, Chad (Jeremy Sevelovitz) has fat-shamed her into packing only carrot juice and sunflower seeds for the trip so she can squeeze into the wedding dress he has waiting – she’ll need to drop a whole size in a week to fit into it.

Like the typical jukebox musical, the storyline only exists to service the songs; sometimes the book writers succeed, but oftentimes the segues fail.

Brick reaches for something to eat after the girls go and he’s lovesick– it’s sponge cake. Cue the song: “Nibblin’ on sponge cake, watching the sun bake,” the opening lines to “Wasting Away in Margaritaville.” The biggest diet cheat comes in the form of an anthem to the deliciousness of a cheeseburger in “Cheeseburger in Paradise,” which somehow turns into a female liberation anthem.

Dramatic action in “Margaritaville” is a volcano eruption, a hidden treasure, and dancing insurance salesman zombies, this particular oddity saves itself from falling flat when it turns into a kick line fantasy of Brick’s, complete with sparkly gold costumes (top hats off to costumer Ellis Tillman) and some spectacular tap dancing (another set of hats off to choreographer Ron Hutchins). Triple hats off to Bell as Brick whose high-kicks rival any Rockette in a number that brings the musical to new heights.

The score features some 25 Buffett tunes (all probably under 3 minutes), including some new songs written for the show as well as his most famous hits from “Fins” to “Volcano” to “Why Don’t We Get Drunk and Screw?” (this complete with audience callback built-in) all played by a spectacular on-stage band of nine musicians led by conductor Nick Guerrero.

Director David Arisco chooses to give the characters hearts and souls instead of coasting along as window dressing for songs and he’s assembled a cast that’s willing to dive right in.

Sean McClelland captures the vibe of the beachy keen island retreat creating almost a picture frame of the surroundings and lighting design by Eric Nelson keeps everything sun-drenched. Shaun Mitchell’s sound design captures the island environment and when the volcano is ready to blow, there isn’t a doubt it just may.

It’s a guilty pleasure to enjoy “Margaritaville,” escapist fare that Actors’ Playhouse obviously picked purposefully in an effort to celebrate their occasion. It’s a way to ease audiences back into the theater post-COVID. Face it. Who wants “La Mancha?” Dig out the Hawaiian shirt, throw on a pair of flip-flops and get lost in island time for a while.

WHAT: “Jimmy Buffett’s Escape to Margaritaville”

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

WHEN:  Performances 8 p.m., Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and Saturday; 2 p.m. Saturday; 3 p.m. Sunday. Through Sunday, Feb. 26.

COST:  $$55, $65, $75, $80, $85, $100

INFORMATION: 305.444.9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

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Review: ‘American Rhapsody’ Explores Issues, Events and Family in Michael McKeever’s New Play

Michael McKeever is pondering big questions in Zoetic Stage’s “American Rhapsody,” a world premiere that boldly traverses more than 60 years in an extended family and an ever-evolving country.

Running through Sunday, Jan. 29 in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center, the play examines how major issues and events – the AIDS crisis, post-traumatic stress disorder, 9/11, Black Lives Matter protests, women’s rights and more – play out in individual lives.

The audience sees a changing America through the lens of the Cabot family of Lawrence, Kansas, and New York City.  This Cabot line begins with the distinguished, much-admired judge Franklin Cabot, a man already deceased when he first appears onstage. His descendants include a celebrated poet, several attorneys and a rising politician.  Diversity in sexual orientation, ethnicity and race enriches the generations as they become a family by birth and by choice.

Plenty of sorrow and tragedy play out through McKeever’s story – because, you know, that’s life – but this is a playwright who is deft at comedy and knows that’s part of life too.  Director Stuart Meltzer, Zoetic’s artistic director (and McKeever’s husband), has proven himself masterful at finding laughter at just the right moment, and thanks to the combination of playwright and director, “American Rhapsody” elicits a richly varied tapestry of emotions.

Poet Franky Cabot (Alex Weisman) is the narrator and fulcrum of this memory play, a piece in which time is both orderly and fluid.  The patriarch everyone calls Papa Frank (Stephen Trovillion), for example, has a hilarious and enlightening interaction with Franky’s future BFF Nat Morris (Lela Elam) when the judge has already lived his life and Nat, a Black lesbian, is yet to be born.

After Franky reads from an epic poem he’s struggling to get right, the play shifts to the 1969 lunar landing, as a sleepy five-year-old Franky (then called Little Frank) is plucked from bed to join his family as they watch Neil Armstrong become the first human to set foot on the moon.

His father Big Frank (Aloysius Gigl), intense mother Eleanor (Laura Turnbull) and big sister Jenny (Lindsey Corey) have gathered around their television to watch history being made. Big Frank insists his little boy should also share in a moment he’s convinced will propel America into its future. Eleanor and Jenny are dubious about a five-year-old’s capacity to take it all in, and as it turns out, they’re right.

Grown-up narrator Franky confides: “I don’t remember a thing.”

Expectations, hopes and the sometimes-brutal sting of reality collide repeatedly in “American Rhapsody,” as they do in life.

The driven and outspoken Jenny, described as having the same sort of “blue fire” in her heart that Papa Frank did, finds herself at a crossroads when she discovers that she and her Cuban-American boyfriend Albert Bernal (Carlos Alayeto) are expecting. Their personal crisis – have the baby or have an abortion – is vividly conveyed through some of McKeever’s finest writing.

Franky, who has abandoned his extremely flat and conservative home state for gay-friendly Manhattan, navigates his own career struggles against the backdrop of the AIDS crisis.  He approaches famous literary agent Terrence Ray (Trovillion who, like the majority of the cast, plays more than one role) about representing him and gets a short, polite, devastating response, which includes these words: “I find what your work currently lacks is a sense of experience. The weight that comes from facing tragedy.”

Soon enough, Franky’s work will acquire that weight as the poet-essayist grows famous and ever more furious.

The eight versatile actors who play 15 different roles on McKeever’s broad canvas include three who have performed on Broadway (Weisman, Trovillion, Turnbull) and four Carbonell Award winners (Elam, Corey, Gigl, Turnbull).  All eight are adroit performers who evolve convincingly over the play’s 63-year time span.

Weisman, who grew up in Davie, won Chicago theater’s prestigious Joseph Jefferson Award for his work in “The History Boys” and “Hand to God,” and his many TV roles include gay dad Frank on “Sesame Street.”

Still boyish in his mid-30s, he is an inspiringly skilled actor whose performance as Franky embraces the character’s weaknesses as well as his talents.  Evolving from that confused five-year-old to a debilitated 68-year-old nearing the end of his life, Weisman earns every moment in the spotlight.

Trovillion, veteran of many a Summer Shorts festival, demonstrates his versatility yet again as the curious, progressive Papa Frank and the supremely snooty Terrence Ray.  As Big Frank, Gigl is a man-of-few-words midwestern farmer. Then he changes utterly as he becomes Justin, Franky’s New York editor and friend, a gay man whose experience of the AIDS crisis begins when he locks eyes with a smiling stranger in a bar.

Turnbull makes Eleanor a prickly woman who fails to realize for far too long that she might have made other choices in life. Then as Miss Cunningham, she becomes an outraged sparring partner with transgressive college student Jenny.

Like Jenny, Corey keeps that blue fire blazing in her character’s heart, aging from girl to young woman facing a life-changing decision to on-the-rise lawyer with a suffering husband and young daughter at home.  She also briefly plays Sally, the woman who brings true contentment into Nat’s life, but it is her journey as Jenny that’s so powerfully captivating.

Elam’s Nat isn’t the first role McKeever has written with the actor’s voice in mind, but this one – complex, wry, provocative, funny – is a perfect fit.  Elam has theatergoers in the palm of her hand from the get-go, and as she becomes increasingly important to Franky and others in his family, the audience falls for her too. The actor also fleetingly plays Judge Emily Barnett, a woman who will help Franky’s niece pursue a career path she never imagined.

Stephanie Vazquez plays Maddie Cabot-Bernal, the daughter of Franky’s sister  Jenny and Albert Bernal.  She’s a pistol, another blue fire kind of woman, emphatic in the correctness of her ideas and ready to take on the world.  The young Vazquez plays Maddie from girlhood to a pivotal moment in 2032 when both she and the country are about to change. She’s energetic, enthusiastic, sometimes overwhelming, but her evolution isn’t entirely convincing.

In his Zoetic debut as Maddie’s father Albert, Alayeto transforms from a tender caretaker to a man suffering from PTSD.  Moving from strength to despair, he heartbreakingly illustrates the post-service reality for too many veterans.  Alayeto also has a short scene as Senator Mendez, a politician who helps fuel the biggest change in Maddie’s life.

As for how the story is delivered, what it looks and sounds like, it’s rather strange and not as enveloping or inviting as most Zoetic shows.

Robert F. Wolin’s abstract set allows for Delavega’s videos and Steven Covey’s projection mapping to offer up multiple elevated images when the play moves into a new year (that particular year is projected onto the stage itself).  While the photos and videos serve as timeline touchstones, they’re generally so numerous that you can’t possibly take them all in before they vanish.

Differently shaped faux metal containers dot the stage, serving as seats and places to conceal the props by designer Natasha Hernandez.  The containers may be utilitarian, but they’re also unappealing.

Marina Pareja’s costumes effectively assist in the play’s time travel, as well as commenting on a character’s age, taste and urban or rural lifestyle.  The only miss is Maddie’s schoolgirl getup, which looks out of place on Vazquez’s grownup figure.

Rebecca Montero’s lighting helps shape each scene – she’s a truly fine designer – but she comes up with an eerie golden glow in which to bathe the actors as they oh-so-slowly walk onto the stage from who-knows-where. Maybe they’re being summoned from Franky’s memories. Maybe the afterlife is that color.

Matt Corey has created the soundscape and woven in selected music, including some from composer Steve Reich whose work Meltzer describes in his program note as “pulses, counterpoints, minimal, complex and, at times, aggravating.” That’s quite right.

However, you should know this: Whether or not any design elements bother you, “American Rhapsody” is a new play worth experiencing.

McKeever makes you laugh, tear up, feel nostalgic. He captures the dynamics of a family bonded by love but struggling as its members face life-and-death challenges.  Those big moments that affect the country as a whole?  The playwright demonstrates how they claim a place in our memories, how they change us.  He finds the constants in the cycle of life, illuminates them, and makes you feel their resonance in your own experience.

WHAT: “American Rhapsody” by Michael McKeever

WHERE: Zoetic Stage 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 (no matinee Jan. 21), through Sunday, Jan. 29

COST:  $55-$60

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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