Review: ‘We Will Not Be Silent’ Examines Last Days of Courageous Life, Speaks to Today

Jason Peck is Kurt Grunwald and Meredith Casey is Sophie Scholl in GableStage’s “We Will Not Be Silent” through Sunday, Jan. 29 at GableStage at the Biltmore, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

Imagine this:  You are a key part of a student group advocating nonviolent resistance to a brutal government.  A true believer sees you scattering pamphlets in support of your cause, and you’re immediately arrested. Within five days, you have been interrogated, convicted and executed.

That horrific scenario is precisely what happened in 1943 to Sophie Scholl, a student at the University of Munich and anti-Nazi activist in the White Rose movement.

Scholl and the White Rose have been the subjects of movies, docudramas, plays and books.  In 2015, playwright and actor David Meyers wrote “We Will Not Be Silent,” a play about the last brutal days of Scholl and her brother Hans.  After a developmental period, the play premiered in 2017, and it was produced at Boca Raton’s Theatre Lab in 2019.

Now, with GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport at the helm, “We Will Not Be Silent” is getting a new production at a time when having the courage to stand up to tyrants seems increasingly urgent.

Scholl embraced Nazi youth organizations as a child, as did her brother, despite the objections of their father Robert, who was later imprisoned for making an anti-Hitler remark to one of his employees.  The Scholl family was Lutheran. “We Will Not Be Silent” isn’t a Holocaust play per se, though there is a line about the dubious claim that the Nazis were “relocating” the Jewish population.

Soon, the siblings and their student friends began rejecting Nazi ideology, and Sophie focused on religion, philosophy, teaching children and the arts.  She also became active in the White Rose as the group found ways to get its pamphlets calling for resistance distributed in cities throughout Germany.

Facts about Scholl’s too-short life – she was guillotined at the age of 21 – are woven into “We Will Not Be Silent.” But Meyers has chosen to focus on the intense, frightening few days when a Nazi interrogator tried to get Scholl to confess to treason.

Scholl’s actual inquisitor was a Gestapo member named Robert Mohr.  Meyers has made the character a former policeman named Kurt Grunwald (Jason Peck), a man who shifts between playing good cop and bad cop several times during the course of the play.

Sophie (Meredith Casey) begins the play fiercely screaming, pulling down a semi-transparent banner painted with graffiti urging Germans to act against the Nazi regime.  Moments later, she appears distraught and chained to a fat golden pillar. Grunwald faux-apologizes as he removes her handcuff, then he awkwardly stuffs the banner almost out of sight.

What then unfolds on designer Frank J. Oliva’s mysterious set – its tiled walls and floor vaguely suggest a kind of cage – is a session filled with debates, lies, attempts at persuasion, deprivation, and torment both psychological and physical.

At first, Casey’s Sophie, her red hair done in youthful braids, claims to know nothing of the White Rose, and her demeanor is fairly convincing.  Peck’s Grunwald tries convincing her that he’s open to believing her innocence and her brother’s.  But before long, he pulls evidence from a folder and starts turning invisible screws as an anonymous Nazi watches from behind a window, documenting the discussion in his notes.

As Sophie is deprived of food, water and rest, and as Grunwald tries to persuade her that the others will be tried and executed, she tries to exonerate them by shouldering the blame.  Grunwald knows better, and in one awful protracted scene he forces her to stand with her back against the wall and her feet straight until her body begins shaking uncontrollably.

Hans (Bobby Eddy) does make an appearance, entering the space as an exhausted Sophie is lying fitfully on the floor.  Whether he is real or an imaginary presence born of her despair, this version of her brother is hale and hearty, which seems odd given Sophie’s condition.

Emotionally, Casey has the most to work with in the cast, and you ache for her Sophie when she makes statements that will obviously doom her.  Peck’s portrayal of Grunwald is so much the low-key “ordinary” German that it’s hard to buy him as a man who may help bring Sophie’s life to an abrupt end.

GableStage’s creative team has made the world of “We Will Not Be Silent” an eerie one, with whispering voices and unsettling music from sound designer Jason Peck. Victoria Murawski’s lighting is, by turns, harsh and haunting.  Costume designer Camilla Haith dresses Casey and Eddy in the sort of period clothing Sophie and Hans wore, and Peck’s nondescript three-piece suit suddenly looks more sinister with the addition of a swastika armband.

Meyers’s script is part discussion, part drama.  That makes Newport’s task as director all the more difficult: A 90-minute play feels longer than it is, and the tension flows and ebbs in a story that should have more of it.

If you don’t know Sophie Scholl’s story, “We Will Not Be Silent” may inspire you to learn more.  And with its chilling contemporary resonance, the play may also serve as a reminder that the courage to oppose tyranny isn’t relegated to one moment in history.

WHAT: “We Will Not Be Silent” by David Meyers

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 matinees 2 p.m. Jan. 21 and Jan. 28), through Jan. 29 (streaming available from Jan. 13); pre- and post-show talks listed here.

COST:  $45-$75 (includes fees)

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

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As Playwright and Director, Nilo Cruz Revisits Life-changing ‘Anna in the Tropics’ at Miami New Drama

Brandon Espinoza, Hannia Guillen and Gabriell Salgado in Miami New Drama’s 20th-anniversary production of “Anna in the Tropics” at the Colony Theatre, Miami Beach, Saturday, Jan. 14 through Sunday, Feb. 5. (Photo courtesy of Camilo Buitrago Gil).

The stunning play that altered the course of Nilo Cruz’s life began with a commission from the 104-seat New Theatre in Coral Gables.  Supported by a national grant, the company led by Rafael de Acha asked the Cuban-American playwright, whose work was being produced by significant regional theaters throughout the country, for a new play.

Cruz delivered “Anna in the Tropics.”

After its world premiere in October 2002, the play won the prestigious American Theater Critics Association/Steinberg Award in April 2003 and, two days later, the Pulitzer Prize for drama.  Thus, the artist who had arrived in Miami as a nine-year-old on a 1970 Freedom Flight from Cuba became the first Latino to win drama’s highest honor, taking his place in history and being elevated to a higher-profile career.

“Anna in the Tropics” has now turned 20, and in celebration, Miami New Drama is presenting a new production in its home at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.  As he did at the Coconut Grove Playhouse in 2004, Cruz is directing his piece about a family of Cuban-American cigar makers in Ybor City near Tampa in 1929.

“It has been a long journey with ‘Anna in the Tropics.’ It completely transformed my life,” says Cruz, who eventually moved back to Miami from New York.  “It brought international visibility to my work, and also allowed me to write screenplays, operas, and oratorios.”

Produced at Broadway’s Royale Theatre in late 2003, Cruz’s prize-winning play has been staged not just throughout the United States but in numerous countries, including Germany, Spain, Belarus, Cuba, Canada, Japan, China, the Philippines, Ecuador, Puerto Rico and three cities in Russia.

The last is particularly significant because “Anna in the Tropics” is inspired in part by Leo Tolstoy’s great Russian novel “Anna Karenina.”  Cruz’s play honors the then-waning tradition of the lector, an educated person who would read everything from newspapers to novels aloud as the workers repetitively toiled.  Once the playwright decided Tolstoy’s tragic love story would be the captivating, influential book the lector was reading to the Ybor City workers, his passionate play coalesced.

Set just as the Depression and the push for modernization were looming, “Anna in the Tropics” uses Cruz’s poetic, image-conjuring language to explore the lives of its extended Cuban-American family.

Patriarch Santiago (Serafin Falcon) and his wife Ofelia (Saundra Santiago) are the cigar factory’s long-married owners, given to bickering but still in love.  Their restless elder daughter Conchita (Hannia Guillen) and her husband Palomo (Brandon Espinoza) are at odds, in part because of his string of affairs.  Conchita’s younger sister Marela (Andrea Ferro) is dreamy, playful, and imaginative.

Santiago’s half-brother Cheché (Daniel Capote) is trying to gain more power at the factory as he struggles with the loss of his wife, who ran off with the previous lector.  So when the handsome new lector Juan Julian (Gabriell Salgado) arrives literally fresh off the boat from Cuba, Cheché sees an enemy, while the women are enraptured.

“Nilo is such a specific writer. He lives in a temperature different from mainstream America. He really knows how to navigate this world… he’s a great director,” says Miami New Drama cofounder and artistic director Michel Hausmann.  “‘Anna in the Tropics’ is such an umami of flavors:  funny, sensual, poetic.”

In September, “Anna in the Tropics” made unwelcome headlines when Miami Dade County Public Schools informed Miami New Drama it would not bus high school juniors and seniors to the Colony to see special performances of the play.

The conflict over age-appropriate content has since been resolved, Hausmann says, and three groups of public school students and one audience of students from private schools will see the play.

Cruz found the short-lived controversy painful and ironic. “This is the city where I grew up, studied, and fell in love with the theater – of all the cities in the world,” he says. “‘Anna in the Tropics’ has to do with the power of words. It’s significant to do ‘Anna’ at this moment in time when books are being banned. The play embraces literature.”

As it evolves, Miami New Drama has become more intensely focused on commissioning and premiering works that reflect the richly diverse communities, which call South Florida home.

That’s a good thing, Cruz says, but so is revisiting an existing play, exploring it with fresh eyes and different actors.

“I wanted this cast to be a sexy cast – elegant, sensorial,” says Cruz, who has worked with three of the seven actors multiple times.

As he does when he stages a play for Arca Images, a smaller bilingual Miami company where he serves as artistic director, Cruz loves to explore a play – even one as successful as “Anna in the Tropics” – with his cast in the rehearsal room, taking in the ideas of each actor.

For instance, he is seeing Cheché in a new way because of what Capote is bringing to the role.

“In the past, he was played more as an angry man.  He was devastated because of his wife leaving with the previous lector,” says Cruz.  “Through Capote, I see more of the pain in him. The solitude, the sadness. He wants to be loved.  Capote brought that, and I said, ‘I love it, let’s use it.’ It’s a lot more profound.”

Central to the play is the life-changing relationship between Guillen’s Conchita and Salgado’s Juan Julian.  The words he reads from “Anna Karenina” spark her imagination and desire, and they begin an affair.  Their lovemaking isn’t depicted in the Miami New Drama production, but the imagery conjured by Cruz’s words is vivid, passionate, and powerful – its own kind of literary achievement.

“‘Anna in the Tropics’ at the Coconut Grove Playhouse is the first play I ever saw. It dawned on me then that I wanted to be an actress, that I wanted to transport people,” says Guillen, who later met Cruz through their mutual mentor, Teatro Prometeo founder Teresa María Rojas. “Nilo has been a blessing and a gift, a miracle… A lot of people try to do what is hot now, what’s trendy.  He believes in his craft, what he brings to the world.  But he remains humble.”

Guillen, who was born in Cuba and moved to Miami with her family at age 11, has appeared in multiple Cruz plays (including a 2011 Spanish-language “El color del deseo”/“The Color of Desire” directed by Hausmann in New York), but this is her first production of “Anna in the Tropics.”  This cast, she believes, “is in tune with Nilo. It’s a magical connection with his text.”

Salgado, a 2019 New World School of the Arts grad who made his professional debut as the Creature in Zoetic Stage’s 2021 production of “Frankenstein,” has become one of the region’s most in-demand actors. He’s far younger than most who have played the lector (Jimmy Smits, now 67, starred as Juan Julian in the 2003 Broadway production), but Cruz believes Salgado has all the qualities needed for the part – plus an undeniable chemistry with Guillen’s Conchita.

“Gabriell is a very, very elegant actor. He has a sense of the language, a lyricism, and a sensuality. He is the quintessential gallant man – un galán,” says Cruz, who sees fire onstage between Salgado and Guillen. “He’s timeless. He is a theater creature with all the tools to deliver on his promise.  I don’t see the age. I see a brilliant man, gifted in the same way Mozart was when he was composing at an early age.  That intelligence has no age.”

Salgado acknowledges that chemistry with Guillen and believes she embodies the qualities in Cruz’s writing. At first, he found the playwright’s style to be “the most unique writing I’ve ever encountered.  It’s the most poetic, and its spiritual component and magical realism excite me.”

Working with the author as director is also a new experience.

“He has such a confidence and a fluidity. He’s in his territory, on his playground.  He’s such an incredible person, so kind, fascinating and extremely generous,” Salgado says.

Santiago, who grew up in Homestead and graduated from the University of Miami, and Miamian Falcon play the older generation in “Anna in the Tropics.” Both have a host of theater, television, and film credits; Santiago is arguably the best-known actor in the Miami New Drama cast by virtue of her role as detective Gina Calabrese on “Miami Vice” from 1984 to 1990.

“‘Anna in the Tropics’ was on Broadway at the same time I was doing ‘Nine’ with Antonio Banderas,” Santiago recalls. “I went to see Daphne Rubin-Vega (the original Mimi in ‘Rent’), who was playing Conchita, and I was blown away.  I played so much attention to what she was doing and thought, ‘Oh, this is a good part for me.’ And now I’m playing Ofelia.”

Santiago has played powerful women and matriarchs in a number of shows, including Mama Rose in “Gypsy,” Amanda in “The Glass Menagerie” and the title role in “Evita.” Ofelia, she says, “keeps the factory running. She is always checking up on everyone. She loses her temper, has her faults, gets drunk. But she’s a typical matriarch, doing the best she can.”

Falcon wasn’t familiar with Cruz or his plays when he was hired to portray Palomo in a production of “Anna in the Tropics” in 2010 at California’s small Sierra Madre Playhouse near Pasadena. He was the only Cuban-American in the largely Mexican-American cast, and he remembers marveling at the script the first time he read it.

“I thought, ‘What is this? This is my family’s history.’ My grandma and her siblings were all cigar rollers in Cuba,” he says.  “This is the fifth production in which I’ve been directed by Nilo. When he calls and says, ‘I want you to do this for me,’ I jump at the opportunity to work with him.  It’s like life being breathed into me.  Theater isn’t the best-paying medium.  But what it has done for my soul I can’t express in words.”

WHAT: 20th-anniversary production of “Anna in the Tropics” by Nilo Cruz

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

WHEN: Previews Thursday, Jan 12 and Friday, Jan. 13, opens Saturday, Jan. 14 (opening night sold out); performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Sunday, Feb. 5

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

INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

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Music And Politics Mix In Two Movies Premiering at Miami Jewish Film Festival

The band National Wake, Ivan Kadey, Gary Khoza, Steve Moni and Punka Khoza, circa 1981, is chronicled in the documentary “This Is National Wake” premiering at the Miami Jewish Film Festival, which opens Thursday, Jan. 12 through  Thursday, Jan. 26. The film screens on Monday, Jan. 16 at O Cinema South Beach. (Photo courtesy of the film).

Two movies in this year’s Miami Jewish Film Festival have at their core stories about music as a political statement, or rather the implications that arise when music becomes intertwined with societal conflict.

Director Lilia Levitina adapted South African writer Victor Gordon’s one-act play “You Will Not Play Wagner” (7:30 p.m., Thursday, Jan. 19, Miami Beach JCC, 4221 Pine Tree Drive, Miami Beach) about a debate that erupts between a wealthy arts patron and a young Israeli conductor over his choice of composers. In Israel, there is an informal ban on the playing of 19^th-century German composer Richard Wagner’s works because of his well-known anti-Semitic sentiments and for his position as a favorite composer of Adolf Hitler.

In Mirissa Neff’s documentary, “This is National Wake” (7 p.m., Monday, Jan. 16, O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach) apartheid-era South Africa is at the center of controversy as seen through the chronicled story of a multiracial punk rock band who defied the establishment in the late 1970s and early 1980s.

The films are an enlightening look at how music plays an essential role in politics and culture.

Neff says she grew up in the 1980s in New York with a “cursory knowledge” of what was going on at the time in South Africa. The Apartheid in South Africa (from 1948 to 1994) was a legal system of racial segregation under an all-white government.

“This Is National Wake” is Neff’s directorial debut. “You have to wonder,” she muses, “do you choose projects, or do they choose you?”

Of mixed race –  her father is Jewish and her mother is Barbadian from Barbados – Neff says she was drawn to the story of the band National Wake. “In part because it parallels to my own life.” For one, she says, “it would have been illegal for my parents to marry (in the United States) a couple of years sooner than they did.”

Guitarist Ivan Kadey formed National Wake after the Soweto protests in 1976 when Black students revolted against the government. At Soweto, outside of Johannesburg, two South African student protesters died from police gunfire, sparking unrest across the country.

Two of Kadey’s bandmates were Black, brothers Gary and Punka Khoza. Kadey tells much of the story in the film since both brothers are now dead – Gary from suicide and Punka from an AIDS-related illness.

The movie uses much of the band’s archival footage shot on Super 8mm film with the film’s score the punk, funk and reggae music of the band. Much of the footage was shot by Kadey’s wife, Nadine, who is co-producer on “This Is National Wake.”

“There was definitely the excitement of living on the edge and saying ‘F-You’ to an absolutely brutal system that we were living in,” Ivan Kadey says about forming the band. “There were dangers and there was reason to fear but the best way to face that fear was to make the music.”

Nadine had been covering what was happening in South Africa for British television when she became involved with National Wake. “It was so extraordinary what they were doing. It was so powerful for them to even develop this band together – a strike against the system.”

Nadine says she encountered her own risks. “Some of my key footage was seized by the police,” she recalls.

Ivan Kadey, who is of Jewish heritage, says there were a significant number of people in South Africa involved in the struggle during apartheid that were Jewish. “I think it’s definitely something in the history of being an oppressed people that struck a chord in terms of people being persecuted based on race.” While his residence is in Los Angeles, as an architect now by trade, he says he has spent the past six years involved in projects in Miami and Miami Beach. “I spend a good proportion of my time there,” he says.

Neff discovered National Wake through a documentary 2012’s “Punk In Africa” and, as a music journalist, knew there was something more. She says she wanted to locate Ivan to interview him for a PBS show she was working on at the time. They connected on Facebook. “The (PBS) show about the intersection of music and politics,” she explains.

She went to Los Angeles where Ivan was living to learn more about National Wake. After spending time with Ivan and Nadine, she realized there was more to tell than just a short television piece about the band. She also discovered that Nadine had more footage than clips of the band used in the “Punk in Africa” film.

About an hour of the film had been digitized for the other film, but the rest was still on Super 8 reels, never before-seen-footage.

“I knew I had a film,” she says.

Levitina, director of “You Will Not Play Wagner,” didn’t plan on making her first feature film either. The project started off with a one-act play introduced to her by actress Annette Miller during COVID-19. The theater director envisioned it as a play via Zoom like many theater companies were doing during the pandemic. But she saw something more and decided to not just capture her actors playing their parts on a small Zoom screen. There would be extended shots to develop the character’s stories: Miller’s scenes as the adamant arts patron, Esther, with a personal story on her own distaste for Wagner, were filmed in her home in Lenox, Mass., and Levitina flew to Tel Aviv to direct Ofek Cohen who plays the young conductor, Yakov.

South Florida actor Avi Hoffman was brought on board by Miller to play Morris, the harried organizer of the Esther Greenbaum International Conductors’ Competition. While the character’s locale is meant to be Brooklyn, N.Y., Hoffman worked out of his Coral Springs home. He says he rehearsed with the director and ultimately recorded his own parts. In the end, editor Christo Tsiaras put all the pieces together.

As far as the storyline, Hoffman says he was familiar with Israel’s taboo of Wagner’s works.

“I grew up in Israel from the time I was 11 years old until I was 20. I don’t remember when the controversy began, but I do remember it pretty clearly that there was this whole thing about you can’t play Wagner in Israel. You just don’t. It’s like saying, okay, let’s celebrate Hitler’s birthday. You just don’t do it.”

Hoffman says he was familiar with the concept of which Gordon based his play but the added subplot of Esther’s backstory was another interesting aspect for Hoffman.

“This is my third film in a row in as many years at the Miami Jewish Film Festival. My first film (“Shehita” in 2018) was 30 minutes long and it was in Yiddish and it was about the Holocaust. My second film (“Boxed” in 2022) was 13 minutes long and it was in Yiddish and it was about the Holocaust. And now, this is the first full-length film I’m involved in and it’s not in Yiddish. But the apropos is the Holocaust.”

He says the film comes at a time in United States history that the 64-year-old says has taken him by surprise.

“I feel like we’re living in an age that I never thought I would see in my lifetime, which is this enormous mainstream revival of antisemitism and Holocaust denial. . . So, how do you combat that? . . . Through the arts. By making movies about the Holocaust; by doing things that show how absurd and wrong it is to have that kind of hatred and prejudice.”

WHAT: Miami Jewish Film Festival

WHEN: Thursday, Jan. 12 through Thursday, Jan. 26. Ivan Kadey will perform live and Marissa Neff, director, will be in attendance for “This is National Wake” on Monday, Jan. 16 at O Cinema South Beach. Director Lilia Levitina and actors Avi Hoffman and Annette Miller of “You Will Not Play Wagner” will be in attendance for a question and answer segment on Thursday, Jan. 19 at the Miami Beach JCC.

WHERE: Various venues including Bill Cosford Cinema, 5030 Brunson Drive and Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables; Miami Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Ave., Miami Beach JCC, 4221 Pine Tree Drive, O Cinema South Beach, 1130 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; Michael-Ann Russell JCC, 18900 NE 25^th Ave., Miami, and Miami Theater Center, 9806 NE 2^nd Ave., Miami Shores. Also, digital screening program.

COST: Single tickets, $15-$36; all-access pass for in-person screenings is $325.

INFORMATION: miamijewishfilmfestival.org

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Prolific South Florida playwright’s ‘American Rhapsody’ gets world premiere at Zoetic Stage

Stephanie Vazquez, Carlos Alayeto, Lindsey Corey, Alex Weisman, Lela Elam, Laura Turnbull, Stephen Trovillion and Aloysius Gigl in the world premiere of Michael McKeever’s “American Rhapsody.” (Photo courtesy of Tony Tur)

Since writing his first-produced play, 1996’s “That Sound You Hear,” Michael McKeever has become a writer with a notably eclectic range and a prodigious drive.

In those 27 years, the South Florida playwright has written 35 full-length comedies and dramas that have been produced throughout the region, the country (Off-Broadway included), and in other countries. His subjects have included hate crimes, a hurricane, bullying, Hollywood secrets, artists, gay marriage, grief, hoarding, diverse Miami – well, you get the idea.

This week, McKeever is preparing to debut his 36th full-length.  “American Rhapsody” was written for Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre as a commission during the pandemic, but it will get its world premiere Thursday, Jan. 12 through Sunday, Jan. 29 at Zoetic Stage, a company of which he is a co-founder, and will be staged by artistic director Stuart Meltzer.   The play previews Thursday, Jan. 12 and opens Friday, Jan. 13 in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center.

“American Rhapsody” – the “rhapsody” refers to an epic poem, not to a piece of music – is a play that weds the personal to impactful events and societal shifts.

It begins in 1969, as the Cabot family of Lawrence, Kansas, huddles around their television set to watch grainy video of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landing on the moon.  It ends in 2032, in a country forever evolving, an America and an extended family vastly changed.

“Sixty years is a lot of play,” says McKeever, who sports a T-shirt that reads “Write On” during a Zoom interview.  “Stuart is keeping everything beautifully clear, so active and moving… Few people know my work better than Stuart; he knows my writing. He’s enormously insightful.”

That Meltzer connects so thoroughly with McKeever’s work is no surprise. Winners of multiple Carbonell Awards, Meltzer is also one of Zoetic’s five co-founders (Christopher Demos-Brown, Stephanie Demos-Brown and Kerry C. Shiller are the others). Meltzer and McKeever have worked together on multiple Zoetic shows, including the company’s first, “South Beach Babylon,”  in 2010 and written by McKeever. Together for two decades and married since 2017, the artists’ lives are creatively and personally enmeshed; it was during a cross-country driving vacation with Meltzer that McKeever hit on Kansas and its utter flatness as the location for “American Rhapsody.”

McKeever acknowledges the autobiographical underpinnings of his new play, though focal character Franky Cabot is a poet, not a playwright.  Meltzer says that initially, the play was intended to be “a reexamination of the beaten-up American dream from a family’s perspective.”

As the script has evolved, the director says, “we’ve figured out a way to connect the milestones in one man’s life with the art of creation.  You get family, events and the art of writing, all in one play.”

McKeever includes four generations of Cabots:  patriarch Franklin “Papa Frank” Cabot (Steve Trovillion), a distinguished jurist; his son “Big Frank” (Aloysius Gigl) and daughter-in-law Eleanor (Laura Turnbull); the couple’s offspring Jenny (Lindsey Corey) and Franky (Alex Weisman); and Jenny’s daughter Maddie (Stephanie Vazquez).  Jenny’s husband Albert Bernal (Carlos Alayeto), family friend Nat Morris (Lela Elam) and six other characters also figure into the sweeping yet intimate story.

Weisman, who grew up in Davie and began acting in South Florida as a child, became an in-demand Chicago actor after graduating from Northwestern University (he received the best supporting actor Joseph Jefferson Award for “The History Boys”), expanding his career to film, television (he plays the LGBTQ+ character Frank on “Sesame Street”) and Broadway (“Harry Potter and the Cursed Child”).

He has seen plenty of McKeever’s work and was part of a one-night Zoom reading of “Daniel’s Husband,” the writer’s play about gay marriage, from his New York apartment during the pandemic.  When he read “American Rhapsody,” Weisman says, “I fell in love with it. It reminded me of Michael Cunningham’s ‘Flesh and Blood’ in its scope, its storytelling, and the Americana in it.”

Weisman also relished the idea of originating the complex role of Franky, “this queer figure who doesn’t have to be innocent and likable and funny all the time. He has allowed me to be flawed, even nasty. So many times when we play these characters, we have the shimmer of a halo around us.  I appreciate how unhappy this character is.”

Meltzer argues that Franky is closer in spirit to him than to McKeever.

“Franky has the opposite qualities of Michael.  His is more of a Peer Gynt story: You work so hard that you lose yourself to find yourself,” the director says.

Weisman, now 35, says he has looked up to McKeever since he was 10, that the playwright was an influence in his decision to become an artist.  Other than the pandemic reading of “Daniel’s Husband” (which was inspired by McKeever-Meltzer debates on gay marriage), he hadn’t worked with the director on a full production, and he’s finding the experience different and exhilarating.

“Stuart is incredibly impulsive.  Every moment feels like you’re walking through an electrical field, and when you put it all together, it’s like fireworks,” the actor says. “I don’t work that way. I’m very in my head and go back to these cerebral impulses.”

Playing the Colombian-American Albert, Alayeto is also new to Zoetic, McKeever and Meltzer.  The son of Cuban parents who came to Miami in 1961, he is relishing being able to originate the role of a husband and father with post-traumatic stress disorder and, like his character, has a wife who travels for work, a daughter and a close relationship with his mother-in-law.

“It’s amazing how efficiently Michael goes through the history. It’s very much a family play that doesn’t get bogged down,” he observes. “I’m very impressed with his rhythm and the melody of his prose… Stuart is very, very specific. I’m amazed at his attention to detail… He provides solid anchor points to connect with, and nothing feels arbitrary.”

Corey, who plays Albert’s driven lawyer-wife Jenny, and Elam, whose black lesbian bartender character Nat becomes a close friend to several Cabots, are both members of Zoetic’s extended artistic family.  Both have been in multiple productions done by the company, and both find this McKeever play especially resonant.

“This play in particular is relatable to everyone: to people affected by 9/11, the feminist movement, the Black Lives Matter movement, the American experience, the female experience, the gay experience, the human experience,” says Corey. “The first time I read the play, I fell in love with Jenny. She has a ‘blue fire’ in her heart, like Papa Frank did. I also feel that fire in me.”

Elam, who originated roles in McKeever’s “Moscow” and “Clark Gable Slept Here” at Zoetic, says it’s an “honor and a privilege” to be playing characters written with her in mind.

“I can relate to Nat in so many ways. She’s gay, she’s black. Nothing she says is foreign to me,” Elam says.  “Alex and I shared things about our personal lives.  We play best friends, and we just clicked.  He’s like so many of my gay homeboys.”

“American Rhapsody” is a memory play, a work of imagination grounded in McKeever’s experiences and perceptions of the world. His Cabot family deals with loss and joy, tragedy and triumph, little decisions, and life-changing ones. The play is suffused with warmth and humor, as well as pain.

Alayeto believes that, even with the challenges the family and the country endure, the takeaway is a point of view that can benefit anyone.

“This paints a hopeful picture of America, which we sorely need.  This is a country of optimism and hope. We can make this the land of the possible,” he says. “I think it’s a play audiences need.”

 WHAT: “American Rhapsody” by Michael McKeever

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

WHEN:  Previews 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Jan. 12, opens 7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 13; 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

ArtburstMiami.com is a nonprofit source of dance, visual arts, music and performing arts news. Sign up for our newsletter and never miss a story.

Filmmakers create ‘Local Love Letters’ to Miami Beach through Oolite Arts, city funding

Karla Caprali’s “South of Fifth,” is about her mother-in-law, Barbara Gillman, a Miami Beach resident and renowned art dealer. Caprali was one of nine filmmakers who received $5,000 to create a short film, which premiere for free outdoors on Thursday, Dec. 15. (Photo courtesy of the filmmaker)

When Karla Caprali, a Miami-based film animator and director, heard about the open call for “Local Love Letters,” she knew she had the perfect story.

Last March, Oolite Arts and the City of Miami Beach awarded nine Miami-based filmmakers $5,000 each to create 3 to 5 minute narrative or documentary film shorts as “Local Love Letters” to Miami Beach.

Caprali’s film, “South of Fifth,” will be one of the films premiering Thursday, Dec. 15, at 7 p.m. in a free screening outdoors on Wallcast at New World Symphony’s SoundScape Park on Miami Beach.

The winning stories share a love for Miami Beach and the special places, compelling moments and local heroes, who make up its very DNA.

Caprali’s love story to Miami Beach uses frame-by-frame, hand-drawn animation, on-camera interviews, and black and white family photos to tell the story of Miami Beach arts pioneer Barbara Gillman.

“When they said it has to be something about Miami Beach, I began to think . . . ‘I do have a perfect story about a girl born in Miami Beach,” Caprali says. “And she’s actually my mother-in-law.”

Caprali says of Gillman: “She’s an art pioneer.  She is one of the first gallery owners in Miami, and she was the first who actually brought Andy Warhol to Miami. And she was just this fantastic art connoisseur.”

The Barbara Gillman Gallery featured national and international 20th-century and contemporary artists for 30 years from 1979 to 2008 and Gillman was a strong supporter of the Miami art scene. Gillman continued to represent artists until 2015 from her storage space, which she called the “Museum Vault.” Her shows featured works by Andy Warhol, James Rosenquist, Jim Dine, Christo, Robert Rauschenberg, Picasso, Jasper Johns, and Judith Page, many of whose works remain in her private collection which her family now manages.

The film is also a sensitive living testament for a much-loved mother-in-law as she succumbs to dementia.

Caprali says she also wanted to tell a bigger story. “I’m concerned because Miami unfortunately has this thing of a lack of memory. We are not really so good at memory. If you ask younger people in the arts, “Who is Barbara Gillman? They don’t know.’ They don’t really know about the history of Miami. If you ask somebody, “Did you know that in the ’30s and ’40s the Jewish people we only allowed to live down south of Fifth?” . . . nobody knows that.”

The animation is brought to life with an original jazz score. Caprali says she enlisted Jesse Katz. “He is a very young musician. He just graduated from University of Miami, he has a band, and this is all his original music. Barbara was a jazz lover. She loved jazz.”

The narration for the film is based on a 2013 interview with Gillman by Miami Design Preservation League.

Another film in the premiere is “I Care About Your Mailbox,”

“I think it has what we are calling a hybrid tone of a few things: not a documentary, or narrative film, rather it floats in between. It’s something that we really are proud of,” explains Gimenez.

The film takes the audience on a heartwarming tour through Miami Beach and suburban Miami in search of and appreciation for quirky, imposing, funny, broken and sometimes forgotten mailboxes.

“We are seeing that Miami is really changing a lot right now, and we really wanted to document it before it flashes before our eyes.  There are some really beautiful mailboxes we need to capture before they are taken down,” explains Suazo about the idea behind the film.

“I Care About Your Mailbox” has a light comedic touch.

“I think the mailboxes are texture and throughline, but without the people there is no story,” comments Gimenez, who gave kudos to Suazo, who found the mailboxes and encouraged the team to speak with the quirkiest of mailbox owners.

“(Isabella) is good at following the lead of something in the moment. What we realized is that (the mailboxes) are a representation of that neighborhood and its people. People say, ‘. . . I know that mailbox; that’s right by this place where I had my first kiss.’ ”

When asked how the $5,000 award stretched to produce such finely textured film shorts, both Caprali and Gimenez responded that the money was “just enough” to allow for them to get the shorts made.

For Caprali, it paid for the animation software she needed, and the competition was the catalyst that motivated her to make a film to tell a story she had long wanted to get out into the world.

Gimenez says: “$5,000 in filmmaking is usually not that much but in this specific project, it was just enough, mostly because it funded our time. . .”

Meanwhile, both filmmakers are also looking for new funding to expand their short films into feature-length films.

The other films premiering include:

“Fire Moon Rising” by Felipe Aguilar: The heartbeat of Miami gets revitalized every full moon, as it illuminates a “secret” Beach Drum Circle.

“It Had to Be You” by Juan Barquin and Trae DeLellis: A couple reminisces on the wild night on South Beach that kicked off their ten-year relationship.

“Toxic Beach” by Abhi Chatterjee-Dutt: Flags flying on lifeguard towers warning swimmers about the tide are used as a metaphor to explore all that is to love about Miami Beach.

“How to make a movie in Miami” by Carla Jerez: A local filmmaker explains how to make a Miami movie in this surrealist desktop documentary.

“La Vie” by Al’lkens Plancher: Three periods of a Haitian couple’s life intertwined together at the shore of North Miami Beach.

“Letter From the Age of Ecocide” by Shireen Rahimi: A woman thrives in her beloved underwater home when suddenly, the natural beauty around her begins to decay. A wise sage narrates her grieving process from another dimension, using the ancient poetry of her ancestors to reveal a universal story of radical acceptance.

“Loveboat Takeout” by Melanie Wu: An experimental docu-fiction short about an immigrant family’s former business, a Chinese restaurant in Miami.

WHAT: “Love Letters to Miami Beach”

WHERE: New World Center SoundScape Park, 500 17th St., Miami Beach

WHEN: 7 to 9 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 15

COST: Free; RSVP recommended.

INFORMATION: oolitearts.org

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The Foundry’s ‘Red Speedo’ skewers Olympic dreams and the cost of compromise

Gabriell Salgado as an Olympic hopeful and Christopher Anthony Ferrer as his brother in “Red Speedo” at The Foundry. (Photo courtesy of Dennis Dean)

When you go to a Ronnie Larsen-produced play at The Foundry in Wilton Manors, you never know quite what you’re going to get.

It could be something over-the-top wild like Larsen’s naked gay comedy “Truck Stop Sally’s Sex Party” or Patrick Cuccaro’s upcoming drag musical “Slammer Girlz.”

Or it could be a very different sort of play, like Larsen’s autobiographically-inspired “The Actors” or the play that’s onstage through the end of December – Lucas Hnath’s “Red Speedo.”

Collaborating for the third time with guest director Stuart Meltzer, the artistic director of Miami’s Zoetic Stage, Larsen is presenting an Obie Award-winning play about the moral compromises of an Olympic-class swimmer and those who would profit from his success.

Hnath, an Orlando native whose 2017 Broadway play “A Doll’s House, Part 2” will be produced by GableStage in February-March, is known for his eclectic range in subject and style, and 2013’s “Red Speedo” is in part his nod to the work of David Mamet.

Miami-based actors Gabriell Salgado and Chris Anthony Ferrer (both graduates of  Miami’s New World School of the Arts) are joined by Casey Sacco and Jerry Seeger in this taut exploration of malleable values, shifting allegiances  and flat-out lies.  Hnath’s plotting is intricately twisting, full of surprises, so we’ll be stingy in sharing certain details.

But we will tell you this: When you enter the 53-seat theater space at The Foundry, the first thing you’ll notice is the sleek pool that set designer Melquisedel Dominguez built on the elevated stage. Because if you’re producing “Red Speedo,” a play about a swimmer on the cusp of career-transforming success, of course you need a real pool, no matter how small your theater may be.

Salgado, a Silver Palm Award recipient who appeared in the world premiere of Michael McKeever’s “The Code” at The Foundry, stars as a rising swimming talent named Ray. Playing a closeted 1950s would-be movie star in “The Code,” the chiseled Salgado wore a suit; here, his entire costume consists of a tiny red bathing suit, a swim cap and goggles, plus a massive sea serpent tattoo (designed by Avi Ram) encircling his body.  “Red Speedo” isn’t a gay-themed play, but it’s clear that the poster featuring a swimming Salgado and his extremely low body fat percentage has helped drive the show’s brisk ticket sales.

With a growing body of professional work, the young actor stunned in his Carbonell Award-nominated professional debut as the Creature in Zoetic’s “Frankenstein,” and he’ll soon appear in the 20th-anniversary revival of Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics” at Miami New Drama and Charise Castro Smith’s “El Huracán” at GableStage.

His challenge in “Red Speedo” is playing a childlike, manipulative, obsessive athlete who’s maybe a quarter as smart as Salgado himself.  With the help of Meltzer, who has a genius for finding funny undercurrents in the smallest moments and gestures, Salgado nails pretty-boy Ray’s hubris and deficiencies.

For example:  As Ray’s lawyer brother Peter, Ferrer lays into Seeger as Ray’s longtime swim coach. Seeger silently radiates intense disapproval as Peter argues that Coach should not report the discovery of performance-enhancing drugs in the facility’s refrigerator.  Not on the eve of the Olympic qualifying trials, not as Ray may ink a life-changing spokesmodel deal with Speedo.

As the men escalate into a full-blown verbal conflict delivered in Mamet-like sentence fragments, Salgado’s seated Ray follows the back-and-forth with his large brown eyes, as if he were a spectator at Wimbledon. His rationale for the giant tattoo (he’d stand out more easily on TV) and his ideas for future nicknames (Ray Gun? Raydar?) show his intensifying focus on the glittering aftermath of Olympic success.

Ray is not, however, the only flawed character in “Red Speedo.” All four have issues.

Peter, played with an always-there undercurrent of desperation by the skillful Ferrer, sees his problematic brother’s success as his ticket out of a law firm job he hates, a fast pass into the lucrative world of sports agentry.

Seeger’s commanding Coach at first appears to be an honorable man, one who knows every mental and physical facet of his star swimmer.  But as it starts to look like Ray may jump ship, honor becomes situational.

The warmly appealing Sacco plays Ray’s sad and bitter ex Lydia, a sports-focused therapist he was ready to marry (and he still has a cockamamie matrimonial plan in mind). He has asked her to the training facility because he desperately needs something from her, and in the course of their conversation, we learn how much she’s lost because of Ray and Peter and her own actions.

As amusing as “Red Speedo” can be, Hnath’s play is ultimately unsettling, deeply so when the brothers finally come to blows. At first, Paul Homza’s fight choreography has Ray and Peter trading gut punches. But then the pool, silently waiting the whole time, gets weaponized. And you, like one of the actors, agonizingly hold your breath.

Adding to Dominguez’s tile-dominated set, Preston Bircher’s lighting reinforces the quiet shimmer of water, the stark glare of confrontation, the bloody potential of cheating. Panos Mitos mixes the startling blast of competition sounds with the music – some calming, some energizing – Ray hears through his earbuds.

“Red Speedo” is a play that might have shown up on any number of South Florida stages.  But Larsen is the producer who said yes, had the pool built and collaborated with Meltzer on a powerful production.  His is the little theater that could – and does.

WHAT: “Red Speedo” by Lucas Hnath

WHERE: The Foundry, 2306 N. Dixie Hwy., Wilton Manors

WHEN:  8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 7 p.m. Sunday (added matinee 2 p.m. Dec. 7), through Dec. 30

COST:  $35-$50

INFORMATION: 954-826-8790 or  playsofwilton.com

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Elizabeth Price shines in City Theatre’s thought-provoking ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’

Elizabeth Price as Heidi, with Seth Trucks as the Legionnaire in City Theatre’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” inside the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center through Dec. 18. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Elizabeth Price comes bounding into the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater happily waving, greeting the audience, smiling so hard you just know her cheeks are going to hurt (later, after so many more broad smiles, she confesses they do).

She’s wearing a mustard yellow suit jacket, and the hue – in combination with glowing lighting and golden panels sporting headshots of long-gone American Legion leaders – makes the radiant Price the embodiment of sunshine.

Portraying playwright-actor Heidi Schreck in City Theatre’s production of “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the veteran South Florida actor is giving one of those performances that makes you doubt anyone could top her or so thoroughly convey the shifting emotional facets of an impassioned artist. (Take note that understudy Melissa Almaguer will perform as Heidi at the Thursday shows Dec. 8 and Dec. 15.)

You’d be tempted to say Price is giving the performance of a lifetime if you’ve not seen her interpretative excellence on so many stages throughout the region. So whether or not her work in “Constitution” is the culmination of her decades of study and experience, it is a peak moment in her body of work.

And it is every bit as gripping and endearing as Schreck’s own 2019 Tony Award-nominated performance in the role.

Staged with a sculptor’s precision by City Theatre artistic director Margaret M. Ledford, “What the Constitution Means to Me” doesn’t fall into the classic well-made play genre.  A finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for drama, the piece operates on a number of levels – as a memory play, a trenchant comedy, an exploration of personal and familial trauma, participatory political theater that examines the strengths and deficiencies of the United States Constitution.

After a brief explanatory preamble, Price’s Heidi reverts to her 15-year-old self, a small-town girl from Wenatchee, Washington.  She is re-creating the life-changing period when she traveled the country vying for college money by participating in debates about the Constitution at various American Legion posts.  The content of those long-ago speeches, she confesses, has been pulled from her memory since her mother tossed out the originals.

After an American Legionnaire (Seth Trucks) explains the rules of the debate and starts the time clock, teen Heidi launches into an exploration of the Constitution and key amendments, personalizing the centuries-long ramifications of a document written in the late 18th century by white male landowners.

Her illustrative examples are smart, ironic, funny, and chilling.  The movie “Dirty Dancing” figures in, as does a horrifying account of the male violence and sexual abuse visited upon generations of women and children in her family.

Eventually, adult Heidi sheds her blazer and teen persona to take us even more deeply into the ways a debatably flawed document touches or dictates so many facets of our lives.  Discarding that persona and using her real name, Price debates a Miami high school student (at the opening performance, Felix Varela Senior High junior Carlotta Avila did the honors) on the question of whether the Constitution should be kept or thrown out.

“What the Constitution Means to Me” is a play with multiple layers, one that calls attention to its theatrical devices, and not just in the Heidi character and the actor who plays her.

After the American Legionnaire details some of the most brutal rulings in battered women cases, Price’s Heidi notes that he’s being played by an actor named Mike (the part was originated by Mike Iveson, a New York actor who most recently appeared as Roger Stone and Bill Clinton in Miami New Drama’s world premiere of Rogelio Martinez’s “Elián”).  She says he’s there because she wanted some “positive male energy” in the play, and he seems a little rattled by that.

But then Trucks-as-Mike stands, starts talking, rids himself of his Legionnaire paraphernalia, and launches into a powerful monologue illustrating the idea that things – and people – are often quite different from what they seem to be.  Like Price, he’s wonderful.

At certain points, “Constitution” is quite interactive, with the audience encouraged to respond with applause, foot-stomping or comments.  Given the fractious state of our political engagement these days, you might expect some ugliness to surface.  That’s possible, of course, but the way the play is written, the cast’s positive energy and director Ledford’s invisible control seem to keep nastiness at bay.

The production itself is exquisitely realized. Jodi Dellaventura’s set pointedly lacks a door for entrances and exits (the reason is spelled out in the script), but it evokes a long-ago American Legion post.  Eric Nelson’s lighting encompasses the golden glow of memory, the harshness of some women’s lives, the tender promise of a better future.

Among sound designer Matt Corey’s contributions are snippets of Supreme Court sessions dealing with birth control, parsing the meaning of the word “shall,” and a comment about female representation on the court from the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg.  Kudos to costume designer Ellis Tillman for helping to give Price’s teen Heidi her glow and turning Trucks into a Legionnaire so classic that you wouldn’t be at all surprised to find his portrait among all the others on the set.

“What the Constitution Means to Me” is an important play, sometimes sobering, sometimes disturbing.  Ultimately, it sends you home thinking hard, maybe debating about how the Constitution and American political life can be made better.

You will also likely feel uplifted, thanks to a skilled playwright sharing her story and to Price, whose thrilling work generates an empathetic connection that is one of theater’s greatest gifts.

WHAT: “What the Constitution Means to Me” by Heidi Schreck

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 (additional 7:30 p.m. show Dec. 7, no matinee Dec. 10), through Dec. 18 (After each Friday performance, moderator Deborah Magdalena will host half-hour conversations exploring the play’s themes; attorneys Diana C. Mendez and Michele Samaroo are scheduled for Dec. 9, and attorney-playwright Christopher Demos Brown and Miami Urban Debate League Co-Chair Osvaldo Garcia Dec. 16.)

COST:  $55 and $60

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org

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City Theatre’s ‘What the Constitution Means to Me’ ready to debate

Elizabeth Price portrays playwright Heidi Schreck in City Theatre’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” at the Carnival Studio Theater inside the Adrienne Arsht Center. (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)

When actor, playwright and screenwriter Heidi Schreck was a teen growing up in Wenatchee, Washington (aka “The Apple Capital of the World”), she began entering debate competitions at various American Legion posts around the country, vying for prize money to help her pay for college.

Her subject? The United States Constitution, a document that became a 15-year-old’s obsession, one right up there with the Salem witch trials, theater and Patrick Swayze.

We know about those objects of her teen affections because she wrote them into her play “What the Constitution Means to Me,” which will get its southeastern premiere in a City Theatre production. The show runs at the Carnival Studio Theater in Miami’s Arsht Center Dec. 1-18.

Schreck, now 51, proved to be an excellent debater.  She graduated from the University of Oregon, then went on to further adventures as an English teacher in Siberia and a journalist in St. Petersburg (the one in Russia, not the one near Tampa) before beginning her theater career in Seattle.

In New York, she became an Obie Award-winning actor, then began to see her plays produced and recognized in playwriting competitions. But little did she imagine that the 2017 play inspired by those long-ago debates would lead to her becoming a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for drama as well as a 2019 Tony Award nominee for best play and best actress in a play.

“I started noodling around with it, revisiting the contest in 2009 or 2010,” says Schreck, who’s currently down to the wire with a television pilot.  “I’m interested in writing about teen girls, and this was a weird, funny, formative experience that made me feel powerful.”

City Theatre’s Margaret M. Ledford, artistic director of the company best known for its Summer Shorts festival since 2017, chose “What the Constitution Means to Me” for its annual December full-length play slot because “it’s such an empowering play, as a woman and a U.S. citizen.  It made me think everyone should see it.  The script is tight, concise, funny and engaging. It has such an earnestness, but there’s nothing preachy about it.”

Operating on multiple levels, the play focuses on Schreck telling her story, first as a 15-year-old, then as an adult, followed by a debate with a student on whether the Constitution should be abolished. An American Legion member talks about the rules and keeps things running smoothly, but he eventually reveals his own backstory in a riveting monologue.

The concept of constitutionally enshrined negative and positive rights is explored in the play, with the former prohibiting an action and the latter requiring one. If that sounds dry or confusing, the way it plays out is anything but.

As she talks, Schreck’s character reveals exactly how she believes the negative rights enshrined in a Constitution devised by 18th-century white male landowners failed to protect generations of women in her family.  That is the beating, valiant heart of “What the Constitution Means to Me.”

“The question was always, ‘How did this document change your life?’  I took that deeply seriously, so I researched my family history in relationship to the document,” says Schreck, whose discoveries became a vividly shocking part of her play. “I was heartbroken about what I discovered. But the women in my family lived through it, and I’m lucky my mom was such an amazing person and survivor.”

Yet, as Ledford noted, the play is sometimes very funny and so inventive that it sounds almost improvisational, but it isn’t.  Though the world surrounding the play is constantly evolving and giving fresh urgency to Schreck’s words, the script itself holds up.

“The contest portion doesn’t need changes, since it’s set in 1989 and is historical,” Schreck observes.  “I’ve made a couple of tiny edits to the part where I’m a middle-aged woman.  The biggest changes come in the debates (at the end), where elements change from night to night.”

Schreck performed in a filmed version of the play shown on Amazon’s Prime Video in 2020, but she always intended for other actors to play the Heidi character.  In Miami, Elizabeth Price will do the honors, calling the role “the biggest thing I’ve ever done.”

That’s saying something, since Price – who is also a director, producer and associate artistic director of Fort Lauderdale’s New City Players – is an award-winning actor whose resume includes “Twelfth Night,” “The Importance of Being Earnest,” “The Normal Heart,” “August: Osage County,” “Misery” and a host of other plays at theaters around South Florida and in other cities.

A two-time Silver Palm Award winner and three-time Carbonell Award nominee, Price is also a determined survivor. When she was teaching and earning her master’s degree in acting at Florida Atlantic University, a car hit her at night as she was riding her bike one night.  From 2017 to 2019, she endured seven surgeries – although she did take on certain physically limited roles during that time – and today, she says, “I’m doing pretty well. I have the agility and use of my body back, just some small daily challenges.”

Ledford cast Price, whose relationship with City Theatre began as a literary manager while the actor was earning her bachelor of fine arts degree from Barry University, after auditioning a number of performers.

“Elizabeth has that nerdy, goofy, earnest, smart quality. The role calls for a strong female who doesn’t have authority to be strong,” the director says.

When she heard City would be doing the play, Price read and loved the script, then watched Schreck in the Prime Video version.  She loved that too and thought about what she could bring to the role that gives her the lion’s share of lines in the play.

For Price, rehearsing to play 15-year-old Heidi, adult Heidi and herself (as she does in the last part of the play) has brought its own kind of healing and inspiration.

“The more time I spend with the characters, the more I identify with the with the play, the way Heidi talks about making decisions and choices as a woman influenced by centuries of laws,” Price says. “I’ve picked up a lot of people pleasing. Things I’ve experienced were being named.  How I behaved when I felt I was in danger.  That’s a lot in my 48 years.”

The play’s nature allows for a complex range of emotions for the actor and the audience.

“Every time I’m rehearsing the personal stories, I’m crying,” Price says. “The play takes us to places in the dark recesses of the human heart, then lets us out, then takes us back.  It’s cathartic, really. It doesn’t bring us down. It allows us to laugh and grieve.”

Sharing the stage with Price are actor-director Seth Trucks as an American Legion member, and recent New World School of the Arts grad Janine Raquel Johnson as a young debater (others will also take on that role during the run).  Trucks and Price shared the stage in an Outré Theatre Company production of “The Normal Heart” in 2016, he directed her in a production of  Palm Beach Shakespeare Festival’s “Twelfth Night” in 2021, and the two are longtime friends.

“I’m extremely excited by the somewhat improvised ending and the way it engages the audience in a conversation,” says Trucks, son of the late Allman Brothers drummer Butch Trucks.  “I couldn’t be happier.  Politics is concerned with art, so as an artist, I love to concern myself with politics . . . The idea of negative vs. positive protections in the Constitution hones in on things a lot of people don’t know about.”

“What the Constitution Means to Me” comes at a time of transition, evaluation and potential growth for City Theatre.  Susan Westfall, the only one of City’s three founders still involved in day-to-day operations of the 27-year-old company, will now serve solely as a board member.  Ledford will continue leading the artistic side, while newly promoted executive director Gladys Ramirez heads City’s business and developmental operations.

“Our focus is putting the ‘city’ in City Theatre.  We have a national platform and great connections to playwrights around the country, but we want to elevate our presence in Miami – to reflect, uplift and serve the community,” says Ramirez, who notes that City’s Homegrown new play development project led by playwright Vanessa Garcia is just one such initiative.

“City Theatre is short plays. That will always be part of the brand. . . How do we stay true to that while we keep developing new work and also connect through full-length plays? We can’t rely on audiences of the past to take us into the future.”

Schreck and those involved in City Theatre’s production feel that some of the nation’s current divisions can be linked to the Constitution – although Schreck doesn’t believe Americans are as divided as recent elections might suggest.

“It seems clear that a lot of what’s harming our democracy is structural and embedded in the Constitution,” says Schreck, who suggests that legally protected bodily autonomy, limits to corporate campaign contributions, an impartial body to oversee redistricting, the right to health care for all and the Electoral College system all need addressing.

“We are just living in such a polarizing climate, where people don’t talk to one another,” says Ledford.  “We are individually so disconnected from our roots, our food sources, original thought – we’re very sheeplike.”

WHAT: “What the Constitution Means to Me” by Heidi Schreck

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. Dec. 1, opens 7:30 p.m. Dec. 2; regular performances 7:30 p.m Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional  7:30 p.m. show Dec. 7, no matinee Dec. 10), through Dec. 18. (After each Friday performance, moderator Deborah Magdalena will host half-hour conversations exploring the play’s themes; attorneys Damaris Del Valle and Carmen Maria Vizcaino are scheduled Dec. 2, attorneys Diana C. Mendez and Michele Samaroo Dec. 9, and attorney-playwright Christopher Demos Brown and Miami Urban Debate League Co-Chair Osvaldo Garcia Dec. 16.)

COST:  $55 and $60

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

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Epic ‘The Head and the Load’ headed for Adrienne Arsht Center

William Kentridge’s “The Head & the Load” is a massive collage of a performance told in music, dance, projections and poetry at the Adrienne Arsht Center. (Photo courtesy of Stella Olivier)

It’s a production of epic proportions on every scale imaginable. More than a straightforward performance in the traditional sense, “The Head and the Load” is a protean pageant of shadow play, projections, music and movement featuring 39 actors, dancers, singers and other musicians, most of them from South Africa.

The production, opening Dec. 1 at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, is the brainchild of William Kentridge, a whirlwind of a creator whose extraordinary output of film animations, opera adaptations, collage, sculpture, and charcoal drawings have put him firmly in the vanguard of international artists.  In his four decades plus in the studio, he has developed an intriguing visual language of artistic techniques and of objects—megaphones, maps, rotary telephones, typewriters—that is instantly recognizable.

“A Kentridge is a Kentridge,” says Johann Zietsman, president and CEO of the Arsht Center. “It doesn’t look like anyone else.”

In 2018, Kentridge was commissioned to create a piece to be performed at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern for London’s commemoration of the centenary of World War I. At roughly the same time, he was invited to premiere a work at New York’s cavernous Park Avenue Armory. Both called for something mammoth in scale.

“The formal thinking about space and performance in a way precedes the theme of the piece,” he says in a telephone interview from his native Johannesburg. “I know it sounds back to front, but the studio often works that way.”

He thus began an investigation into Africa’s involvement in the Great War. “It’s history that I should have known, but I didn’t know,” he says.

The British, he soon learned, had conscripted nearly one hundred thousand Black Africans to serve as porters in their campaign against the Germans in East Africa. These recruits, referred to as the Carrier Corps, were viewed as utterly expendable. Paid a miserly sum so as not to be considered slave labor, they were expected to be dead or of no use after a brief period of service hauling munitions and materiel across the dense jungle. When they expired, they would simply be left where they lay, to be replaced by other nameless conscripts.

“In the end, (‘The Head and the Load’) does have a very strong sense of this unknown history, what is it to elide histories and to make them disappear,” Kentridge says.

I asked Zietsman if a work of this magnitude and technical complexity had ever been produced at the Arsht Center. “Not in the history of the Arsht,” he says. “Not on this scale.” The audience will enter the theater through the loading dock and sit onstage with the performers, looking out in the direction the house would usually be. “The challenge is not just how we mount the show. We have to build risers for over 500 audience members . . . I’m looking right now at a thousand feet of trusses and miles and miles of cables. But when the curtain goes up, it goes up. That’s what we do.”

The title of the piece refers to an enigmatic West African proverb, one of many that adorn the walls of Kentridge’s Johannesburg studio: “The head and the load are the troubles of the neck.”  “I couldn’t quite figure out what it meant,” Kentridge says. “It’s not only the physical load that bears you down, but also the psychic load.”

Kentridge’s work has long interrogated systems of colonialism and oppression—and so did his parents’ work before him. His father, Sydney Kentridge, a legendary attorney and still alive at age 100, defended in the course of his career three Nobel Peace Prize recipients: Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and Albert Luthuli. His late mother, human rights lawyer and fierce anti-apartheid advocate Felicia Kentridge, cofounded Johannesburg’s Legal Resources Center. The ethical reverberations of his parents’ work, he says, “kind of disappear in the studio and maybe reappear in the finished work… No doubt that there’s a connection.”

His father would read the classics aloud to his children—everything from Greek myths to Victorian novels. As an adolescent, however, the son was more moved by Dada than Dickens. It was a fascination that would stay with him until this day.

“Dada is so strange,” Kentridge says. “In high school, I was intrigued by the Dadaists when we were doing art history. But it took me a long time to understand that every contemporary artist or all contemporary artists are in debt to the Dadaists, in what they made possible. For you to be able to think to yourself, ‘I’m an artist, but my drawing today is going to be this poem, or my drawing is going to be this performance of a poem, or my drawing is going to be this theater piece with sixty performers in it.’”

The quality of those performers, Kentridge would tell you, is the secret to his success.

“I’m very good at choosing collaborators,” he says. He has worked with composer Philip Miller for over 25 years and with the extraordinary Belgian costume designer Greta Goiris for 17; Australian singer/actor Joanna Dudley has been with him for 7. Thuthuka Sibisi, musical director and cocomposer and choreographer Gregory Maqoma are more recent additions to Kentridge’s artistic tribe, which developed “The Head & the Load” together at the Centre for the Less Good Idea, an arts incubator he created in 2016 in downtown Johannesburg. “Apart from the orchestra and the chorus, the main roles, both danced, sung and acted, were created by the people who now perform them . . . There’s a real agency of everyone in it, making the piece together.”

He says there are elements that change each performance.

“People have to be very aware and sensitive to where they are and what’s happening on the stage and how they relate to the other people, because it’s never the same. There are too many people and too many moving parts to set it precisely,” he says.

Even for a seasoned creator like Kentridge—who has seldom met an artistic limb he wasn’t tempted to stroll out on—this production is a devilishly ambitious work.

“At the moment, our crisis for today is that our container with everything we need in it is still stuck at Jacksonville… there’s a snarl up at the ports, so they have to U-Haul it down piece by piece.” Add to that the challenge of arranging for U.S. visas for close to sixty South African artists and technicians and you have an idea of the logistical heavy lifting a production of this scale entails.

In a twist that is as worthy of Dada’s absurdist vision as anything else, the production owes its Miami run not just to the generosity of diehard arts patrons like Valerie Dillon and Dan Lewis, but also to Knoxville’s Roy Cockrum, the former actor and one-time Episcopalian monk who used his 2014 Powerball winnings to create a foundation to promote theater on a grand scale here in the U.S.

One can only imagine what the Dadaists with their manifesto would have made of that.

WHAT: William Kentridge’s “The Head & the Load”

WHERE: Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Ziff Ballet Opera House, 1300 Biscayne Blvd, Miami, FL 33132. (Note: Entrance is through stage loading dock) 

WHEN: 8 p.m., Thursday, Dec. 1, Friday, Dec. 2 and Saturday, Dec. 3. 2  p.m. matinee Saturday, Dec. 3 followed by post-show conversation with William Kentridge and creative team.

COST: $50 – $175

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722 or arshtcenter.org 

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‘Million Dollar Quartet Christmas’ regifts four music legends at Actors’ Playhouse

Dominique Scott as Jerry Lee Lewis at the piano in “Million Dollar Quartet Christmas” at Actors’ Playhouse through Jan. 1. (Photo courtesy of Alberto Romeu)

An impromptu jam session by four future Rock and Roll Hall of Fame giants has become one of those showbiz gifts that keeps on giving.

On Dec. 4, 1956, Sun Records founder Sam Phillips wanted to record some new tracks with Carl Perkins, whose “Blue Suede Shoes” had been a hit for Perkins and  Sun superstar Elvis Presley.

Phillips brought in the young Jerry Lee Lewis to play piano on the session. And then two other Phillips stars – Presley, whose contract had been sold to RCA to keep Sun Records afloat, and Johnny Cash, who was about to jump ship to Columbia Records – came by the Memphis studio.

When the four started jamming, the Sun engineer pressed “record,” and a one-time-only group dubbed the Million Dollar Quartet made a piece of music history.

In 2006 at the Seaside Music Theatre in Daytona Beach, that night and those stars spawned “Million Dollar Quartet,” a piece of musical theater jam-packed with hits.  The show would go on to a major production at Chicago’s Goodman Theatre in 2008, to Broadway in 2010, Off-Broadway, London, a tour and productions at theaters all over the United States – including two by Actors’ Playhouse in Coral Gables.

With the smash success of those 2016 and 2018 productions at the Miracle Theatre, it’s no surprise that Actors’ Playhouse and artistic director David Arisco would go back to the “Million Dollar” well to kick off the company’s 35^th anniversary season.

While the new show, “Million Dollar Quartet Christmas,” isn’t precisely a sequel – it takes place on the same night as the original, because Elvis, Johnny, Carl and Jerry Lee got together just the one time – it serves up a fresh collection of songs linked by a different story.

The music, as anyone in the delighted Actors’ audience would tell you, is sung and played to a fare-thee-well by talented actor-musicians who have been part of one or both of the company’s “Million Dollar Quartet” productions.

Colin Escott’s new book, however, pales in comparison to his Tony Award-nominated original (he co-wrote the first one with Floyd Mutrux).  All of the really good stuff about these stars, Sam Phillips, Sun, jealousies, betrayals, gossip – that was all used in “Million Dollar Quartet.”  Escott has struggled to construct a story that isn’t half as compelling, and no amount of finesse on the part of the performers and Arisco can disguise that.

Fortunately, at least with this particular show, theatergoers aren’t focused on listening to the characters talk to each other. They want to hear the music, the hits, Elvis singing “Blue Christmas,” thank you very much. And they do.

Led by Arisco and musical director Dominique Scott, who’s reprising his Carbonell Award-winning role as Jerry Lee Lewis, the actors deliver the vocal and instrumental goods.

Eddie Clendening, who played Elvis on Broadway and in the first Actors’ production, is back as the King, again with a sultry singer named Dyanne in tow (Lindsey Corey, here a redhead in a fits-like-a-glove red velvet dress).  Sky Seals is back as Cash, Jeremy Sevelovitz as Perkins, with David Sonneborn on drums and Jonny Bowler on bass.  Gregg Weiner has returned as Phillips, whom he first played at Actors’ in 2018.

Solos, duets and songs by the cast as a whole flow like spiked eggnog at a company Christmas party.

Clendening’s Elvis croons “Don’t Be Cruel,” a yearning “I’ll Be Home for Christmas” and sings a lovely duet with Seals’s Cash on “Silent Night.” Seals sends a happy jolt through the audience with “Ring of Fire,” and Sevelovitz’s Perkins blazes on guitar as he sings “Cotton Top.”

Scott, playing the controversial rock ‘n’ roll legend who passed away just last month, is a wild man as Lewis, singing “Chantilly Lace,” “Boogie Woogie Santa Claus,” “Bad Kid,” then easily topping himself more than once during the concert-style finale.

Corey adds vocal spice with a sultry “Santa Baby” and other tunes, but her mission appears to be slinking around the studio and draping her arm over this musician or that one.  Her talented, charismatic Dyanne deserves more. Weiner plays Phillips in a pleasant, low-key way rather than as a music pioneer facing the loss of stars he helped create.

The design team – set designer Gene Seyffer, lighting designer Eric Nelson, sound designer Eric Bonilla, costume designer Ellis Tillman and set dresser/properties designer Jodi Dellaventura – effectively re-creates the “Million Dollar” Sun studio, the period look of the actors, the shifting moods of different songs.

In going back to the creative well, “Million Dollar Quartet Christmas” doesn’t deliver as reliably as its predecessor.  But it is a rollicking holiday mood-enhancing experience for music lovers looking for a different way to get into the spirit of the season.

WHAT: “Million Dollar Quartet Christmas” by Colin Escott

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

WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Jan. 1

COST: $40 to $125 (seniors 65 and over get 10 percent off weekdays only; students 25 and under with valid student ID pay $15 for a rush ticket available 15 minutes before a weekday performance)

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293 or actorsplayhouse.org

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Miami native tells father’s story of dying wish in her documentary film ‘Last Flight Home’

Eli, Lisa, Rachel, Ondi and David Timoner in an archival image circa 1979 from Ondi Timoner’s film “Last Flight Home,” opening Friday at Coral Gables Art Cinema. (Photo courtesy of MTV Documentary Films)

Eli Timoner was known to Miamians for his no-frills airline Air Florida, which he founded in 1972. It was an intra-state carrier that offered low rates and began a Miami-to-London route that beat out the big-name airlines when it charged as little as $175 for a transatlantic trip.

Documentary filmmaker and Ransom Everglades graduate Andrea Doane “Ondi” Timoner, the middle child of three, was daddy’s girl, right up until the very end. She didn’t set out to document the last days of her father’s life in what’s become her latest film “Last Flight Home.” But the labor of love and what was meant to be a private memorial video for the family turned into a full-length feature documentary. “It just poured out of me,” Ondi, 49, says.

“Last Flight Home” has played the big festival circuits, which included a premiere at Sundance, and was an official selection at Telluride and London. Now in release through MTV Documentary Films, “Last Flight Home” comes “home to Miami” opening Friday at Coral Gables Art Cinema.

It was in January of 2021 after her father was hospitalized because of breathing problems that he had made his wishes known. He had a series of health issues since a stroke in 1982 paralyzed and blinded him on his left side. On that day in January, he told his family, “I am going to take my life on the 3^rd of March. I don’t want to fight anymore. I want peace.”

In the film, we see Ondi’s sister, Rachel, a rabbi, asking her father “Are you definitely, definitely sure you are ready to go?” 92-year-year-old Eli, totally of sound mind, responds: “I am ready to go to the next adventure.”

His dying wish was put into motion through the California End of Life Option Act and Ondi captures those 15 days leading up to March 3, 2021, where she filmed in her parents’ Pasadena bungalow (they had moved in 2005 from Miami to California to be closer to their children and grandchildren). At this point, Eli is in a hospital bed in the middle of the living room.

California is one of ten U.S. states and the District of Columbia where medical aid in dying is authorized and legally allowed.

“My real motivation and urge to film Dad’s final days was not to forget him. I thought it would be something that I could give to my family that we would have forever,” she says. She kept a camera behind a closed door so as to be unobtrusive as people would come to say their final goodbyes to Eli. At other times, cameras were present. She says the family was used to Ondi’s filmmaking with cameras around all the time.

Since she wasn’t filming with a public documentary in mind, she unflinchingly shows so many personal moments including the exact process, the delivery of the medications that will be used to stop Eli’s heart, and the day she has the burdensome job of preparing the cocktail.

When everything was over and she was “no longer seeing him suffering or worrying about quarterbacking his care,” she recalls taking in all the video she had amassed. “I was able to look through the objective eyes of the camera and see all the people coming in there and what they were bringing in terms of grappling with facing a man that’s going to die.”

Ondi says that she only remembers her father as disabled. She was nine years old when, after leading an Air Florida meeting of 1,000 employees then running his usual six miles, Eli went in to the Doral Hotel spa for his weekly massage. The masseur who had worked with him for years would crack his neck as a usual part of the procedure.

“My mom was watching television two days before and on ‘Hour Magazine’ she saw a segment about not having your neck manipulated because it could cause stroke. It was like a warning from above,” Ondi recalls.

Ten minutes after the massage, her father, then 53, collapsed in the locker room shower of the spa. He had suffered a stroke ultimately caused by the neck manipulation.

Life changed completely for the family. He was told to step down from the airline not long after the stroke. “On July 10, 1982, the board of directors said to him, ‘What do you think Wall Street will think of a cripple running an airline?’ ”

Ondi remembers their idyllic life for her mother and dad in Miami – “pillars of Miami society” before the debilitating stroke paralyzed his left side. “They were so active in bringing the arts to Miami – on the board of the Miami City Ballet, YoungArts and so many arts organizations.”

The family lived for a bit in Coral Gables, but she says her growing years were spent in South Miami, SW 101^st Street and Ludlam Road. “I went to Pinecrest Elementary School and I remember riding bikes in our neighborhood. There was also one time when we had an alligator in our swimming pool and my mother didn’t believe it when my brother told her,” Ondi recalls.

Seven months prior to Eli’s stroke, on Jan. 13, 1982, Air Florida Flight 90 heading to Fort Lauderdale from Washington National Airport crashed shortly after takeoff. Investigators found that the cause of the crash was ice, snow and slush on the wings of the Boeing 737, which ended up dragging the plane down killing 78 people.

But it wasn’t that ill-fated flight that forced Air Florida into a tailspin and plunged Eli and his family into bankruptcy, according to Ondi. After his forced retirement, he was replaced by a man named Donald Lloyd-Jones. “He was the guy who pushed Dad out. He had only been there a month and after my father’s stroke he saw an opportunity to steal the airline. He apparently drank a bottle of vodka a day and did crossword puzzles while the airline went into the ground.”

In 1984, Air Florida went bankrupt and shut down.

There are glimpses of the heydays of Air Florida in the documentary and, as part of the film, Zoom calls lined up for people to say their last goodbyes to Eli, including some of his past employees.

Ondi says she’ll save the story of Air Florida for the narrative film she’s creating on the life of her father, the businessman. “I have wanted to do a documentary for so long about him and Air Florida, but there isn’t a lot of archival footage, so I thought I would make it another way.” She says she read him the script by his bedside during those final days of his life.

In “Last Flight Home,” Rabbi Rachel sits with her father for the vidui, the Jewish ritual of a final confessional. “The shame that he was carrying wasn’t the accident,” says Ondi, who makes it clear that there were four parties sued in the settlement for the series of deicing errors from that 1982 accident – American Airlines, Boeing, air traffic control and Air Florida.

“The confessional was more about the shame he carried about how he felt like a failure because he couldn’t provide for us.”

“Last Flight Home” will make audiences question their own mortality, she believes, and share in how it felt for Eli in his last days and the life’s lessons she watched him learn.

The film has left her with many things to think about, too, and her own fate.

She shares the story that while part of a question-and-answer session at the British Academy of Film and Television Arts recently, someone brought an interesting thought to mind. “‘ Do you think maybe you were born into this family and became a filmmaker so that you could make this film?’ ”

She’s come to a conclusion based on the query.

“I do think making ‘Last Flight Home’ was something I had been preparing for and it is part of my destiny,” says Ondi.

WHAT: “Last Flight Home”

WHERE: Coral Gables Art Cinema, 260 Aragon Ave., Coral Gables.

WHEN: Opens Friday, 11/18 runs through Thursday, 11/24. Opening night screening and in-person question and answer, 6 p.m. Friday with director Ondi Timoner and her mother and Eli’s wife, Lisa Timoner.  

COST: $21.75 for opening night screening and question and answer session, $17 for cinema members. Regular screening price, $12.75, $8 for cinema members.

INFORMATION:786-472-2249 or gablescinema.com

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