Miami Book Fair turns the city into a book lover’s dream

The weekend street fair is a draw to the eight-day Miami Book Fair, buzzing with live music, art, performances, and live readings. (Photo courtesy of the Miami Book Fair)

Miami. The Magic City. Known for its nightlife, parties, and beaches. But this month, Miami becomes the Book City.

During eight days, from Sunday, Nov. 13 through Sunday, Nov. 20, the Miami Book Fair 2022 will host approximately 250 booksellers and exhibitors, and more than 500 authors with both in-person and virtual events in English, Spanish and Haitian Creole.

Among the authors that will meet readers at the Wolfson Campus at Miami-Dade College are Russell Banks (“The Magic Kingdom”), Matthew Ball (“The Metaverse: And How It Will Revolutionize Everything”), “Saturday Night Live’s” Kevin Nealon (“I Exaggerate: My Brushes with Fame”), Azar Nafisi (“Reading Dangerously: The Subversive Power of Literature in Troubled Times”), Patti Smith (“A Book of Days”), Anne McCrary Sullivan (“The Everglades: Stories of Grit and Spirit from the Mangrove Wilderness”), Maud Newton (“Ancestor Trouble: A Reckoning and a Reconciliation”), and Jose “Fat Joe” Cartagena (“The Book of Jose: A Memoir.”)

Miami Book Fair has been running for 39 years, making it one of the longest-running literary events in the country.

So, Miami, the Book City?

“Most definitely,” agrees Lissette Mendez, director of programs at Miami Book Fair. “I think Miami is known for much more now – lots of art and culture events have been nurtured and grown roots since 1984, when the fair was founded. The fair, which has always been produced by Miami-Dade College, was part of a small vanguard that proved you can enjoy the beach and the nightlife, but also books and literary culture activities,” says Mendez.

So apart from its leisure aspect, Miami is also gaining a reputation as a city of literature, and hundreds of authors contribute each year to make Miami stand out, especially local authors such as Christina Diaz Gonzalez, Edwidge Danticat, Julie Marie Wade, Nadege Green, Vanessa Garcia, Pablo Cartaya, Chantel Acevedo, Natalia Sylvester and many more.

Mendez says that a good deal of the book fair program is focused on Miami and Florida, featuring authors who live and work in this city. Their contributions have cemented Miami in the larger literary ecosystem as a place where great stories are written, whether in English, Spanish, or Creole.

As a city, Miami itself is the setting of many novels. Mendez agrees that there’s something about the city that makes it prime for writers. “There is so much going on in Miami all the time. So much history related to the many waves of immigrants who have contributed to the creation of Miami. There is so much mythology – going back hundreds of years. There’s just a lot of source material for authors to be inspired by, or to cover, in nonfiction,” says Mendez.

She says regardless of the genre the writers work in, whether it be poetry, fiction, or non-fiction, they all have something in common.

“(It is) the nuance they bring to these Miami- or Florida-centric writings. This is the level of detail about our home state and city that allows for a deeper knowledge and understanding and contributes to a more expansive view of what Miami is all about,” explains Mendez.

Miamian author Pablo Cartaya, who will sign “The Last Beekeeper” at this year’s event, takes great pride in calling the 305 his home. “Whenever I travel around the country discussing books with readers, I represent Miami with all my heart.”

“My abuelos called this place home after losing their beloved homeland in Cuba. My family is here. My community, and my culture. When you love a place, you feel great pride in coming home to contribute to a beautiful event like the Miami Book Fair,” Cartaya says.

A journalist and author, Kathie Klarreich will participate in the fair with her anthology “Don’t Shake the Spoon: A Journal of Prison Writing, Volume 3.” She describes her journal as unique in that “the voices of writers who have been incarcerated (and have been) are being shared with the public.” Klarreich says the writers will participate in a panel. “Their participation on our panel authenticates the voices in the book and adds a dimension to the reality that tens of thousands of writers face, not just in Florida prisons but worldwide,” she says.

Nadege Green will participate in the exchange of ideas with “More Than What Happened: The Aftermath of Gun Violence in Miami,” a community book written by Miamians about gun violence.

A longtime Miami Book Fair fan, an avid book buyer, a moderator, and reporter, the 36-year-old Haitian American author confesses that the book is all about memory, healing, grief, survival, resisting, and more.

“O Miami reached out to me to edit the last book in the ‘Miami Trilogy,’ a three-book series that speaks to our city’s most pressing issues. I immediately knew I wanted this book to be about local gun violence,” says the former WLRN reporter.

“We’re used to hearing about gun violence as a crime story, not a human story. What happens after? How do people process loss and grief over time? What does it mean to always be on alert at school because of the threat of shootings? This anthology made up of contributions from people in Miami delves into the interior of how our neighbors deal and react to this very real issue,” says Green.

Tackling another issue, Cartaya, wants to educate about the environment in his dystopian middle-grade publication, “The Last Beekeeper.” Set about 125 years in the future, a pair of sister bees are fighting greedy forces in order to save the world’s last bee colony and repopulate the earth’s crops.

“I wrote this book taking into account the increasing intensity of natural disasters across the world,” Cartaya says, recalling the Texas freeze a few years ago and Hurricane Ian that swept through Florida’s west coast recently.

“I want young people to imagine a world where nature has done her worst. The novel is set in an isolated, desolate world. As humans begin to rebuild, the battle between technology and nature rages once again. The question I leave for my young readers is: What side do they want to be on? With respect to living with nature or with an over-dependence on technology? The choice is theirs,” the author concludes.

Miami is, as we all know, a multicultural city with a kaleidoscope of cultures, whether Hispanic, Caribbean, Caucasian, Haitian, or African American. The organizers say they ensure the fair reflects this diversity.

“There are authors and books that reflect all of these cultures and themes and topics that explore most facets of life,” says Mendez. “I particularly love that even when a culture is not as widely represented in Miami as in other cities or states, we bring those authors and books to the Fair too – for example, our 2022 emphasis on stories from the Middle East and South Asia.”

Because Miami is a Hispanic and Caribbean city, there is a space dedicated to Hispanic and Caribbean authors. In the IberoAmerican Authors section, fair participants can find conversations and panels with noted Latinx and Hispanic authors, journalists, poets, essayists, storytellers, and visual artists and photographers who travel to Miami Book Fair each year to share their work and thoughts.

The Read Caribbean section presents literary events centered on Haitian and Caribbean diaspora including readings and panel discussions, storytelling for children, music, and more. Florida has the highest Haitian population in the country, with most of them settling in Miami. Every year, Haitian authors are invited to discuss literature and other related topics. This year is no different as the book fair has invited authors Jacky Lumarque, Herold Toussaint, Michel Frantz Grandoit, Phillipe Matthieu and journalists Marie-Lucie Bonhomme, Frantz Duval, and Roberson Alphonse to talk about Haiti.

Miami Book Fair launches on Sunday, Nov. 13, with an evening with “Saturday Night Live” alum Kevin Nealon on his book “I Exaggerate: My Brushes with Fame”, and Alan Zweibel, author of “Laugh Lines: My Life Helping Funny People Be Funnier: A Conversation.”

The fair will continue during the week with the “Evenings with” series, which are “intimate conversations” between the authors and their audience including notable names like Harvey Fierstein with his memoir, New York Times bestselling author Michael Pollan talking about his book “This Is Your Mind on Plants,” Charlayne Hunter-Gault with “My People: Five Decades of Writing About Black Lives” and former Dallas Cowboys coach Jimmy Johnson talking about his book “Swagger: Super Bowls, Brass Balls, and Footballs: A Memoir” joined by Sun Sentinel newspaper sports columnist David Hyde.”

The weekend street fair is another draw where, through the streets of the Miami Book Fair, is an open-air marketplace where books and everything related to writing, including pencils, pens, journals, and stationary, are sold over three days from Friday, Nov. 18 through Sunday, Nov. 20.  There’s also entertainment including a street fair buzzing with live music, art, performances, live readings, and activities for the kids at Children’s Alley.

Mendez says Miami Book Fair’s vision remains the same as it approaches four decades.

“Our vision is to build a community of writers, readers, and collaborators across all disciplines and cultures in South Florida,” says Mendez.

WHAT: Miami Book Fair 2022

WHERE: Miami-Dade College, Wolfson Campus, 300 NE Second Ave, Miami, FL 33132.

WHEN: November 13-20

COST: Single-day admissions: $10, $5, ages 13 through 18 and those over 62 years of age; free for those ages 12 and younger

INFORMATION:  305-237-3258 or miamibookfair.com

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Review: An improbable couple finds what’s missing in ‘Heisenberg’ at GableStage

Colin McPhillamy as Alex resists Margery Lowe as Georgie taking his photo in “Heisenberg” at GableStage. Photo by Magnus Stark.

Science and art sometimes collide – or coalesce, maybe – when a playwright decides to craft a drama suffused with an idea from the world of physics.

Nick Payne did it in “Constellations.” Simon Stephens, who adapted “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” into a Tony (and Olivier) Award-winning play, uses the device in “Heisenberg,” a two-hander which has just kicked off the 2022-23 season at GableStage.

Producing artistic director Bari Newport explains in her program notes German physicist Werner Heisenberg’s 1927 uncertainty principle this way: “…the uncertainty principle states that we cannot know both the position and speed of an object with perfect accuracy; the more we nail down the object’s position, the less we know about its speed and vice versa.”

The woman in the play, she adds, has “speed but no anchor.” The man is “stuck,” with no clear way forward.

So of course, in the way these things tend to go, the two meet and change each other’s lives.

A few things to know about the 80-minute play, which was done Off-Broadway in 2015 and on Broadway in 2016: You needn’t understand physics in general or the uncertainty principle specifically to experience and enjoy “Heisenberg.” There is no connection between Walter White’s drug alias in “Breaking Bad” and the play title. And you won’t learn anything about Werner Heisenberg – for that, turn to Wikipedia or read the script of Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen.”

Staged by Newport, “Heisenberg” plays out over six scenes as strangers in London become, however improbably, the life-changing answer to unspoken prayers.

Georgie Burns (Margery Lowe) is a kooky, potty-mouthed 42-year-old American who speaks at two volumes: loud and louder. Alex Priest (Colin McPhillamy) is a 75-year-old British butcher whose accent ever so slightly hints at his childhood in Ireland.

They don’t meet cute, as characters so often do in the movies. Instead, before the lights go up, Alex is sitting on a bench at St. Pancras railway station, minding his own business as he listens to music. Georgie walks up behind him and kisses the back of his neck. Then the play begins, with Alex rattled and Georgie apologetic.

Revelations come quickly from Georgie, who abhors silence, but her sometimes outlandish claims are those of a self-confessed liar, so who knows which autobiographical nuggets are true? At one point she asks Alex, “Do you find me exhausting but captivating?” Yes to the first part.

Alex, on the other hand, takes time to loosen up and begin sharing, a process that accelerates a wee bit after the two have sex. He’s a contemplative type who experienced too much loss in youth and thus created an ordered, isolated existence for himself. But Georgie is wrong when she tells him, “You’re not so much a creature of routine as a psychopathic raging monster of it.” Um, no he’s not.

Secrets are embedded in “Heisenberg,” secrets that it wouldn’t be fair to share. See the play if you’re curious as to how these two, so different in age and personality, deal with the unexpected turns in their lives.

Newport and her design collaborators have kept the look of play’s world simple, largely using black-and-white projections by Alessandra Cronin along the back wall of Frank J. Oliva’s archway set. Clear rectangular cubes, moved before each scene by silent black-clad figures, become everything from a railway bench to Alex’s bed. Sean McGinley provides the sounds of trains, traffic, Alex’s beloved Sonata for Violin and Piano in B Minor by Bach. Lighting designer Tony Galaska enhances each scene’s mood.

In New York, Georgie Burns (a nod to the late, legendary comedian?) was played by Mary Louise Parker, who does irresistible craziness as well as anybody. Lowe, who urged Newport to produce “Heisenberg,” puts her own spin a role designed by Stephens to be big and, now and then, alienating. This performance is thus as far away as possible from the dreamy, layered complexity Lowe conveyed as in her much lauded-turn as Emily Dickinson in “The Belle of Amherst” at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

Even Camilla Haith’s costumes for Georgie seem to yell, “Look at me! I’m eccentric!” Lowe’s Georgie is seldom still, a physical match to her verbal excess. In part because of that, when she has a quiet, truthful, revelatory moment, it lands with far more emotional impact, as when she confesses the pain in her estrangement with her son: “I don’t know what I’m supposed to have done wrong.”

McPhillamy, whose lengthy acting resume includes Broadway, London, major regional theaters and many a South Florida theater company, is a master craftsman when it comes to rich silences and painting pictures with words. His Alex slowly thaws, rejoins the living despite the comparative brevity of the life remaining to him. When he takes Lowe’s Georgie into his arms for a dance (beautifully choreographed by Jeni Hacker), the moment becomes a physicalized sigh of joy and relief.

Whether you experience “Heisenberg” through the more challenging lens of a play rooted in the uncertainty principle or decide to watch an unlikely relationship play out, know this: Stephens has layered plenty of truths about navigating life into his script, truths illuminated by Newport, Lowe and McPhillamy.

WHAT: “Heisenberg” by Simon Stephens
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 2 p.m. Nov. 19), through Nov. 20 (streaming available from Nov. 4)
COST: $45-$75 (includes fees)
INFORMATION: 305-445-1119 or gablestage.org.

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Review: Miami New Drama’s world premiere of ‘Elián’ is surprising and superbly acted

The cast of Rogelio Martinez’s world premiere of “Elián” at Miami New Drama is shown with their real-life counterparts. Photo credit Andres Manner.

In the moment, the battle over Elián González was a hugely impactful struggle for those who lived it and for Miami’s Cuban exile community.

Twenty-three years later, the story of a Cuban boy whose mother drowned trying to bring him to freedom in the United States still has lessons to impart, nuances to explore, political ramifications to ponder.

Rogelio Martinez’s “Elián,” a commissioned Miami New Drama world premiere, is revisiting that volatile time in late 1999 and early 2000 when Elián was at the center of an international custody battle.

Ostensibly, the fight was between his father Juan Miguel, who wanted the boy returned to him in Cuba, and Elián’s Miami relatives, who took him in after his Thanksgiving Day rescue from the Atlantic Ocean three miles off the Fort Lauderdale coast. In truth, at least as “Elián” sees it? Fidel Castro knew a six-year-old could be a powerful propaganda tool.

Staged by Miami New Drama artistic director Michel Hausmann, Martinez’s play has an intermingling duality.

One is a fairly straightforward, deeply researched retelling of the story by those who lived it, with González family attorney and future Miami mayor Manny Diaz (Andhy Mendez) as its strategic center. The other is a wild, narcissistic recounting by political operative and dirty trickster Roger Stone (Mike Iveson), who does have a link to the Elián story – and, the script suggests, to Vice President Al Gore’s loss in the 2000 presidential election.

For this ambitious drama – or maybe, given Stone’s character, the play verges on becoming a dramedy – Hausmann uses nine actors to play more than 20 characters.

Elián himself is seen only in projected videos or photos from that time, the most chilling being Alan Diaz’s Pulitzer-winning photo of an armed federal agent pointing his weapon at a terrified boy during the early-morning raid that would return him to his father. Otherwise, we hear the sound of too-loud childish laughter offstage or see one of the boy’s toys appear to remind us that yes, an innocent child is present in a small home surrounded by chaos.

The actors in “Elián” embody such excellence and versatility that savoring their work becomes a key reason to see the production.

Iveson plays both Stone and President Bill Clinton, transforming into the latter by altering his accent and unzipping his fly, a running bit that never fails to get giggles from the audience. His Stone is a comic wonder, charismatic, crude, awful, irresistible.

Mendez is quietly intense as Manny Diaz, who led the dramatic 11th hour negotiations to keep Elián in Miami, and he also voices the puppet comically representing Fidel Castro. Putting aside the fact that Castro was more the puppeteer (he threatened to launch a second massive Mariel boatlift if Elián wasn’t returned to his father), the actor’s Castro voice is so high and quick that some of the lines don’t land.

Jonathan Nichols-Navarro, whose roles include Cuban National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón and the ghost of Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) founder Jorge Mas Canosa, is compelling and sometimes wry as Elián’s great uncle Lázaro, whose Little Havana home was ground zero in a media circus.
Nichols-Navarro also transforms before our eyes into Lázaro’s older brother Delfin, a former political prisoner who was first in the González family to come to Miami. He delivers a speech in Spanish about La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, Cuba’s patron saint, linking her to Elián’s rescue. The actor’s performance of that passage is so powerfully heart-wrenching yet filled with faith and joy that you cannot fail to be moved, even if you don’t know a word of Spanish.

Carmen Pelaez, a fine playwright and actor who has found a creative home at Miami New Drama, gets to demonstrate her transformative chops, including a bit as future Vice President Dick Cheney’s assistant, charged with keeping the obnoxiously condescending Stone away from her boss.

Pelaez gets laughs as the fierce and very recognizable media personality Ninoska Pérez Castellón, whose fiery approach to the Elián situation didn’t sit well with Jorge Mas Santos, her then-boss at CANF. She is also (after a bizarre yet hilarious introductory dance) a low-key and logical U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno, the Miami native who was bullied by Clinton into resolving the Elián fight and taking the political heat.

Playing a variety of roles, René Granado conveys the nervousness of Elián’s father Juan Miguel in his first meeting with Castro, subtly suggesting that bringing Elián home to Cuba may not have been his original plan. He’s also amusing as Armando Gutierrez, a “family” spokesman trying to monetize the situation at Lázaro’s home and insisting all checks be made out to him.

Caleb Scott’s work in “Elián” is also an absolute marvel of versatility. He morphs from a politically calculating Al Gore to Clinton attorney Greg Craig to Donato Dalrymple, the “fisherman” who became a González family groupie addicted to media attention.

Daniel Capote is sincere and straightforward as Mas Santos, the man determined to take CANF and its power in a new direction, and he gets a comic turn as one of two men named Carlos who advise Diaz on how to resolve the crisis. Cristina Ortega, a recent New World School of the Arts grad making her debut as Lázaro’s daughter Marisleysis, conveys the intense emotion of a young woman who assumed the main caregiving role for her little cousin. Gaby Tortoledo plays several wives – Diaz’s, Mas’s, Stone’s – as well as media types, effectively differentiating each character.

To create the environment for telling such a sweeping story with multiple locations, Miami New Drama turned again to the Carbonell Award-winning, New York-based design team of Christopher and Justin Swader, who have created six previous sets for the company. This one consists of a towering wall of squares surrounded by lights that can disappear or change color, with multiple doorways set into the wall.

Projections by Yana Biryukova shift locations from Miami to Cuba to Washington D.C., and they allow for the emotion-stirring child version of Elián to be shown. Kirk Baran-Bookman’s lighting anchors the shifting scenes, and Salomon Lerner’s sound-music design summons time and place. Costume designer Christopher Vergara respects the turn-of-the-century styles and uses them to help communicate place and class, and wig designer Carol Raskin does her bit to help with all of those actor transformations.

New plays are tricky to pull off, and though this one has been polished and honed and edited, this first production of a play by the incisive Martinez offers the opportunity for more tweaking.

The playwright and Hausmann might look at finding an even better balance between the serious story and the abundant laughs. Though the play runs just a couple of hours with an intermission, there are so many scenes that sometimes it seems as if the characters are charging in from the doors, standing in a near-void, then quickly departing to make way for the next scene.

Several lines pointedly make connections between politics circa 2000 and today, and a bit more of that would certainly resonate. And although “Elián” was written as a piece for and about Miami’s Cuban-American community, the cascade of characters is large enough that it wouldn’t hurt to put an insert in the program briefly describing each of the real figures being portrayed.

Hausmann and his Miami New Drama colleagues continue to hew to the company’s mission as they tell fresh stories about our diverse, unique community. “Elián” turns out to be a thought-provoking surprise, one that is bringing out the best in a company of actors from South Florida and beyond.

WHAT: “Elián” by Rogelio Martinez
WHERE: Miami New Drama world premiere at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 20
COST: $46.50-$76.50 (includes service fee)
INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.org

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Miami New Drama’s ‘Elián’ ready to revisit flashpoint in Cuban exile history

The cast of Miami New Drama’s “‘Elián,” from left are: Mike Iveson, Gaby-Tortoledo, Daniel Capote, Rene Granado, Caleb Scott, Carmen Pelaez, Jonathan Nichols-Navarro, Cristina Ortega, and Andhy Mendez. (Photo courtesy of Andrés Manner)

When two cousins who were out fishing found a boy bobbing in an inner tube three miles off the Fort Lauderdale coastline, he was so small the men thought they were looking at a doll, someone’s idea of a cruel joke.

They were wrong.

Elián González was rescued that day – Nov. 25, 1999 – after a frightening journey in a small boat that left Cuba from Cárdenas, its passengers bound for Miami and hoping for a better life.  Only five-year-old Elián and two others made it to Florida. The other 11, including the boy’s mother Elizabeth Brotons Rodríguez, drowned after the boat capsized.

If you lived in Miami then, if you followed what happened after Elián’s rescue, you know that the boy who had just lost his mother became a high-stakes symbol – or a pawn – in an escalating tug-of-war.

On one side: Fidel Castro, Elián’s father Juan Miguel González, advocates for fathers’ rights and, ultimately, the United States Justice Department, all declaring Elián should be returned to his father in Cuba.

On the other:  The boy’s relatives who took him into their Little Havana home, outraged members of the Miami Cuban exile community and countless politicians, who demanded Elián be allowed to stay and grow up in freedom.

You know that story, right?  Perhaps. But 23 years after the painful battle played out, Miami New Drama is preparing to provide fresh insight into a saga that continues to sting.

The world premiere of “Elián” by Cuban-American playwright Rogelio Martinez – a surprising, tragic, farcical, moving version of the story – will preview Thursday and Friday, Oct. 27 and 28 and open on Saturday, Oct. 29 for a run through Nov. 20 in the company’s home at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.

“At the end of the day, it’s a human story.  Everybody knows what happened to the boy.  What they don’t know is the narrative,” says actor Andhy Mendez, who plays two very different characters in “Elián.”

Michel Hausmann, Miami New Drama’s cofounder and artistic director, commissioned the play and is directing its premiere. He had a deep involvement in the developmental process, accompanying Martinez when the playwright made multiple research trips to Miami to interview key figures in a story that, judging from some social media comments on “Elián” promotional posts, can still provoke rage.

“This was a holy moment, a pivotal moment for our community.  The play has to be smart and sophisticated enough to be part of the conversation,” says Hausmann, who points out that “Elián” is a dramatic work, not a journalistic one, but that the script is grounded in fact. “I think it’s the most important play we’ve ever presented.”

Martinez, who left Cuba with his mother as a nine-year-old on the Mariel boatlift in 1980, grew up in New Jersey and still lives in the northeast.  He is an award-winning playwright – a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Princess Grace Award and multiple other honors – whose work has been produced by major regional theaters all over the United States.

His gluttony-themed play “Itsy Bitsy Spider” (about ex-president Richard Nixon, dreaming of a comeback) was part of Miami New Drama’s acclaimed “Seven Deadly Sins” project. His Cold War Trilogy plays – “Ping Pong” (United States-Chinese relations during the Nixon era), “Born in East Berlin” (the impact of a 1988 Bruce Springsteen concert on East Germans before the fall of the Berlin Wall) and “Blind Date” (Ronald Reagan’s 1985 summit meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev in Geneva) – demonstrate his highly theatrical treatment of history, politics and policy.

Hausmann, who comes from Venezuela, says that collaborating with Martinez, who brought a different perspective to the storytelling as both a Miami outsider and a Cuban-American, has been deeply rewarding.

“[The resolution of] Rogelio’s story is the opposite of Elián’s.  He’s a Marielito. He came to the United States with his mother on a boat and never saw his father again,” Hausmann says.

The “Elián” collaboration works, Martinez believes, because of what he, Hausmann and Miami New Drama bring to the table.

“Michel is great at storytelling. I am strong with character. We complement each other, and we both love the theatrical,” Martinez says. “I think I had enough distance to tell a story that can be both gripping and entertaining,” the playwright says of his perspective. “Maybe I would have been less inclined to make those bold choices in comedy. But I am an exile. I have strong opinions.”

In rehearsals, Martinez has whittled his original 140-page script to about 100 pages, eliminating some characters, moving other things around. Figuring out the ideal form for a new play is, he says, “like a little puzzle.”

Arguably the playwright’s most surprising choice is his decision to make controversial lobbyist and political operative Roger Stone – yes that Roger Stone – not only a character but the metatheatrical play’s self-anointed narrator.  There is an actual connection between Stone and the Elián story, but Martinez had several reasons for incorporating the controversial Stone.

“I thought, ‘How do I tell this story in a way that will be surprising?’” he says. “Roger had been fired from the Bob Dole campaign. He was in a form of exile from Washington… He needed this to play out in a certain way so he would once again be at the center of the political universe.”

9 Actors, 20 Characters

Nine actors play more than 20 characters in “Elián,” with the majority of a powerhouse cast coming from South Florida.  Most are walking a performative tightrope, portraying the real people who lived the Elián story (some of whom are expected to be in the opening night audience) while conveying the playwright’s version of them.

Many play multiple, sometimes diametrically opposed characters.

Actor-playwright Carmen Pelaez, for instance, portrays outspoken Radio Mambi talk host Ninoska Pérez Castellón as well as U.S. Attorney General (and Miami native) Janet Reno.

Jonathan Nichols-Navarro plays Elián’s great uncle Lázaro, whose home was a refuge for the boy as well as the target of protests covered by a massive media circus; Lázaro’s older brother Delfin; Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) founder Jorge Mas Canosa; and Ricardo Alarcón, the powerful president of the Cuban National Assembly.

Mendez portrays the González family attorney Manny Diaz, who would go on to become a two-term Miami mayor and now heads the Florida Democratic Party, Mendez also operates and voices a Fidel Castro puppet.

Mike Iveson, who made his Broadway debut in Heidi Schreck’s “What the Constitution Means to Me” (a play being produced by City Theatre at Miami’s Arsht Center in early December), gets two juicy roles as Roger Stone and President Bill Clinton.  Daniel Capote plays Jorge Mas Santos, the billionaire businessman and successor to his father as the head of CANF.

Caleb Scott plays Vice President Al Gore and Donato Dalrymple, one of the cousins who rescued Elián. The latter is the man who was holding a terrified Elián when armed federal agents conducted a predawn raid to remove the boy from Lázaro’s home, whisking him off to be reunited with his father at Andrews Air Force Base. It is also etched in memories from one of the most famous photos taken during the raid.

Also in the cast: René Granado in multiple roles including Elián’s father Juan Miguel, Cristina Ortega as Elián’s cousin Marisleysis, and Gaby Tortoledo in a variety of roles.

Real-Life Research

To become their characters, the actors are drawing on what Martinez put on the page, Hausmann’s vision and research including video footage, though a few have met someone they’re portraying.

Pelaez is enjoying the process of playing “two vastly different characters” and is outspoken about portraying Ninoska, whom she has met a number of times.

“I was dying to play her. I understand her vitriol. It’s delicious to play what she considers qualities and I consider defects,” says Pelaez, who put a Ninoska-like character into her Miami New Drama world premiere “The Cuban Vote,” which is up for eight Carbonell Awards at this year’s Nov. 7 ceremony.

The outspoken actor adds of Ninoska: “I have a hard time listening to her. We are both anti-Castro and both anti-Revolution, but she’s so grating. I want to say, ‘Just stop and be honest.’ I’m at the opposite end of the political spectrum from her – but at the same time, what she was saying would happen to Elián did happen.”

Which was, in brief, that he went back to Cuba after Castro threatened to unleash a second massive boatlift if Elián wasn’t returned.  The dictator became like a second father to a boy who was educated and indoctrinated in Cuban communism, and in news footage, the adult Elián – now 28 and a father – extols the values of the revolution and in so many words deifies the late Cuban leader.

Mendez, who played Pelaez’s campaign manager and love interest in “The Cuban Vote,” portrayed Fidel Castro in the world premiere of Eduardo Machado’s “Celia and Fidel” at Washington D.C.’s Arena Stage in 2021.  This time, Fidel is a puppet operated and voiced by Mendez.

“A puppet will always be funny. Castro had a level of manipulation that made him a genius – thinking before he spoke, using precise language and absurd metaphors. That translates into farce,” Mendez observes. “This is a caricature of him, using an exaggerated, high-pitched voice.”

Though Manny Diaz spoke at length to Martinez and Hausmann as they were researching the play, Mendez hasn’t met the former mayor. The actor has watched plenty of video featuring Diaz – though he says there is “little footage of him at that time” – and is hoping to emulate rather than imitate one of the players at the center of the Elián story.

Mendez also admits to another challenge in playing Diaz:  “I have played real people before, but not ones who are alive and might see the play.”

Capote also began building his interpretation of Jorge Mas Santos by watching videos, absorbing impressions of his “mannerisms and quirks” and finding Mas Santos’s voice.

When the events in the play unfolded, Capote was a 15-year-old Miami high school student. He remembers that, shortly after the raid that returned Elián to his father, “I saw Marisleysis at a book sale.  She looked distraught, very emotionally beat up.”

The play, he says, is “not what I was expecting. It tackles all kinds of points of view….It’s less about Elián the person and more about everything going on around him, showing how many people didn’t have his best interest at heart.”

Although Nichols-Navarro plays multiple roles, he sees the one as Elián’s great uncle Lázaro as vital to the play’s potential impact.

“As Lázaro, I am the touchstone of the family. I’ve fought for those family scenes, which show what happened inside the house,” says the Miami-raised actor, who is Carbonell nominated for his performance as a quintessential old-school Cuban-American mayoral candidate in “The Cuban Vote.”

“If you looked outside at that time, you’d think the Beatles had shown up.  But what happened inside that 1,000-square-foot house is more interesting.  That’s what we don’t know…With facts, you can tell a story. With heart, you can move people.”

Approaching the Subject Matter

Iveson read Martinez’s script after Miami New Drama reached out to him about “Elián.” He was impressed with the playwright’s approach.

“I could see he was doing a super creative take on the story. You have to pick a lane because there are 30 different ways to think about it,” the actor says. “He has tried to incorporate a lot of different ways, and that’s what theater should do. It’s such a sprawling story.”

Working in a cast with a number of actors who are of Cuban descent or who arrived from Cuba as children, Iveson has become far more aware of the impact of the Elián González story.

“This is real Miami stuff, theater for people who it affects. I don’t know what does that better than theater,” he says. “I’m getting an up-close picture of how emotional this was for Cuban-Americans at the time. It remains a really big deal. Still, 23 years after Elián, it’s very alive.”

Today, as huge numbers of would-be Cuban exiles are making the same dangerous  journey toward freedom that Elián and his mother did, Pelaez makes note of the transformative damage done by the highly publicized battle over a little boy.

“This shattered the perception of the Cuban exile community. The Cuban government used it brilliantly against us,” she says. “We went from being model exiles to ‘oh, those crazy Cubans.’  We became a monolith outside the 305.  This took away our agency.”

Says Hausmann: “The narrative was that the Cubans went crazy.  But this was similar to a Black Lives Matter moment for people dealing with significant, multi-generational trauma.”

WHAT: Miami New Drama’s “Elián” by Rogelio Martinez

WHERE:  Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Rd., Miami Beach.

WHEN:  Previews Thursday, Oct. 27 and Friday, Oct. 28, opens Saturday, Oct. 29 (opening sold out); performances are 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Nov. 20

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

INFORMATION: 305-674-1040 or miaminewdrama.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.

Review: Zoetic Stage’s Mlima’s Tale’ is incisive, inspired theater

Jerel Brown as a majestic African elephant leads the audience on a harrowing journey in Zoetic Stage’s “Mlima’s Tale” at the Adrienne Arsht Center through Oct. 30. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Zoetic Stage’s stunning Florida premiere of “Mlima’s Tale” is mindful of the suggestions Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage offers in brief notes at the beginning of her script.

The stage, sparse and open, “invites transformation.”  Projections provide a shifting sense of place.  The play’s 16 scenes flow from one to the next with a constantly shifting cast of characters orbiting around what remains of a tragic presence they cannot see:  Mlima, an African “big tusker” elephant slaughtered for his incomparable, perfect, priceless ivory.

Nottage, whose eclectic body of work is being produced throughout the country this season, tells the painful story of the illegal international ivory trade in a powerfully evocative way — impeccable research blends with her observational skills and intricately revelatory dialogue.

But what Zoetic’s minimalist yet highly stylized “Mlima’s Tale” also underscores is the way a great play can become an invitation to risk-taking creativity and a spur to excellence as artists collaborate on a new production.

“Mlima’s Tale,” now playing in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center through Oct. 30, is not, as you might fear, a play that becomes too overwhelming to watch because of its grim subject.

Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer draws from a vast emotional palette – loyalty, cruelty, love, loss, humor, betrayal, avarice, deception, vengeance – to mine the script’s many tonal shifts.

The design team’s vital contributions are breathtaking, absolutely key to the storytelling in a piece that blends elements of an African folk tale with a stinging rebuke to man’s failed stewardship of nature.

Michael McKeever’s set uses a traverse stage sliced down the middle by a gap that transforms into a river or valley or a place awash in blood.  On screens floating above each side of the playing area, video director DelaVega, media producer Nathaniel Connella and projection mapping designer Steven Covey communicate place and feeling via shifting images – a menacing crocodile swimming just beneath the surface of a river, an elephant family happily congregating, a haunting moon so massive it dwarfs Mlima, brutal death symbolized by a roomful of ivory tusks on a floor in Vietnam.

Lattice work that evokes an elephant’s rough hide surrounds the stage. Stenciled onto the video screens, it subtly imprints on the images, further transforming as Rebecca Montero’s lighting washes over it – the blood-red and ivory-white lighting in particular.

Sound designer Matt Corey brings Africa into the space as startled birds take off, a lion roars and hidden poachers struggle to remain unseen by their prey. The work of Corey and costume designer Marina Pareja helps to pinpoint locations on the journey with Mlima’s flawless tusks as they’re moved from Africa to Vietnam to China.

Mlima and more than 20 other characters tell Nottage’s story, but just four actors appear onstage.  Jerel Brown plays Mlima, embodying the elephant, his tusks and his spirit.  All other roles are divided among Phillip Andrew Santiago, Paul Torres Wong and Sydney Presendieu, who must change characters, costumes, accents, and sometimes gender from scene to scene.

Brown’s challenges in “Mlima’s Tale” are daunting.  He’s a man portraying an elephant, a creature who moves with grace, power and control through a world where death lies in wait. In his opening monologue – his longest speech in the play, delivered with a Kenyan accent – the anthropomorphized Mlima speaks of his history, his beloved mate Mumbi and their offspring, the wisdom of elders and his desperation to keep his family safe.

With movement direction by Herman Payne, the tall and muscular Brown uses his dancer’s body with utter control, conveying the stealth of the live Mlima, his fighting spirit and the agony of his death.

After, embodying Mlima’s tusks, he is an unseen force haunting everyone who seeks to profit from his death. Imposing (Mlima means “mountain” in Swahili), ominous as he marks each scheming player in the saga with white paint representing his ivory, Brown is dignified, expressive and magnetic.  His final appearance, when Mlima’s tusks have been transformed from a $300 payday for the poachers into a work of art sold for nearly $1 million, is soul-shattering.

Torres Wong, Santiago and Presendieu display their transformational mojo as they move from character to character, some more significant than others.  The necessary quick costume changes aren’t always quick enough, briefly slowing the story’s momentum, but that will likely get tighter during the run.

Certain characters seem to inspire the actors – for Santiago, for instance, it’s a Vietnamese hipster who’s a player in the ivory carving trade; for Presendieu, it’s a power-conscious Vietnamese customs official who enjoys tormenting an American cargo ship captain – but it’s Torres Wong who most consistently delivers an array of finely detailed characters. Very impressive.

Overseeing everything is Meltzer, who found the right collaborators to bring his  vision for this production to life.

The director made the decision to have the characters flinch or recoil in pain as Mlima leaves his mark of complicity, lies and cruelty on each one.  For Nottage’s proverb-like scene titles – including “No one tests the depth of the river with both feet,” “Don’t think there are no crocodiles because the water is calm,” “Do not look where you fell but where you stepped” – he chose to have them projected onto the video screens, thus reinforcing the play’s folk tale quality.

Depending on the theatergoer, “Mlima’s Tale” can be a call to action and involvement.  But for anyone who sees it, the production is thought-provoking theater of the highest order, the work of a superb playwright inspiring her fellow artists.

WHAT: “Mlima’s Tale” by Lynn Nottage

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 (additional performance 7:30 p.m. Oct. 19, no matinee Oct. 22), through Oct. 30; Zoo Miami communications director Ron Magill will lead talkbacks after the matinee Oct. 23 and the matinee and evening performances Oct. 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.

Review: Bistoury Physical Theatre’s latest chapter explores ‘Fear of Freedom’

Carla Forte wearing a box on her head in Bistoury Physical Theatre and Film’s “The Commune, Chapter 3: Fear of Freedom” at Miami Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box Theatre. (Photo by Alexey Taran)

If Bistoury Physical Theatre and Film’s first part of “The Commune” constituted a search for alternative ways of being in the world and 2022’s part 2 “The Commune” presented practices of freedom, its latest did a deep dive into the existential consequences of rejecting freedom and abandoning the self.

On Thursday, Oct. 6 and Friday, Oct. 7, BFTF (the acronym by which they identify the group) performed “The Commune, Chapter 3: Fear of Freedom,” at the Miami Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box Theatre. Miami Dade County Auditorium commissioned “The Commune.” I attended both performances and, although on different nights, the execution differed minimally.

Choreographer Alexey Taran and filmmaker Carla Forte founded the company in Caracas, Venezuela, in 2005 as an avant-garde creative platform for dance and film. In 2007, BFTF moved to the city of Miami.  The company’s projects reflect a philosophy of respect, admiration, and curiosity for the extraordinary creative movement and diversity of Latin American megalopolises.

In its latest “The Commune” chapter, BFTF laid out the psychological tics and neuroses of four people trapped in a pandemic-like form of physical and emotional isolation.

In show notes published online, the group claimed “Fear of Freedom” reflects on the thought of Frankfurt School psychoanalyst and political theorist, Erich Fromm (1900-1980). For Fromm, freedom occurs in the sphere of the interpersonal. In the practice of freedom, people aim at knowledge of what others really need which emerges only through caring and having respect for their autonomy.

People either embrace or reject their freedom, and those who reject it do so in different ways – by socially conforming or submitting entirely to powerful personalities or deepening the destructive tendencies of their isolation until they destroy their world.

Whatever the strategies they employ, the rejection of freedom initiates profound mental conflicts that can deepen into acute forms of mental illness.

BFTF’s performance opened with the theater divided into four large squares. One square contained a suitcase, another a huge pile of clothes. The two squares at the back of the stage was strewn with sheets of crumpled white paper and the last contained a potted white orchid and a box.

The show began by showing four videos of the performers – Taran, Forte, Heather Maloney and Carlos Fabian  – doing different actions like staring at their faces in a mirror, climbing a wall, shuffling through photos, hugging themselves or undressing and raising a fist.

Clips showed Forte with a box over her face and Fabian with a bag over his head.

The Christmas song, “Carol of the Bells” – a recurring musical motif of the piece – played faintly in the background.

As the film ended, the stage was illuminated by a bank of lights from the left and a timer flashed on the back of the stage and started to count backwards from 40 minutes.

In one of the back squares, Forte sat with her head covered by a cardboard box and a white orchid in her lap. She recited into a microphone statements about grief like “El luto es la Avenida principal de la ciudad” (“Grief is the main avenue of the city”) and “El luto es las memorias” (“Grief is the memories”).

Sometimes she would begin sobbing, sing scales or call out for “Gloria,” presumably a pet. At one point she dumped a box of what looked like cat litter over her head.

With his back to the audience, Taran sat in the square adjacent to Forte in the midst of huge sheaths of white paper, which he either shredded or folded up and snapped beneath his arm. His movements were erratic and robotic. At times he would snatch a tablet and launch into a pantomimed lecture or fiercely conduct Tchaikovsky’s “Pathétique” Symphony from his chair.

Occasionally he would stand, salute and declare: “Aqui por la patria!” (“Here, for the Fatherland!”)

In the square in front of Forte, Fabian shuffled through a huge pile of clothes and then frantically began dressing and undressing. At times he had a difficult time keeping his pants on while at others he stuffed more and more clothes into his shirt and pants until they clownishly bulged.

At one point Fabian kneeled and recited the “Apostle’s Creed” in Spanish before donning a red dress and leopard print jacket and running circles in his square.

In front of Taran, Heather Maloney – her face pained – hugged herself tightly or slowly ran her hands up her legs, briefly palming her face. At times she moved as if drugged.

At other moments, she would tie on a red dress and dance, pirouetting or standing en pointe before collapsing on the floor and slowly spinning in place.

None of the performers behaved as if they were aware that others shared their space. Each played out their compulsive behaviors as if entirely engaged in medicating the internal sense of deep conflict each experienced.

With the stage trashed, the countdown hit six minutes. Fabian in black jeans and black sunglasses held his phone in front of him as if beginning a FaceTime call, waving and repeating,

“Hi Everyone! Love you guys!”

As he did so, he crossed the stage and became the first performer to break from his square, crossing Maloney’s space who then danced along the full floor’s diagonal.

At the cue, Taran hung over his chest a disco ball and bright white light then spun and danced around the theater to Laura Branigan’s 1982 pop hit, “Gloria.”

Facing the audience Forte danced and joined in with the vocals. Given the chaos on the stage, Branigan’s line, “I think you’re headed for a breakdown so be careful not to show it” hit home.

For these four characters that ship had already sailed.

Then the timer struck zero, flashed red, and the house lights went black.
After a few seconds of darkness a bright blue light streamed from the ceiling to the center of the performance floor.  As the four performers all huddled in its beam, Fabian opened an umbrella over them.

For the first time in the 50-minute show they spoke to one another in low tones and touched as a stream of what looked like snow fell from the ceiling onto the umbrella.

BFTF’s “Fear of Freedom” constituted a brilliant, risk-taking work of multimedia theater. The performers powerfully brought to life Fromm’s thesis concerning the neurotic, self-destructive mindsets that capture people in their gambit to escape the demands posed by their lives and other human beings.

The work’s closing with the four performers huddled together for protection stayed consistent with Fromm’s thesis – that only through the sphere of the intersocial can the emotional disturbances initiated by rejection of freedom be healed.

If you didn’t get the chance to catch “The Commune, Chapter 3” this time around, BFTF plans on staging it again in December, on a date yet to be determined, at inkub8, 2021 NW 1st Place, Miami. For information, call 305-482-1621.

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Review: A boxing ring holds life lessons in ‘The Opponent’ at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center

Kedar Myers plays an on-the-rise boxer in “The Opponent” at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center through Sunday, Oct. 23. (Photo courtesy of Leesa Richards)

Brett Neveu’s “The Opponent” is a two-character, one-set play about an on-the-rise boxer and his sometime trainer.  The show would seem relatively simple to produce, but as the saying goes, appearances can be deceiving.

The 2012 drama by the Chicago-based Neveu is the first post-pandemic professional theater production at the African Heritage Cultural Arts Center (AHCAC) in Liberty City.

The facility itself is looking better than ever, thanks to an array of improvements and a variety of new equipment. And the return of drama to its Wendell A. Narcisse Performing Arts Theater is an enriching facet of AHCAC’s extensive programming.

Directed by Lowell Williams, “The Opponent” pits young Black boxer Donell Fusels (Kedar Myers) against his on-and-off white trainer Tremont “Tre” Billiford (Enrique Galán).

At Tre’s bare-bones gym in Lafayette, Louisiana, Donell is nervously getting ready for his third professional fight. If he beats successful boxer Jasper “Jas” Turner Dennis at their bout in New Orleans that night, Donell believes, he’ll be on his way to the career and lifestyle of his dreams.

What the older Tre communicates as he puts a jittery Donell through his paces boils down to this: not so fast.

Tre, an ex-boxer whose Louisiana accent is as pungent as the Café du Monde’s chicory coffee, has been there, done that and has the scars (physical, emotional, mental) to prove it. He knows that dreams of fame and wealth can be potent fuel for a fighter. But he also knows – too well – that reality can be far more bleak.

Tre pushes Donell to train harder and faster. Donell wants to hold back, save his strength for the fight.  As Donell punches against Tre’s hand pads – pow! pow! – the verbal jabs flow both ways.

Act II, longer than the relatively short Act I, jumps forward in time and finds both men changed. But those details are for audiences to discover.

As director, Williams had to draw the performances he wanted from two actors relatively new to theater, but he also had to make the boxing moves and training look real, keeping them in synch with the dialogue.  He turned to athlete/coach  Bladamir Santos Laffita as fight coordinator, who makes sure the physical action is convincing and that only a couple of intended errant punches seem to land as they’re meant to.

Problematically, Neveu’s script is dense with dialogue and only sporadically engaging.  The playwright name-checks a string of boxers, but those names fly by almost unintelligibly pronounced rendering them meaningless.

Myers and Galán communicate the complexities of their characters’ shifting relationship.  Friendship and mentorship figure in, sure, but so do disappointment and betrayal.  Myers has a presence and conveys the cockiness of youth, while Galán’s world-weariness helps make Tre’s diminishing life more moving.

Jade Mesa’s minimalist set is basic — the boxing ring with some benches and equipment placed around it. Lighting by Guy Haubrich and technical advisor Dudley Pinder brings the two men into sharp relief against the black velvet curtains that line the Narcisse Theater’s walls.  Sound designer James Mungin II and costume designer Jacquelin Hodge contribute to the verisimilitude of the gym environment.

Next up in the AHCAC’s professional theater series is a production of Lynn Nottage’s powerful Pulitzer Prize-winning 2009 play “Ruined,” which will run Feb. 22-March 19, 2023.  The drama about the lives of women in the Republic of  Congo is larger in scale, more challenging to pull off and, simply put, a better work of theatrical art.  Even so, it’s good to have “The Opponent” heralding the post-pandemic return of another South Florida theater company.

WHAT:  “The Opponent” by Brett Neveu

WHERE: African Heritage Cultural Arts Center, 6161 NW 22^nd Ave., Miami

WHEN:  7:30 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Oct. 23

COST:  $25

INFORMATION:  305-638-6771 or ahcacmiami.org.

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Playwright Lynn Nottage talks high stakes of ‘Mlima’s Tale,’ Zoetic Stage’s season opener

Jerel Brown plays a majestic elephant in Zoetic Stage’s production of “Mlima’s Tale” at the Carnival Studio Theater in the Adrienne Arsht Center, Miami. (Photo courtesy of  Chris Headshots)

Playwright Lynn Nottage navigates deeply into many worlds.

She has taken audiences along as she explored the life of a gifted black seamstress in “Intimate Apparel,” the horrific experiences of women in Congo in “Ruined,” racist Hollywood in “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark,” the fears and fury of steel workers in “Sweat,” the challenges of the formerly incarcerated in “Clyde’s,” and the complexities of superstar Michael Jackson in her book for the Broadway musical “MJ.”

That topical range, she says in a telephone interview while heading back to her home in Brooklyn’s Boerum Hill neighborhood, has to do with her particular creative nature.

“I’ve found I have a nomadic imagination and that I’m a restless artist,” says Nottage, who lives in her childhood home with her filmmaker husband Tony Gerber. “That’s foundational to my practice.”

Each piece in her large body of work is quite different, meticulously researched, comic or tragic or both.  Nottage is the only woman to have won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama twice – for “Ruined” in 2009 and “Sweat” in 2017 – and in 2007 she received a MacArthur Fellowship, unofficially known as the “Genius Grant.”

The reach and impact of Nottage’s work are vast.

The Theatre Communications Group, which tabulates the most-produced plays and playwrights for the coming season at its 551 member theaters, recently announced that Nottage tops both lists. “Clyde’s” will get 11 productions (“Sweat” will have seven), and Nottage will have 24 productions of various plays around the country (a tie with Lauren Gunderson).

“The magnitude and muscle of Lynn Nottage are pretty fantastic,” says Zoetic Stage artistic director Stuart Meltzer, who is beginning the company’s season with the Florida premiere of Nottage’s “Mlima’s Tale.” “So is the way she gives voice to the voiceless.”

Different in content and style, “Mlima’s Tale” previews Oct. 13, opens Oct. 14 and runs through Oct. 30 in the Carnival Studio Theatre at Miami’s Arsht Center. The harrowing and deeply emotional story tracks the illegal trade in elephant ivory from the African savannah to the opulent home of a nouveau riche Asian couple.

Meltzer read the script of the 2018 play two years ago and fell in love with its style, story and power. Nottage structures scenes much as Arthur Schnitzler did in 1897’s “La Ronde,” with two characters interacting, then one moving on to the next scene to engage with a different character, who then moves on to the following scene – and on and on it goes.

The only omnipresent force is Mlima, whose name means “mountain” in Swahili. The magnificent African “long tusker” (so named because his enormous tusks nearly scrape the ground) meets his earthly end not long after the play begins. But his spirit follows the journey of his poached tusks, and with a quick touch, he marks each person involved as complicit.

In notes at the beginning of the script, Nottage suggests a sparseness and fluidity in the staging, the use of a live musician, projections and media to summon different places – and a “breathless quality to the flow of the action” with no total blackouts until the end of the play.

“Ms. Nottage says to find what ‘works for you’ in this play. I’m always looking for material that lets us explore how creative we can be. She gives us this wonderland and lets us decide how to tell it,” says Meltzer, who is collaborating with choreographer Herman Payne on the production’s movement direction. “We can be inventive in the staging, sparse at times as we bring light out of darkness and sounds out of silence.”

Nottage was commissioned to write “Mlima’s Tale” by Kathryn Bigelow, the Oscar-winning director of “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty.” An activist in the fight to save African elephants – whose numbers have plummeted from 10 million in 1900 to 415,000 today, despite a 1990 ivory trade ban – Bigelow made the 2014 short film “Last Days” to argue that the slaughter of majestic elephants for their ivory was not only hastening the extinction of a keystone species but also funding African terrorist groups.

Bigelow directed a staged reading of “Mlima’s Tale” at New York’s Public Theater, then Obie Award-winning director Jo Bonney (who had staged “By the Way, Meet Vera Stark”) became Nottage’s collaborator on the world premiere.

The playwright, who was once charged by an elephant on one of her trips to Africa, spent a year doing the research that underpins “Mlima’s Tale.” The key character was inspired by Satao, a Kenyan big tusker who was around 45 when poachers killed him with a poisoned arrow in 2014. But after all the research, bringing Mlima and his thoughts to life flowed from the deep wells of Nottage’s imagination.

For example: Nottage encapsulates Mlima’s nature and history in a vividly evocative two-page monologue at the start of the play.  He relates his grandmother’s advice about the key aspect of survival in this chilling phrase: “…how you listen can mean the difference between life and death.”

By sharing Mlima’s story as a 90-minute play, Nottage says, “it’s easier to build empathy in the room.  In telling the story of ivory traffickers, with so many characters, you have to have a strategy that will allow people to feel the depth and breadth of it.”

Hence the “La Ronde” structure and the decision to have three of the play’s four actors portray 19 different characters.

In the Zoetic production, Paul Torres Wong, Phillip Andrew Santiago and Sydney Presendieu must transform from scene to scene, playing a variety of African, Chinese, Vietnamese and American characters.  Dialect coach Rebecca Covey has been key to those transformations, but Torres Wong observes that much of the magic lies in Nottage’s writing.

“Each character is a fully realized, multidimensional human being,” he says. “She has made it stereotype-proof.

Mlima is played by Jerel Brown, an actor, singer, dancer and choreographer who appeared in Nottage’s shattering “Ruined” at GableStage in 2012 and received a Carbonell Award nomination for his work in Slow Burn Theatre Company’s intense “Parade” in 2014.  He is receiving a Silver Palm Award and just got another Carbonell nomination for his choreography of Slow Burn’s “Once on this Island.” Tall, muscular, graceful yet powerful as he moves around a stage, Brown is best known in South Florida as a dancer, a lynchpin of any ensemble.

“I hope this will show what I can do,” says the smiling, soft-spoken actor.  “I don’t like being pigeonholed as a dancer. I started as a singer, then became an actor, then a dancer.  Maybe I keep getting cast that way because there’s a lack of male dancers in South Florida.”

Brown did his own research as he prepared for the role, reading about African elephants, looking at videos to observe their movement and reactions, watching numerous interviews with Nottage.

“Elephants celebrate when there’s a birth. When there’s a death, they mourn,” Brown says. “I play three Mlimas: the animal, the physical tusks and Mlima’s spirit…I’m the only actor onstage for the entire journey. I see the journey, and throughout it, I want each person to do the right thing.”

But from the play’s impoverished African poachers to its wealthy Chinese collectors, virtue is in short supply. Thus, Mlima leaves a mark on each one, a swipe of paint indicating complicity.

“The paint indicates an element of guilt. Everyone has blood on their hands,” says Santiago, whose Zoetic debut is also his first time appearing in a Nottage play. “It’s great to see a piece about conservation. Lynn Nottage’s work takes a big, big issue and puts it under a microscope.”

Torres Wong, who is of Chinese and Cuban descent, plays three distinct Chinese characters, two Kenyans, a Vietnamese woman and an American in “Mlima’s Tale.”  He touches on just one of the play’s complexities when he observes, “The craft and art of ivory carving is meaningful in Chinese culture.  But it’s tough to reconcile the atrocity of the ivory trade with this ancient tradition.”

Presendieu, who graduated from Miami’s New World School of the Arts in 2020, is making her professional debut in a play that feels to her like the telling of an African folk tale.

Of Brown, whose Mlima is invisible to the other characters, she says, “He has a great presence.  I can feel where he is onstage.  He uses his body, his energy and his eyes to communicate, like a dance.  It adds an eerie element.”

The forward progress of the glowingly reviewed “Mlima’s Tale” took a long pause during the pandemic, and Nottage says she had been optimistic about the play getting more productions, in part because “we’re not being good stewards of our fellow creatures.”

At one point not so long ago, Nottage was working simultaneously on “MJ” and “Clyde’s” for Broadway and the operatic version of “Intimate Apparel” at Lincoln Center.  She survived, she says, by learning to compartmentalize, being fully present in each rehearsal room and turning to her pandemic-acquired skills of yoga and meditation when she got home.

Multiple projects lie ahead, including adapting “Clyde’s” into a television series.  Nottage, who will turn 58 next month, says she is still happily focused on creating: “I’ve been so busy for so long that I haven’t had time to think about legacy or dream projects.”

Note to Nottage fans:  The African Heritage Cultural Arts Center will produce “Ruined” Feb. 22-March 19 in its theater at 6161 NW 22^nd Ave., Miami (305-638-6771 or www.ahcacmiami.org), and Main Street Players will present “Sweat” April 21-May 14 at the Main Street Playhouse, 6812 Main St., Miami Lakes (305-558-3737 or www.mainstreetplayers.com).

WHAT: “Mlima’s Tale” by Lynn Nottage

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

WHEN:  Previews 7:30 p.m. Oct. 13, opens 7:30 p.m. Oct.  14; 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday (additional performance 7:30 p.m. Oct. 19, no matinee Oct. 22), through Oct. 30; Zoo Miami communications director Ron Magill will lead talkbacks after the matinee Oct. 23 and the matinee and evening performances Oct. 29

COST:  $55-$60

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

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Miami’s regional theaters are digging into new (and newer) works

Daniel Capote plays Jorge Mas Santos, with Andhy Mendez as Manny Diaz in Miami New Drama’s “Elían,” a new work commissioned by the company being produced at the Colony Theatre, Miami Beach. (Photo courtesy of Andres Manner)

Since ancient times, theater has enlightened and entertained us, helped us make sense of the world, mankind, ourselves. In 21^st century Miami, it still does.

South Florida’s 2022-23 theater season is about to take off, and thanks to a growing community of playwrights, returning artists with Miami roots and artistic directors passionate about nurturing new works, this season is brimming with world premieres and plays making their regional debuts.

To get an idea of what’s on the horizon for theater-loving Miamians looking for something new, we connected with four artistic directors and five playwrights to talk about their projects and why new works are such a vital part of the theater ecosystem.

Key shows at several major Miami-Dade based companies – Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach, GableStage at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables, and Zoetic Stage and City Theatre in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center – speak to a growing focus on new (and newer) work as well as opportunities for Miami-connected playwrights.

“I don’t understand how we can be in the arts and not take risks,” says Miami New Drama co-founder and artistic director Michel Hausmann.  “It’s so exciting because of the diversity of our community… to write the first drafts of great new American plays.”

Three of the company’s 2022-23 productions are premieres:  Rogelio Martinez’s “Elián” Oct. 27-Nov. 20, Aurin Squire’s “Defacing Michael Jackson” March 9-April 2 and “Create Dangerously” May 4-28 by former Miamian Lileana Blain-Cruz, an acclaimed director basing the piece on Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat’s 2010 book of essays by the same title (the award-winning novelist and essayist makes her home in Miami.)

The fourth Miami New Drama play – a 20^th anniversary production of Nilo Cruz’s “Anna in the Tropics” Jan. 14-Feb. 5, to be directed by the author – had its commissioned world premiere at the intimate New Theatre in Coral Gables in 2002. In 2003, it made its Miami-raised Cuban-American playwright the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for drama, and a new production played the Tony-winning McCarter Theatre before moving to Broadway – all fuel for Miami’s then-nascent playwriting community.

Though “Anna” has been produced throughout the world, Miami-Dade school officials recently sparked controversy by refusing to allow high school students to see the play gratis courtesy of New Drama and at the Colony, citing what they stated was “age-inappropriate content.”

Miami New Drama’s season begins with the commissioned world premiere of Martinez’s “Elián,” which Hausmann will direct. The celebrated and widely produced Cuban-American playwright, who came to the United States on the Mariel boatlift, made multiple trips from his home in the New York area over several years to research the 2000 Elián González custody battle and interview some of those involved.

“The subject matter is really sensitive to this community… which wasn’t painted in the best light by the national media,” Hausmann says. “We have a responsibility to set the record straight while being entertaining and surprising.”

Martinez got vivid details from some of the lawyers and negotiators in the case, and as he writes in an email, at that point “…a slightly different narrative from the one on record started to emerge… When I write about history, I know that I’m contributing to a conversation that already exists.  What I’m doing is adding to that conversation so when people see the play, they’ll discover new things and new points of view.”

The playwright also appreciates that Miami New Drama has underscored its faith in him by commissioning another world premiere piece, and he’s hoping that audiences will come to “Elián” to play their vital role in the developmental process.

“A play changes from one production to the next…because the audience has taught us something.  If this play is to have a future life, it’s because there has been an audience there to ensure that.  New plays need audiences,” he says.

Colony Memories: ‘Mostly Empty’

Aurin Squire, who wrote the book for Miami New Drama’s world premiere Louis Armstrong musical “A Wonderful World” and has built a thriving television career as a writer-producer on “Evil” and “The Good Fight,” is returning to the Colony this season with “Defacing Michael Jackson.”

Squire, who grew up in Opa-Locka, first wrote the play as a 2004 one-act. He expanded it to a full-length play two years after Jackson’s 2009 death, and in 2018, a newer version was given a small production in Chicago. Now a different version of the play – rewritten to reflect new ideas and changing times – will premiere at Miami New Drama.

Set in Opa-locka in 1984, “Defacing Michael Jackson” is a coming-of-age play about teens, hero worship, and life-shaping personal and societal turmoil. The kids are members of a fan club devoted to the pop star, a figure who serves as a metaphor in Squire’s dark comedy.

The playwright is gratified that the piece is being produced at the Colony, which he remembers as “mostly empty” when he was growing up, and that Miami New Drama is part of a bustling South Florida theater season.

“Theater is not-for-profit…It only exists thanks to the support of artists, audiences, benefactors, patrons and government.  All the best theater comes out of that, and Miami has made huge strides in finding a way to create a vibrant theater community,” Squire observes.

As to why people should seek out new work, Squire believes that “…the underlying engine in new plays are the ideas that keep us up at night.  You’re looking at the obsessions, compulsions, addictions of the human soul.  That’s why theater feeds all other dramatic forms because it starts with that obsessive idea…What we do in theater is pass along these obsessions and voices to others.  That’s why theater has continued to enchant people for over 6,000 years.  And even today, there is something about sitting in that dark space with others and letting new ideas spark something in your soul.”

Disney’s ‘Encanto’ Writer’s Play Comes Home

For her second season as GableStage’s producing artistic director, Bari Newport has assembled a five-show lineup that begins Oct. 28-Nov. 20 with “Heisenberg” by Simon Stephens, who transformed “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” into a Tony- and Olivier Award-winning play. Margery Lowe and Colin McPhillamy star as an improbable couple whose lives are transformed by love.

Two plays earlier produced in Palm Beach County – David Meyers’s “We Will Not Be Silent” (Jan. 6-29) and Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” (Feb. 24-March 19) – will be followed by a pair of works by Latina playwrights: “El Huracán” by former Miamian Charise Castro Smith (April 14-May 14) and “Native Gardens” (June 9-July 1) by Karen Zacarías.

Via preshow talks outside the theater before every performance, Newport is hoping to give GableStage’s evolving audience context for what they’re about to see.

“It’s incredibly useful to be given a lens into new work,” she says. “The production and interpretation are always new.”

Newport is ecstatic that the Cuban-American Castro Smith – a playwright, director, actor, producer and screenwriter who cowrote and codirected the Oscar-winning animated Disney smash “Encanto” – is coming home for what will be only the fourth production of 2018’s “El Huracán.”  Dámaso Rodríguez, a Miami-born Cuban-American director and artistic director who has worked at major regional theaters throughout the country, will stage the play.

“Dámaso brought me the script. This is a passion project for him,” Newport says. “This is absolutely a new play.  Charise is doing rewrites on Act Two.”

Set in Miami, “El Huracán” focuses on four generations of Cuban-American women as they cope with exile, loss and three different hurricanes – including the 1992 monster, Hurricane Andrew.

“‘El Huracán’ is, by far, the most personal play I’ve ever written.  It is deeply connected to my roots and to my family,” Castro Smith writes in an email. “It had always been a dream of mine to stage the play in Miami, the city where I grew up and also the land that bore witness firsthand to the devastating effects of Hurricane Andrew.”

The playwright also feels that “El Huracán” will resonate with many communities in a diverse Miami.

“‘El Huracán’ is, at its heart, a play about what we get to keep when it feels like everything has been stripped away,” she says. “It’s about exile and the longing for home, about how memories get passed down, about surviving and rebuilding after literal storms and about the possibility of transformation in the face of loss…It’s about magic and forgiveness… I’m honored and humbled to be able to share it with the city that inspired it all.”

Challenging Audiences

Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts will play host to several Broadway tours new to the city, including the musicals “Six” (Oct. 25-30), “Hadestown” (Dec. 6-11) and a reconceived “My Fair Lady” (March 28-April 2).  But as regional theater fans know, the Arsht’s Carnival Studio Theater is also home to several local companies including Zoetic Stage, City Theatre and Area Stage (which recently scored a massive success with director Giancarlo Rodaz’s immersive “Beauty and the Beast.” Next, back at its home base in South Miami, Rodaz is staging an immersive “Sweeney Todd” Oct.14-Nov. 6.)

Zoetic Stage is opening its season with the Florida premiere of “Mlima’s Tale” (Oct. 13-20), a shattering 2018 play about the deadly ivory trade by double Pulitzer Prize winner Lynn Nottage.  The company is also producing the 2010 Pulitzer-winning musical “Next to Normal” (March 16-April 9).  Zoetic’s other two shows are world premieres by South Florida-based playwrights:  Michael McKeever’s “American Rhapsody” (Jan. 12-29) and Vanessa Garcia’s “#Graced” (May 4-21).

Artistic director Stuart Meltzer, who notes that two of the company’s five founders are playwrights (McKeever and Christopher Demos-Brown, both of whom have had multiple Zoetic world premieres), blends recent works, musicals (often by Stephen Sondheim) and new plays when he’s constructing a season.  But it’s the new work that calls to him – and, he hopes, the audience.

“I find new work incredibly vital, engaging and a lot more interesting,” says Meltzer, who is hoping that Zoetic’s annual Finstrom Festival of New Work will grow from workshops and readings into a festival of fully produced plays presented in repertory. “Material that has been produced time and again becomes comfort food.  With a new play, you have to listen, pay attention and get lost in the story. It’s beautiful.”

Meltzer describes his season’s new plays as “60-plus years of an American family…an epic poem” (“American Rhapsody”) and “a remarkable journey of an immigrant woman traveling through America and how she learns to create her own American dream” (“Graced#”).

The prolific McKeever has had his plays – all world premieres – produced at theaters throughout South Florida, and many have gone on to Off-Broadway, regional or international productions.  Since launching his play-writing career with “That Sound You Hear” at New Theatre in 1996, he has successfully juggled work as a playwright, actor, designer and, for a time, Zoetic’s managing director.  He has seen a sea change in the attitude of companies toward new work since he began at New Theatre 26 years ago.

“New Theatre and Florida Stage would worry about selling tickets to new plays,” he said of two important now-closed companies.  “Now, almost all companies are excited about world premieres. There has never been a better time to be a South Florida playwright than now.”

“American Rhapsody” was commissioned by Sarasota’s Florida Studio Theatre, which told McKeever to “go as big as you want.”  The play uses eight actors playing 14 characters to chart the evolution of a family and the America that surrounds them over six decades – “history through the eyes of four generations of one family,” McKeever says.

“When you see something new, you put yourself in the position of being among the first people to see the next ‘Strange Loop’ or ‘Anna in the Tropics’ or ‘August: Osage County,’” he says. “Miami and South Florida are such great incubators for new work.”

Garcia, a playwright, novelist, journalist and visual artist, is a multifaceted talent.  The author of “Amparo,” Miami’s long-running immersive 2019 hit about the Cuban revolution and diaspora refracted through the experiences of the family behind Havana Club Rum, she’s in the midst of an eventful season: her first children’s book (“What the Bread Says”), the commissioned world premiere of a play she coauthored with inaugural poet Richard Blanco (“Sweet Goats & Blueberry Señoritas” at Maine’s Portland Stage Jan. 1-Feb. 12, 2023) and Zoetic’s world premiere of “#Graced.”

“I wanted ‘#Graced’ to be like a road trip movie, but it’s a play with a Latina woman at the helm,” Garcia says of the comedy, her third play to get a full production in Miami.  “She represents a lot of Americans you don’t always see on New York stages.”

Development Program Nurtures Writing

Garcia twice participated in Miami-Dade County’s much-admired Playwright Development Program, working with master playwrights Deborah Zoe Laufer and Kenneth “Kenny” Finkle to develop her plays “The Cuban Spring” and “1,000 Miles.”

As a result of the region’s multiple developmental programs, new play festivals and the increased interest of companies in producing new work, Garcia says, “You can work from here and create here and not have to leave.”

Garcia is paying her experience forward by serving as the master playwright in the new City Theatre program Homegrown. Over a two-year period, she is mentoring eight emerging BIPOC playwrights as they develop pieces reflective of a diverse Miami.

The necessity of a program like Homegrown, says City Artistic Director Margaret Ledford, is illustrated by Miami artistic expats who have built careers elsewhere.

“Florida is in the export business when it comes to talent. We have to do a deep dive to support the artists living here, particularly artists of color and playwrights,” she says.

Because City’s focus for more than 25 years has been on producing short (and frequently new) comedies, dramas and musicals in its perpetually popular Summer Shorts Festival, its audiences eagerly embrace those world and regional premieres.  But its annual December production of recent, more political full-length plays – this year, it’s Heidi Schreck’s 2017 work “What the Constitution Means to Me” (Dec. 1-18) – presents different challenges.

“For the winter audience, we have to convince people to sit in a room with others and enjoy a communal experience,” says Ledford, who cites Art Basel, the bustle of the holiday season and the outdoor lure of Florida in December as competitors for a theater lover’s presence.

Schreck’s play, which will star South Florida actor-director Elizabeth Price, is a trenchant comedy born of the playwright’s experience: As a teen, she earned prize money for college by giving speeches/having debates on the Constitution.  Women’s rights, immigration, domestic abuse and protections afforded by the Constitution and its amendments figure into the play, as does a debate about whether the Constitution needs to evolve – or be scrapped.

“Theater has to start the harder conversations in order for us to have them,” Ledford says. “If you are or you know a woman, you need to see this play.”

Miami New Drama’s Hausmann, who has continued deepening his company’s relationships with Miami playwrights who have chosen to stay as well as those who forged careers elsewhere, is certain that new work created for Miami audiences can go on to a longer life – and should.

“A play that’s successful in Miami can be successful anywhere,” he argues.  “Miami has grown more and more as a place for new work. It’s not a new wave.”

INFO:

• City Theatre: “What the Constitution Means to Me” (Dec. 1-18), $55-$60. Carnival Studio Theater in Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. www.citytheatre.com
• GableStage: “Heisenberg” (Oct. 28-Nov. 20), “El Huracán” (April 14-May 14), “Native Gardens” (June 9-July 1). $35-$65; subscriptions also available. 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables. www.gablestage.org
• Miami New Drama: “Elián” (Oct. 27-Nov. 20), “Defacing Michael Jackson” (March 9-April 2), “Create Dangerously” (May 4-28). Single tickets available now for “Elián” at $76.50, $65.50, $46.50, includes service charge; season memberships also available. Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach. www.miaminewdrama.org
• Zoetic Stage: “Mlima’s Tale” (Oct. 13-30), “American Rhapsody” (Jan. 19-29), “#Graced (May 4-21). Single tickets available for “Mlima’s Tale” at $55-$60; five-show Theatre Up Close subscription also available, includes City Theatre’s “What the Constitution Means to Me.” Carnival Studio Theater in the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami. www.zoeticstage.com.

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.

Teo Castellanos’ ‘F.Punk Junkies’ Blends Dance, Funk and Folktales

Haitian American singer Inez Barlatier in Teo Castellanos D-Projects “F.Punk Junkies” presented by Miami Light Project at  The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse in Wynwood. (Photo courtesy of Knight Foundation)

There are few individual performing artists who so fully represent modern Miami in all its multifaceted, gritty singularity as does Teo Castellanos. This shape-shifting actor, writer, dancer, and mentor has been an integral part of the city’s performing arts scene for over three decades—and he’s not done yet. Far from it.

Anyone who knew Castellanos in his early 20s would be forgiven for not recognizing him today. Born in Puerto Rico but raised in the rough streets of 1970s Carol City, the young Castellanos was a sometime bus driver and a frequent connoisseur of all manner of mood-altering chemicals. At 27, an epiphany, and a woman, caused him to turn his life around. He lost the drugs, married the woman, found theater, got a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, and started making art. He hasn’t stopped since.

Miami Light Project director Beth Boone calls Castellanos “the quintessential Miami artist.” Like so many Miamians, she says, “He’s from another place, but this is his home. He tells stories that traverse decades and cultural moments that are really important in the cultural and contemporary history of Miami and he reveals those stories on stage beautifully.”

Castellanos confides he considered moving to New York or Los Angeles after finishing his degree. His first job, directing a street theater troupe for at-risk young people, helped to convince him that his place was in the 305.

“I made the conscious decision to stay here and cultivate the art community here and work with those young people — those young people who, like myself, came from difficult upbringings and were mentorless. To me, it was really important that I did that, and that I did that in my community, the community where I grew up.”

“F.Punk Junkies”—the F stands for “funk”—is his latest high-energy and highly-anticipated work. Following the calendar of pandemic interruptus, the dance theater performance has been many years in the making commissioned, co-produced, and presented by Miami Light Project. Previews begin Monday, Oct. 3 through Wednesday, Oct. 5, with its official opening starting Thursday, Oct. 6 and running through Sunday, Oct. 9 at Wynwood’s The Light Box theater.

The piece features an all-female cast and showcases performers of different age groups and styles: Michelle Grant-Murray, who co-choreographed the piece with Brazzdance founder Augusto Soledade, comes from a background in West African and Afro-Brazilian dance. Performer/collaborator Niurca Márquez was originally a flamenco dancer, Maria “Mercy” López is principally a contemporary dancer, and the multi-talented Haitian American singer Inez Barlatier brings her skills as an actor to “F.Punk Junkies.” Keshia Abraham, the production’s dramaturg and also an actor in the piece, has a Ph.D. in African diaspora women’s literature.

As with all of Castellanos’ work, the process has been a learning experience for him as much as it has been for the artists in the company: “It’s experiential… (an) experience that’s had to happen in that space with the energy of these powerful women that has really been beautiful. Joyous. And at times overwhelming.”

Set in a “nondescript Caribbean kind of magical place,” Castellanos explains that the text is based on Black and Puerto Rican folktales and the stories of the Orishas, the demi-gods of the Santería pantheon.

“We are using narratives from Orisha tales,” Castellanos clarifies, “but it’s more like energies, right?  There’s Eleguá energy, there is a story of Oba being told from the perspective of Changó, then Yemayá shows up. Those are the main four.”

And then there’s the music. 1980s Afropunk and funk was the soundtrack of Castellanos’s youth.

“It’s not only funk,” he said. “It’s more Black punk than funk. It’s the music that drives the piece,” but the “punk” of this work has nothing to do with the violent brand of nihilism performers like Sid Vicious so aptly personified. Patti Smith once defined punk as “the freedom to create, freedom to be successful, freedom to not be successful, freedom to be who you are. It’s freedom.” Punk embraces a DIY spirit—why buy any record with a bar code when you can create one yourself in your garage? Punk is non-conformist, it is revolutionary, it eschews consumerism. And finally, punk is about coming together in community, without judgement, to make and appreciate art.

Whatever the brand of punk you profess, however, all of it is fast and frenetic—it’s a far cry from the kind of energy Castellanos exudes. A Zen Buddhist, he begins each day at 5 a.m. with 40 minutes of meditation. Boone says that he brings something akin to a spiritual discipline to his artmaking:

“He starts each rehearsal with a meditation and then a physical warm-up. And then he moves into discussion around character, story line, text… He doesn’t rush the process—he respects and celebrates the ways in which each person in any given cast arrives in the space.” In ensemble building, she says, he is a master at “creating a space that is sacred and liberating for artists to do their best work.”

For Castellanos, his creative work is closely linked to his spirituality.

“I can’t separate my practice from my practice,” he explains simply. “Both practices, they unify, they work together. You’ll see Buddhist tenants in my work all the time. You’ll hear Buddhist teachings in the text. Buddhist concepts in the text. Sometimes you see Buddhist movement in the text…”

In addition to his focus on Buddhist tenets and ritual, says Boone, “he’s very much rooted in the tradition of the griot and folkloric storytellers. I think he finds really imaginative ways of realizing that tradition in a contemporary context.”

“With every new piece,” Castellanos adds, “I take on a new challenge. The piece before this one, I worked with combat veterans from the Iraq war, Puerto Ricans, specifically… They were in their late thirties, maybe, but still younger than me, right? And historically my companies have all been men, specifically men of color.”

“This time,” he says, “I really decided that I would flip that and work with all women, and not only younger folks, but I wanted to work with artists who already were established and had had careers of their own. He adds: “I think it really began with the premise of having older bodies onstage, which is the reason I’m in the piece… because I wanted to make that statement of older artists onstage.”

Castellanos says that his impetus for doing the kind of work he does is quite simple: “I remember reading (an interview with) Eric Bogosian where he said, ‘I like to put work on stage that I would like to go see.’ That’s always been kind of one of my motivations, right? I would love to see this type of work on stage.”

WHAT: Miami Light Project presents Teo Castellanos D-Projects: F.Punk Junkies

WHERE: The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, 404 NW 26^th Street, Miami.

WHEN: Previews: 8 p.m. Monday, Oct. 3 through Wednesday, Oct. 5;  8  p.m. Thursday, Oct. 6 through Saturday, Oct. 8, 2022

COST: $25, preview performances; opening night through closing night, $40, $30 for students and seniors

INFORMATION: 305-576-4350 and miamilightproject.com

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.

Review: Main Street Players delivers emotional, raw reality in ‘Topdog/Underdog’

Roderick Randle as Booth and Denzel McCausland as his brother Lincoln in “Topdog/Underdog” at Main Street Playhouse, Miami Lakes, through Sunday, Oct. 16.  (Photo courtesy of Olimac Media)

The 20th-anniversary production of “Topdog/Underdog” begins previews on Broadway Sept. 27, with an opening set for Oct. 20. TV and movie actors – Corey Hawkins and Yahya Abdul-Mateen II – will play brothers Lincoln and Booth in the revival directed by Tony Award winner Kenny Leon.

Still, you don’t need to travel nearly that far to see a production of the searing, Pulitzer Prize-winning drama by Suzan-Lori Parks.

Main Street Players in Miami Lakes obtained the rights to do the play before the pandemic hit, and the company has finally opened its own production, which will end a few days before the official Broadway opening. (Palm Beach Dramaworks will do a regional production of the show May 26-June 11.)

Staged by director-actor-playwright Carey Brianna Hart, “Topdog/Underdog” is, obviously, a far more intimate experience at the 50-seat Main Street Playhouse than it will be for audiences in Broadway’s 805-seat John Golden Theatre.  Though the play is laced with laughs, particularly in earlier scenes, it is also intense, quicksilver in its mood shifts and ultimately tragic. Being so close to the actors feeds into the play’s aura of danger; at times, you may find yourself shrinking back in your seat or experiencing a touch of claustrophobia.

The play about two Black brothers in their 30s – the elder Lincoln (Denzel McCausland) and five years younger Booth (Roderick Randle) – takes place “here” and “now,” or so the program says, though the vibe feels like the bad ol’ days before the push to clean up Manhattan’s Times Square.

Naming the brothers for the 16^th president and his actor-assassin was, Lincoln tells Booth, their father’s idea of a joke.  The current situation for the siblings, as iffy as their entire lives have been, is that they share Booth’s single dilapidated room with no running water and no toilet.

Lincoln leaves every day for a job at an arcade, donning whiteface makeup, a stovepipe hat and a fake beard to play his presidential namesake. As he pretends to watch “Our American Cousin” at an imaginary Ford’s Theatre, tourists line up to “shoot” him with blanks – again and again and again.  It is, he says, “sit down … easy work.”

Time was, Lincoln was the OG of Three-card Monte, a slick con man with hypnotic patter and dizzyingly fast hands. Then Lonny, his right-hand man, was murdered in front of him. Lincoln kept boozing and womanizing ‘til his wife Cookie threw him out.  Hence the arcade job and the “temporary” living arrangement, just one source of Booth’s endless stream of complaints.

The volatile, insecure Booth has dreams of following in his brother’s hustler footsteps and rechristens himself “3-Card.” Truth be told, he has no gift for the grift; Lincoln, who chuckles as he masterfully puts baby bro in his place, says Booth has two left hands. Slow ones.

When it comes to shoplifting, on the other hand, no one boosts like Booth.  In the play’s funniest scene, he brings home two fully accessorized outfits – and not in shopping bags.

“Topdog/Underdog” is a Cain and Abel story about brothers forever scarred by the warring, cheating parents who abandoned them when Lincoln was 16 and Booth 11.  Both are damaged, barely getting by, anxious.  But Booth – loud and angry, sick of living in his brother’s shadow, tired of being put off by his ex-girlfriend Grace – is ready to blow like a volcano.

As shaped by Hart and the actors, the performances and thus the brothers are quite different.

McCausland’s Lincoln is a more low-key, weary man whose unexplored talents (he sings beautifully, for example) were overshadowed by the need to hustle and protect his little brother from one day to the next.  The actor’s work deepens as the play moves toward its inevitable end, with a kind of emotional blindness keeping Lincoln from fully grasping just how dangerous his brother can be.

Randle’s Booth is a fuse just waiting to be lit. Lying is like breathing to him, no matter the subject.  His sexual prowess, his swagger, his Three-card Monte skills are all fodder for his delusions, envy and deadly jealousy. Randle is a ball of energy from the get-go, yet he still builds to the ferocity and heartbreak of the final scene.

The show’s designers get the essence of the brothers’ world just right, from Danny Nieves’s shudder-inducing set and Kat Svadbik’s props (including Lincoln’s “bed,” a broken green recliner with rips and paint dribbles on it) to Angie Esposito’s costumes and Alejandro Milian’s lighting.

One quibble with the sound, which was done by Nieves and Hart: In two places, to fill time for costume changes, noisy traffic sounds get loud then disappear. Sure, you can’t have that city cacophony going all the time if you want to hear the actors. But either there’s traffic outside the place they live or there isn’t; real noise doesn’t turn on and off like a faucet.

Though “Topdog/Underdog” won its Pulitzer two decades ago, this masterwork about the love-hate relationship between these broken brothers is as penetrating, insightful and disturbing as it was when Parks wrote it.  Some of the language is vulgar and quite raw, some poetic (Booth calls Lincoln’s reminiscing his “raggedy recollections”), some revelatory.

Times change, but the crushing effects of prejudice, poverty and familial dysfunction endure, as does the American obsession with winning and losing.

Great plays endure too, giving theaters of all sizes and a younger generation of artists the chance to interpret a contemporary classic. With “Topdog/Underdog” and the singular voice of Suzan-Lori Parks, Main Street Players is taking its audiences on a profoundly emotional, thought-provoking ride.

WHAT “Topdog/Underdog” by Suzan-Lori Parks

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

WHEN: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through Oct. 16

COST:  $30 ($25 for students and military personnel).

INFORMATION: 305-558-3737 or mainstreetplayers.com.

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.