Review: Virtuoso musicians bring personal stories to light in Miami New Drama’s ‘Papá Cuatro’

Mafer Bandola explains her musical evolution in a short-ruffled dress, the same costume she wore as a youngster, in Miami New Drama’s “Papá Cuatro.” (Photo courtesy of Chris Crass)

In Miami Beach, Miami and Coral Gables, July has become a focal month for theater by and about Latinx artists. Some shows are in Spanish, others in English.  Some artists were born here, others are visiting, still others are living as exiles or immigrants.

Miami New Drama’s extraordinary world premiere musical “Papá Cuatro,” playing at Miami Beach’s Colony Theatre through July 31, has just opened. And there’s more: The 36^th International Hispanic Theatre Festival is ongoing through July 25 at Miami’s Arsht Center and Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box, the world premiere of Vanessa Garcia and Ruben Rabasa’s “Rubenology” debuts at GableStage on July 1, and Pulitzer Prize winner Nilo Cruz will direct the world premiere of his “Kisses Through the Glass” for a two-weekend run at the On.Stage Black Box starting July 28. (Editor’s Note: Miami New Drama extended the run of “Papá Cuatro” twice, first through Aug. 7 and then through Aug. 21.)

For anyone eager to experience the wealth of multicultural artistry that makes theater here so distinctive, Miami New Drama’s “Papá Cuatro” is a thrilling place to start.

The company’s second world premiere collaboration with Venezuelan-Canadian director Juan Souki (after 2019’s “Viva La Parranda!”) celebrates the talents and stories of five musicians who have become part of the Venezuelan diaspora.  It is quite different from “Viva La Parranda!,” a folkloric exploration of village culture, music traditions, and cuisine that Souki crafted with performer Betsayda Machado.

“Papá Cuatro” takes as its unifying sound and symbol the four-stringed cuatro. Resembling a small classical guitar, the traditional cuatro in considered the national instrument of Venezuela. And indeed, the cast members share photos of themselves learning to play the cuatro as kids, though the percussionist jokes: “My name is Adolfo Herrera, and I am not a cuatro player. I am the cuatro’s drummer.”

Set in designer Frank J. Oliva’s rendition of a recording studio, “Papá Cuatro” is performed in Spanish with English supertitles.  Lyrics of the dozens of carefully chosen songs aren’t translated, but the qualities inherent in the music – longing, joy, loss, nostalgia, sheer virtuosity – always come through clearly.

Singer-actor Mariaca Semprún, harpist Eduardo Betancourt, cuatro virtuoso Miguel Siso, bandola llanera player Mafer Bandola (whose given name is María Fernanda González Olivo) and percussionist Herrera are world-class musicians with several Latin Grammy Awards among them.

Director Souki, who conceived and assembled the show, interviewed the performers and assembled their personal stories into a script. The result is a musical-documentary of sorts that conveys the influences of family and cultural traditions, the trajectory of dreams and success, and the myriad challenges of starting anew after politics and violence made staying in their beloved Venezuela impossible.

Speaking, singing, and playing, the artists convey their personalities and backstories, with projection designer Fernando Mendoza illustrating some of their words with videos and family photos.

In regard to the latter, some of Herrera’s are particularly mind-blowing:  His mother Gloria, who was a militant Venezuelan communist in the 1960s and ’70s, is pictured with the Dalai Lama.  His grandfather Humberto is seen posing with Mao Tse Tung. It was on his parents’ second trip to China, in 1979, “where they truly realized, 40 years ahead of all Venezuelans, that communism was going nowhere,” he says, grinning.

The radiantly beautiful Semprún – who starred in the Venezuelan TV show “La Popular Shirley” performed for huge concert, opera and theater audiences, and recently did the Telemundo Global series “Malverde: El Santo Patron” – talks about coming to Miami with her writer-husband Leonardo Padrón to prepare for their musical “Edith Piaf, Voz y Delirio.” An airline employee called her to say the SEBIN, or political police, kept asking when the couple would be returning to Caracas. They never did.

Herrera, who has a knockout singing voice, pulls off an adroit balancing act of keeping things amusing while underscoring the realities of what being an artist in exile means.  He puts together a drum kit while storytelling, talking about cleaning up construction debris at the Venetian Way condo owned by the father-in-law of a Venezuelan radio host who interviewed him many times.  He’s happy with his wife and two kids at their home in Kendall. He plays with the Miami Symphony Orchestra, the Raices Jazz Orchestra and has contributed to five Latin Grammy-nominated albums. He has perspective.

“The migratory experience has offered me those crazy moments where people rediscover you: ‘Hey, man, you’re a beast. You could dedicate your life to this,’ ” Herrera says.

Betancourt speaks of working construction, playing in restaurants and driving for Uber before getting hired to teach – Spanish, not music. He recounts his difficulties with revisiting the rules of grammar and does a good job of trying on other accents, Cuban and “gringo.” Today, he’s a special education teacher’s assistant at a Boston school.  In “Papá Cuatro,” playing Juan Vicente Torrealba’s “Concierto en la Llanura” and other songs, he proves himself one of the most moving and masterful harp players anywhere.

Siso shares what sounds like an improbable tale of emigrating from Venezuela to Ireland, of starting out in an Irish pub, playing in a Latin band with a Cuban lead singer, and winning the Latin Grammy for “Identity,” his farewell album to Venezuela.  Though he could not celebrate with family in his homeland, Irish President Michael D. Higgins had him over for dinner – Soto shows us the photos.

All of this is after his blistering cuatro rendition of Consuelo Velázquez’s “Bésame Mucho,” which is anything but dreamy.

Bandola recounts the traditional – sexist, if you will – teaching methods of the great Carlos Hidalgo as she learned the bandola in a class that was all-male.  Later she shares her experiences competing in the Festival Internacional de Música Llanera El Silbón, in which she had to dance, sing, recite and play the bandola, all while wearing the short-ruffled dress from her childhood in green and purple (her favorite colors), brought from Venezuela. It’s complemented by a flower headdress and sparkle-bedecked shoes. The show’s other costumes are the work of designer Angela Esposito.

Bandola, fierce and powerful as she plays, eventually concluded that her instrument’s male-dominated culture probably wasn’t the best way for her talents to flourish, so now the songwriter and activist performs with the four-woman multinational band Ladama.

With vivid lighting by Ernesto Pinto and crisp sound by Javier Casas, “Papá Cuatro” is already an impressive, enlightening, and thoroughly enjoyable piece of musical theater.

Because each performer gets two solo segments, however, the show runs long – two hours with no intermission, though a break is listed in the program.  Some precision trimming and restructuring could make the piece even more powerful, though there’s no denying that each time someone says his or her name and adds “…and I am an artist in exile,” you feel overwhelming sorrow.  Yet you are thrilled, sometimes overwhelmed, by the sheer talent and determination of such remarkable musicians.

Miami New Drama’s core mission is making theater that reflects and connects with South Florida’s diverse array of communities.  “Papá Cuatro” resoundingly does that for the region’s Venezuelan residents, but even if your background is different, even if you don’t speak Spanish, you’re missing out on theater and music that will move you. Culturally, this is a place of many treasures, and “Papá Cuatro” is one of them.

WHAT: “Papá Cuatro” at Miami New Drama

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through July 31 (extended through Aug. 21)

WHERE:  Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

COST: $45.50, $61.50 and $71.50 (prices include $6.50 service charge)

INFORMATION: miaminewdrama.org or 305-674 -1040.

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.

‘Are You There, Bette Davis?’ from Uruguay opens Hispanic Theatre Festival of Miami

María Elena Pérez as Graciela, Martha Vidal as Azucena, and Carlos Sorriba as Aníbal in “Are You There, Bette Davis?,” which is part of the 36th International Hispanic Festival of Miami. (Photo courtesy of Domingo Milesi).

That cinema came to steal space from the theater at the beginning of the last century was a challenge for the stage, and since then, there have been many acts of revenge. One of the most recent is titled “Are You There, Bette Davis?,” a play written and directed by Uruguayan playwright Domingo Milesi that the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (IHTF) of Miami premieres on Friday, July 8 at the Black Box in the Miami Dade County Auditorium.

Azucena, played by Martha Vidal, faces two shocks: she retires, and her mother dies. Emptiness has her searching for nothing less than love and the meaning of life. That exploration takes her to a small neighborhood movie theater where she and her friend Graciela (María Elena Pérez) meet Aníbal (Carlos Sorriba), an inveterate movie buff. As if that were not enough, Azucena also indulges in experimentation with esoteric practices that, according to the program notes, “could establish a new interpretation of the present and a line of communication with the beyond.”

Spectators wear headphones to hear the performance as if they were sitting on stage. The effect is achieved thanks to “binaural sound,” a technique that records the voices of the actors with two microphones installed in what would appear to be a mannequin head placed on stage. This is also used to reproduce music simultaneously and pre-recorded sounds, such as street and beach environments.

“I always say that, above all things, this work is a sensory experience that has comedy, drama, melodrama, suspense; there is a bit of everything,” Sorriba told Chany Robson in Uruguay on the radio program “El Gato en el Tejado.”

In conversation with Artburst Miami from Montevideo, the play’s author and director describes the passion of mixing the languages of cinema and theater.

The fruits of that crossing “have been the motivators of my writing,” assures Domingo Milesi. “I like to think from the cut of a shot, from the fragmentation of an image, how a movie scene looks and how one language can be nurtured from the other without falling into the cinematographic representation of the shooting,” explains Milesi. “I use elements of cinema translated into theatricality.”

He underlines that he finds “the motor of theater” fascinating, referring to the body of the actor live, the stage presence, and the energy of the spectator coexisting in the same space with the actor. “But there are always certain resources of cinema that have been magnetic to me, such as intimacy, proximity, because they help empathy and the most hypnotic game,” he says.

He confesses that it is harder for him to be distracted in a movie than in a theater and that while the atmosphere of the 1950s of the last century flies over “Are You There, Bette Davis?” the work pays tribute to a way of seeing cinema that is disappearing: the small neighborhood rooms. Milesi remembers when he was just over 20 years old in evening screenings at the Uruguayan Cinematheque, “a tiny room that is already disappearing here in Montevideo. We were very few, just four people, and that inspired me a lot.”

As proof of the cinematographic element used in the stage performance, he cites the use of actors with their backs to the public. “It’s a rule to say in theater: you can’t turn your back,” he says. “I review my staging and realize that I use the back as a narrative resource. I want to narrate from the back, and here I do it too. Having the viewers in headphones gives me certain freedom; I can compose visual frames that are not subject to sound, so the sound is a very cinematic narrative component in the story.”

Milesi reveals that the seed of the play was a concise text that he wrote when he was invited to participate in the workshop “Theater and Death” in Barcelona and that he made the definitive text knowing that he was going to have binaural sound in the performances. In his previous works, he says he experimented with physical resources such as dividing the audience space in half and making shots and reverse shots translated into theatrical language. In this one, he investigates more how sound generates dramatic tension.

Thanks to an award from the National Research and Innovation Agency of his country, he could count on the binaural sound system. It is the first time he uses it, and it is also the first time that the system is used in the Uruguayan theater, declares Milesi.

“Considering that everything happens in a movie theater, it works as if we had a spectator sitting there . . . We spent several months investigating because this technology enables whispering, it enables secrecy, it enables the sounds of clothing; everything takes on a new dimension, and the work becomes a truly immersive experience.”

I ask him to try to forget the official synopsis and say how he would tell a friend what “Are You There, Bette Davis?” is all about.

“I would start by telling that friend that it is a story of three solitudes; that although there is a protagonist, there are three co-protagonists because the three characters are important and relevant in their game; I would say that this is a story that talks about life, about old age, about humanity,” answers Milesi, and then, he falls into a confession: “When I wrote it I was not so aware of why I was doing it. I am 38 years old now, my parents are alive, and I have no direct connection with that age nor with Bette Davis, but there is something in the story that connects with questions about the meaning of our existence. The three characters are going through their old age in a very solitary way, and they accompany each other thanks to the cinema.”

He warns that the three characters are not fully revealed and have areas of mystery; however, that does not stop them from being endearing.

“I don’t like to load them with words: I want to go to the place where the character is alive, and I don’t have to explain it,” he says. “. . . Although there are things from the original script that do not reach the public, indeed, the character is greatly enriched by the construction made by the actors,” explains Milesi. “Theater happens thanks to that process.”

In addition to “Are You There, Bette Davis?”, the 36th International Hispanic Theater Festival of Miami will stage six productions from Argentina, Chile, Spain, Puerto Rico, and the United States. Immediately after each premiere, the director of the Festival’s Educational Program, Beatriz Risk, will present forums in Spanish and English about the works.

On Sunday, July 17, on International Children’s Day, there will be workshops on manual arts, painting, puppetry, and mimicry, as well as a function of “Los Colores de Frida,” all with free admission between 2 and 6 p.m. at the Mid-Stage Theater of the Miami Dade County Auditorium. Prior to the performance of “Mejor me Callo” by Teatro Avante on Thursday, July 28, the festival will present its Award for a Lifetime Dedication to the Arts to the actress and teacher Adriana Barraza.

WHAT: The 36th International Hispanic Theatre Festival: “Are You There, Bette Davis?” from Uruguay, “Scorpion of The Ceremony,” from Spain, “Brief Encounters with Repulsive Men” from Chile, “Broken” from Argentina, “Quintuplets” from Puerto Rico, “The Colors of Frida” and “I’d Better Shut Up” from U.S.A.

WHERE: MDCA On.Stage Black Box Theatre, 2901 West Flagler St., Miami, Carnival Studio Theater, Adrienne Arsht Center, 1300 Biscayne Boulevard, Key Biscayne Community Center, and MDCA’s Mid-Stage Theatre.

WHEN:  Various times, Friday, July 8 through Sunday, July 31

COST:  $23-$27.50

INFORMATION: teatroavante.org or call 305-445-8877

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.

At GableStage, ‘Rubenology’ actor, 84, is finally in spotlight

Actor Ruben Rabasa moves from his usual sidekick/supporting roles into the spotlight as the star of “Rubenology: The Making of an American Legend” running in a limited engagement at GableStage from July 14 through July 31. (Photo courtesy of Abre Camino Collective)

Unless you really know the Cuban-American talent pool, Ruben Rabasa’s name may not ring a bell, despite his many decades of success as an actor.

Rabasa has more than 70 film and television credits (his latest is as Tio Walter in the Miami-set “Father of the Bride” remake).  His theater experience in Spanish and English stretches over more than six decades.

He’s also a standup comedian, an irresistible storyteller and a man who performed Spanish street theater in New York while taking opera lessons at Carnegie Hall. In 2019, he became a meme as the eccentric focus group guy from Tim Robinson’s Netflix comedy series “I Think You Should Leave.”

Now, at 84, Rabasa is moving from his usual sidekick/supporting roles into the spotlight as the star of “Rubenology: The Making of an American Legend,” a show that explores both his Cuban back story and his life as a proud American. The world premiere coproduction from the Abre Camino Collective and GableStage, billed as a special event, has a 12-performance run from Thursday, July 14 through Sunday, July 31.

“Rubenology” has its roots in the immersive Miami megahit “Amparo,” which opened in 2019 and ran for months in a dramatically reimagined old home not far from the Arsht Center.  Rabasa wasn’t part of the original cast, but he went into the show a month after opening and stayed for seven months.  Playing Miguel, the exiled former emcee of Havana’s Club Náutico, he quickly formed a lasting bond with playwright Vanessa Garcia and director Victoria Collado, the women behind Abre Camino.

Before long, the life stories Rabasa would share with Garcia, Collado and Robby Ramos, the actor who played his grandson in “Amparo,” got the Abre Camino partners thinking.

“We’re obsessed with preserving Cuban and Cuban-American stories,” Collado says.  “It felt like we needed to do this, like a responsibility . . .Robby had recently lost his grandfather, I had lost mine, and Vanessa was very close to hers (he passed away on her birthday in 2021).  Ruben has this ability, with those who love him, to make them family. . .During ‘Amparo,’ I felt like I’d known him all my life. It’s impossible not to love Ruben.”

In January 2020, before the pandemic began, Rabasa appeared as Manolito in the Miami New Drama’s world premiere of “The Cubans” by Michael Leon. After the world shut down, Rabasa, Garcia and Collado had time to focus on devising “Rubenology.”

Transforming memories into a compelling, engaging solo show is, however,  anything but simple.

“We started over two years ago, with Robby and me gathering Ruben’s stories.  I’d press ‘record’ on my iPhone, and Ruben would talk for hours in Spanish,” Garcia says. “After we got a week’s worth of interviews, I transcribed them, then later translated them into English.”

Rabasa left Fulgencio Batista’s Cuba with his mother and brother in 1955, when he was 17.  They arrived from their tropical homeland in the dead of winter, and he was not smitten.

“My mom lived at 135th and Broadway, where the subway came out.  It was very cold. I thought, ‘Oh my God, is this hell?’ I thought I was inside of a refrigerator,” Rabasa recalls.

His early days of working as a busboy and struggling to learn English are in the show.  So is the tale of how he worked a santero to get a bad-luck dead man off his back.  So are funny, touching stories about his beloved mother – she, like his other relatives, is gone now.

Selecting and honing those stories wasn’t easy. Rabasa and Garcia didn’t always agree.

“Some stuff we thought was important, but he didn’t want to tell those stories. We’d go back and forth. We’d have arguments.  There was always a push-pull between English and Spanish, between generations and what happens in a theater,” says Garcia, who was also mindful of choosing English words that are easier for Rubasa to pronounce.

After the creators tested material with pandemic-era digital shorts in different cinematic styles on IGTV (now Instagram Video) and YouTube, “Rubenology” has emerged as a multimedia piece, one that calls attention to its own theatricality; as Collado describes it, “Ruben exposes the process.”

Garcia and Collado appear in videos, interacting with the live Rabasa and keeping the show going when he briefly leaves the stage.  A stagehand helps ready him, onstage, for his final story.  The structure is, says Garcia, both “practical and logistical.  He’s 84. We had to give him some breaks.”

“He’s an 84-year-old actor who makes you feel like he’s 24.  He challenges himself,” Collado observes.

After his years in New York, Rabasa lived in Miami for a time, appearing in the movies “Guaguasi” and “Amigos” (and others), five episodes of “Miami Vice,” 39 episodes of the Spanish-language series “Corte Tropical” and many more. After he moved to California, his movie and TV resume grew, with film work alongside Andy Garcia, Marisa Tomei, Colin Firth, Adam Sandler, Gloria Estefan and others.  But when  “Amparo” came calling, he gladly came back to Miami and stayed

“The majority of Spanish-speaking actors in California are Mexican, and directors would want me to sound Mexican. I just want to be me,” he says.

Garcia notes, “He’s been trying to tell his story forever.  But people kept getting in the way.  We thought, ‘How do we stop people from taking the mic away from him?’ ”

After he established his strong connection with Collado and Garcia – Rubasa calls them “my new family” – he got the chance to put his life onstage.  His play is both serious and funny, and he believes the latter is harder to pull off.

“It’s more difficult to make people laugh. You have to have the right timing,” he says.

He would love to do a version of “Rubenology” in Spanish – “it would be easier,” he says with a smile – but looks forward to its debut in English and to sharing his life journey so far.

“In the beginning, it was difficult, but then I started loving New York and freedom,” he says.  “I get to tell about my experiences in the United States and how I grew as a human being.”

Garcia – and Rabasa as well – would love it if “Rubenology” could help transform the actor from well-known supporting player to leading man.  Whatever happens, the playwright is happy to be bringing some long-overdue focus to the resonant life of a man brimming with stories.

“Ruben has been busy paving the road,” she says. “There is only one Ruben.”

WHAT: “Rubenology: The Making of an American Legend” by Vanessa Garcia and Ruben Rabasa

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

WHEN:  7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday (July 14 opening is at 8 p.m.); runs July 14-31

COST:  $40-45 (tickets start at $20 for those under 35 with ID)

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

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.

Miami New Drama’s ‘Papa Cuatro,’ debuts original musical based on performers’ life experiences

Eduardo Betancourt, Mariaca Semprún and Miguel Siso in Miami New Drama’s “Papá Cuatro” at the Colony Theatre, Miami Beach. (Photo courtesy of Andres Manner)

The cuatro, a small, four-string guitar, deceptively simple to play, seems too little, too innocent-looking to hold the heart of a country — and yet.

As the quintessential Venezualan instrument, the cuatro is a connection to home for the South American musicians, “without fail,” says Venezuelan-Canadian director Juan Souki. “But sometimes it is for non-musicians as well. A cuatro hanging on a wall in a Venezuelan household is an invitation to get together. The cuatro is there, and if the moment calls for it, it is lowered, someone plays it, and it unites the group,” says Souki. For those who chose to emigrate, “it’s a reminder of rootedness,” he says.

“Papá Cuatro,” Miami New Drama’s original world premiere, opens with previews on Thursday, July 7 and Friday, July 8, with opening night on Saturday, July 9 at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach. Souki describes it as “something between a musical, a documentary, and a house party.”

The director also created “Viva La Parranda,” an immersive experience of Venezuelan music, food, and small-town culture presented by Miami New Drama in 2019. “Papá Cuatro” is a tribute to a group of virtuoso musicians, he explains.

“All very successful in their chosen discipline or instrument, who in recent years have left Venezuela and are in the process of rewriting their histories, reconstructing their lives,” says Souki.

The performers in “Papá Cuatro” are actor, singer, and songwriter Mariaca Semprún; cuatro player Miguel Siso; harpist Eduardo Betancourt; Mafer Bandola on bandola, a pear-shaped string instrument related to the mandolin; and drummer and percussionist Adolfo Herrera.

For the play-as-musical documentary, Souki interviewed the musicians, who all emigrated to South Florida in the same period in the past five or six years.

“In this group, you have people that were in billboards all over Venezuela, playing big auditoriums, and today their musical career continues, but it is shared with being an Uber driver or working in construction,” notes Souki. “You also have some 30-somethings who recorded an album before leaving Venezuela thinking of bringing a cover letter, and six months after they left, they were winning a Grammy. Their stories coexist in the play, and little by little, as if by chance, their songs also tell pieces of our history.”

The pieces create the fabric of “Papá Cuatro” which is told in songs, including original compositions and traditional works in which they share their story and relationship with the instrument.

Semprún, the main vocalist in “Papá Cuatro,” is a remarkably versatile performer. Her credits include work in theater, film, and television. She has interpreted a wildly varied repertoire as a singer, from music by Mozart, Handel, and Verdi to starring in shows about Edith Piaf and La Lupe. Semprún’s recording of “Soy Puro Teatro (Homenaje a la Lupe)” was nominated for a 2020 Latin Grammy award.

The cuatro, the performer notes, has been part of her life since she was a child. “I was in music school since I was very, very young, and the cuatro was a compulsory subject,” she recalls. “Without even thinking about it, it just became part of my life,” she says.

Semprún talks about “Venezuelizing” her interpretations of Piaf and La Lupe, notably adding a cuatro to a medley of songs by the Cuban singer. “It was not in the original recording, but . . . if the cuatro is not there, it doesn’t feel fully Venezuelan.”

In her personal life, the performer wasn’t planning to emigrate to the United States.

“Like with everyone else in the play, there is part of my personal story in this work,” says Semprún, who looks at “Papá Cuatro” as “a musical documentary, an experience.”

“Perhaps my story is a little more political because of how my departure was. My husband and I came to Miami for a week — and we’ve been out of the country for five years. We found out that the political police were waiting for our return, and we didn’t know what could happen if we went back. 2017 was a very murky time, so we decided to stay — and it has been a very violent and unexpected adaptation process.”

The interviews that Souki conducted to construct his play, which are at the heart of “Papa Cuatro,” explore who the artists are, he says.

“Who they were before they came, why did they come, and where they feel they are now in their process (of reinvention)? They are all living very different experiences, and their stories reveal the emigrant experience.”

WHAT: Papá Cuatro at Miami New Drama

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through July 31

WHERE:  Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

COST: $45.50, $61.50 and $71.50 (prices include $6.50 service charge)

INFORMATION: miaminewdrama.org or 305-674 -1040.

 (Performances are in Spanish with English supertitles.)

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: It’s a game of cat-and-mouse in two-person thriller ‘Borrowed’

Ernesto Reyes as Justin and Caleb Scott as David in the world premiere of Jim Kierstead’s “Borrowed” at House of Games at Miami Ironside. (Photo courtesy of Melissa Almaguer)

Two men with dovetailing psychosexual needs find a way to connect in “Borrowed,” the first drama by Broadway producer-turned-playwright Jim Kierstead.

After previous iterations as a 2020 pandemic Zoom reading and a film that debuted at the Miami Film Festival in March 2022, “Borrowed” is now getting its stage world premiere in the House of Games space at Miami Ironside.  You can find the sprawling complex of shops, restaurants and offices at 7610 NE 4^th Court in Miami, not far from Biscayne Boulevard and NE 79^th Street. If you’re hungry before or after the show, grab a bite at the inviting indoor-outdoor spot Ironside Pizza.

Produced by Broadway Factor’s William Fernandez, Deborah Ramirez and Kierstead – the team that, with the late George Cabrera, was behind Miami’s long-running theatrical experience “Amparo” – “Borrowed” is a deliberately disturbing thriller.

The list of content warnings you’ll find in the digital program is 10 items long, and it includes violence, kidnapping and four kinds of abuse (physical, verbal, sexual and mental).  You are warned.

You’re also told that, once the play begins, do not leave the intimately immersive performance space – if you do, you can’t come back in.  That makes sense, as anyone bailing to use the bathroom or whatever would disrupt the show since the actors use nearly every inch of the converted event space.  Best to put that out of your mind, though, or you may start feeling like the younger of the two characters – trapped in a no-exit situation.

In fairness to future audiences, some of the plot points of the 90-minute play need to be revealed in the moment. What is or isn’t a spoiler can be debated, but we’ll try to remain as spoiler-free as possible.

“Borrowed” unfolds in 2010 in a small, less-than-chic New Jersey cottage near the Hudson River.  Though the place is modest and isolated, it provides a bonus for amateur painter David (Caleb Scott):  a multimillion-dollar view of the water and the Manhattan skyline.

An Army veteran, David is a damaged man. A thicket of red scars on his face makes “hookups” recoil.  A brace helps with a knee ruined by a grenade.  Self-loathing misery masquerading as machismo, hair-trigger violence and hurled epithets are all part of David’s arsenal when things so south – which they do, almost instantly – once his younger visitor shows up.

Justin (Ernesto Reyes), a handsome Latino who often seeks out older men for sex, shows up late then takes one look at David and nervously starts making excuses about having to leave for a party in the city.  But David, primed by his flirty text exchanges with Justin, wants what the younger man promised to provide.  After trying persuasion, David makes a decision: he locks the door and refuses to let Justin leave.

What happens over a long night and morning is a mixture of fear, intimidation, violence and revelation.  The balance for director Melissa Almaguer, assistant director Natalie Cabo and the cast is a tricky one.

The audience has to feel the tension between the demanding David and the panicked Justin, but it also needs to surrender to the storytelling and attempts at connection when the men share some gentler moments or talk about their histories – Justin’s as a teen whose attachment to older guys began with a teacher and a friend’s father, David’s as a married man who concealed his sexual orientation and fathered a deeply troubled son.

Though David insists he has merely “borrowed” Justin for a while, that’s semantic manipulation. Justin knows he’s being held prisoner, so in the moments when he’s pleasant or charming, survival is underpinning his actions.

“Borrowed” is a two-hander, and so much depends on the performances.  In this world premiere production, that balance (much like the ebb and flow of tension) is unstable.

Scott is by far the more experienced and technically skilled actor.  His David is frightening and intimidating, whether he’s belittling Justin by bellowing homophobic epithets or demonstrating his combat-honed physical dominance.  Do we feel for the character? Maybe, somewhat, by the end of the play.  But Scott’s portrayal of a haunted, troubled man is so effective that you may find yourself shrinking back in your seat any time he moves closer to you.

As a young man whose inattentive father helped shape his desire to please, Reyes is frightened, pleasant, and sometimes miserable.  Mostly his Justin is watchful, except when he’s making an ill-fated attempt to escape.  A more scheming, manipulative Justin would help even the cat-and-mouse game between the two.

Set/prop designer Jennifer Ivy, lighting designer Tony Galaska, sound designer Ernesto K. Gonzalez, fight choreographer Lee Soroko and intimacy director Nicole Perry have all contributed to crafting a production that can feel claustrophobic in its in-your-face danger. It is jarring (Gonzalez provides a metallic sound effect to emphasize the more frightening moments) and it is provocatively creepy (as when David “disciplines” Justin). There are some laughs in “Borrowed,” but they’re few and far between, as you’d expect from a play that burrows into two men’s psyches.

The script is more the work of a craftsman than a writer with a distinctive voice, though Kierstead’s master’s degree in psychology informs that facet of his storytelling.

“Borrowed” is a small-scale play that could be easily produced by any company looking for an intense, shocking drama.  Since the producers are aiming for an Off-Broadway production, a rewrite that would make Justin a cagier character and stronger adversary could heighten the play’s impact.

WHAT: “Borrowed” by Jim Kierstead

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through July 17

WHERE:  House of Games at Miami Ironside, 7610 NE 4^th Ct., Miami

COST: $50

INFORMATION: BorrowedThePlay.com or 786-383-2755

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.

The American Black Film Festival is back on Miami Beach

George Taylor as Coy in Carlos Miller’s “Between Sins” getting its world premiere at the American Black Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of Carlos Miller)

“It feels wonderful to be back in person after being virtual for the past two years,” says Jeff Friday, the founder of the American Black Film Festival (ABFF).

The American Black Film Festival is returning to Miami Beach after going virtual for the past two years. It will be a hybrid event. From Wednesday, June 15 to Sunday, June 19, the festival will be presented live while a virtual version continues from Monday, June 20 to Thursday, June 30.

“The community of Miami Beach is critical to the festival’s success. The virtual festival was fantastic since it helped us extend our brand, but we sadly missed out on the chance to get together and celebrate movies in a beautiful location like Miami Beach,” says Friday.

Live events will take place at different locations throughout South Beach including the New World Center Performance Hall, the Bass Museum, the Black Archives Historic Lyric Theatre, and the Regal South Beach.

The American Black Film Festival, now in its 26th year, was founded in 1997 by Friday after he attended the Sundance Film Festival and noted its lack of diversity. “It was mostly white men, with very few women and people of color at that time,” he recalls.

So, with the help of advertising CEO Byron E. Lewis and film director and producer Warrington Hudlin, Friday came up with the idea of creating a festival comparable to Sundance, but with content showcasing Black culture around the world.

They launched what was known as the Acapulco Black Film Festival until the name was changed in 2002, providing a platform for Black filmmakers to connect, network, collaborate, and celebrate their work.

For the first five years of the festival, from 1997 to 2002, the festival was held in Acapulco then arrived in Miami in 2003 at the invitation of David Whitaker, who is now the president and CEO of the Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau, according to Friday. At the time, Whitaker was working as a member of the GMCVB team. He was appointed president and CEO in 2021.

“Miami Beach has the same desirable elements (as) Acapulco: It is tropical, the weather is fantastic, and so is the food; Miami Beach has upscale restaurants and hotels, and most significantly, it is more accessible by plane and car,”  says Friday. “Since we’ve been in Miami, we have on average 7,000 people each year who come from all over the country.”

According to Friday, festivalgoers can expect offerings from major studios and television networks as well as 50 new movies and television series by emerging directors and writers. Films, including narratives, documentaries, and shorts, are a diverse selection, promises Friday.

“Our mission is to promote the work of new people, to showcase new talents, new voices of color,” says Friday.

The festival opens with “Civil” at the New World Center Performance Hall, directed and produced by Nadia Hallgren known for her Emmy-nominated documentary “Becoming” and the Academy Award shortlisted “After Maria.” The Netflix biographical documentary offers an intimate look at the life of Ben Crump, who has become a high-profile civil lawyer representing the families of Ahmaud Arbery, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor.

As a Florida-based festival, moviemakers from The Sunshine State are featured, too. Carlos Miller’s film, “Between Sins” was selected for the festival.

To Miller, the benefits of such a festival are “the concentration of the quality of eyes that can identify with these stories (and) the opportunity to immediately have access to the people these films are intended for.”

Miller’s movie is competing in the narrative features category with nine other selections on Thursday, June 16, Friday, June 17 and Saturday, June 18 at the Regal South Beach cinemas. Miller’s screens at 10:30 a.m. on Friday, June 17.

“It’s a luxury not to have to search for your audience or look here and there for people that will get it. It’s like fishing and pulling out a full net. You know you’re in the right waters.”

The ABFF also highlights TV and streaming shows from Miami such as the HBO series “Rap Sh!t: Something for the City” a show set in The Magic City, written and executive produced by Issa Rae. Yung Miami and JT, the Miami duo behind the popular rap group City Girls, are co-executive producers on the series, which is the closing night screening on Saturday, June 18 at 6 p.m. in the New World Center Performance Hall.

Actress and director Rae is this year’s festival ambassador for 2022, following in the footsteps of high-profile ambassadors over the years such as Halle Berry, Idris Elba, Taraji P. Henson, and others.

While the pandemic restricted the live interaction of the festival, Friday says organizers learned a few things. They built a custom streaming platform called ABFF Play to keep the festival going during the pandemic. He says it has since allowed them to extend their brand and grow their audience around the world.

“We had attendees from more than 90 countries online from Europe, Asia, Middle East, South America, and Africa.”

For this reason, organizers have decided to keep the virtual component that will launch and run for 10 days after the live festival.

“Before that, we thought of ourselves as a domestic brand catering primarily to African Americans, but we realized we were a global brand during the pandemic,” says Friday.

WHAT: American Black Film Festival 

WHERE: New World Center, 500 17t St., Miami Beach; Regal South Beach, 1120 Lincoln Road Mall, Miami Beach; Black Archives – Historic Lyric Theater, 819 NW Second Ave., Miami; 1 Hotel South Beach, 2341 Collins Ave., with registration at the Ritz Carlton South Beach, 1 Lincoln Road. Online screenings at  ABFF Play. 

WHEN: Wednesday, June 15 to Sunday, June 19, (onsite at various locations), Monday, June 20 to Thursday, June 30 (virtual).

TICKETS: $12 (single ticket) – $1,495 (industry pass)

INFORMATION: abff.com/miami. Download the complete schedule here.

(Some COVID requirements in place. At the time of check in to the festival, all attendees are required to present documentation of a negative PCR or rapid antigen test taken within 72 hours of your arrival. Masks are strongly encouraged for all indoor events.)

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.

City Theatre’s Summer Shorts Returns in Fine Form for 25th Anniversary

Diana Garle, Margot Moreland and Lindsey Corey share a celebratory toast in the 25th Summer Shorts festival through July 2 at the Carnival Studio Theater at the Arsht Center. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

After a two-year pandemic pause, Miami’s City Theatre is finally celebrating its 25^th anniversary in the best way possible, presenting a Summer Shorts festival that amply demonstrates the engaging allure of short-form comedies, plays and musicals.

In these tumultuous times, the festival is a celebration of the art and craft of playwriting, the versatility of skilled actors, a director’s vital invisible hand, and a dedicated company’s presentational inventiveness.  To borrow a term from Marie Kondo, Summer Shorts sparks joy, and it has returned none too soon in fine form.

Playing through Saturday, July 2 in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Arsht Center, the back-in-business Summer Shorts consists of 10 varied plays and musicals.  Some are new versions of favorites from past festivals.  Others are world or regional premieres.  Start to finish, the quality of the work remains high.

This year’s festival, which runs two hours plus a 15-minute intermission, has some fancy anniversary tweaks.

The musical accompaniment and stand-alone tunes that carry the audience from play to play come from a live four-piece band assembled by music director Caryl Fantel.

As is the case at many theaters now, only digital programs are offered via a scanned QR code, but City Theatre came up with a great work-around: With a few exceptions, each playwright offers a brief video introduction before his or her play.  It’s a nice user-friendly, clarifying touch.

The fun begins with Daniel Hirsch’s “A Small Breach in Protocol at Big Rick’s Rockin’ Skydive Academy,” a short comedy with one very long title.

(See the preview of the Summer Shorts festival by clicking here.)

Directed by Elena Maria Garcia, one of South Florida theater’s comedy masters, the piece features instructors Tina (Lindsey Corey) and Chad (Daniel Llaca) jumping out of a plane as they’re strapped to a pair of first-time skydivers. Extremely apprehensive Rae (Stephon Duncan) and exhilarated Alicia (Diana Garle) are a couple, and they’re having an adventure courtesy of Groupon. Rae contemplates death on the way down, and not just because she’s hurtling toward the ground.  Hirsch’s message: No matter how long or short your life, savor each day.

“A Little Bit of Culture” by the late Staci Swedeen was first done at the 1999 Summer Shorts festival.  Businessman Kenny (Tom Wahl) and arts aficionado Charlie (Alex Alvarez) have gone to a concert, and before long the overtired Kenny is nodding off and snoring.

Charlie elbows his husband and gets plenty irritated. Soon, Kenny is on the verge of checking out again, but then in fantasy, he takes the stage and does his own wacky version of “Swan Lake.” With graceful direction by Gail S. Garrisan and a mini-star turn by Wahl – sign this guy up for the Les Ballets Trockadero de Monte Carlo – “A Little Bit of Culture” is a tiny treasure about the different ways we connect with the arts.

Directed by James Randolph, the world premiere of Amy Berryman’s “Winner” explores the same sort of thematic territory as Claudia Rankine’s “The White Card,” produced at GableStage earlier this year.

Duncan is Tori Walker, a Black playwright in her early 30s, who has just won a coveted award. She has bested three-time Pulitzer winner Charlie Harvard (Wahl), a white writer whose comeback play was 10 years in the making.  Elegantly dressed in formal wear, the two talk on a New York balcony at an after-party in her honor. At first, their exchanges seem friendly enough. She’s a longtime admirer of his work; he has been impressed by hers.

Before long, the gloves come off as the seriously soused Charlie suggests Tori’s win had as much to do with her race and gender as it did with her buzzed-about play. Duncan and Wahl skillfully portray the combatants in this short but incendiary piece.

Pulitzer-winning playwright David Lindsay-Abaire and director Garrisan deliver the festival’s flat-out funniest play. “Misdial” involves cell phones, three women named Amy (Corey, Garle and Margot Moreland share the name), and Fran (Duncan), who has two pairs of contacts stuck in her eyes and can’t get them out. Her possibly ex (but still loving) boyfriend Malcolm (Alvarez) also joins the increasingly confusing conversation.  The perfectly timed comedy is the cellphone equivalent of a door-slamming farce, and everyone is hilarious.

The program’s first half closes out with a reboot of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “21 Chump Street,” a compact musical first done in the 2017 festival.  Narrated by Wahl, the story follows high school senior Justin (Daniel Llaca) as he crushes on new girl Naomi (Garle), a beauty shrouded in mystery.  Much trouble – serious trouble – ensues.

Director Margaret M. Ledford, who is also City Theatre’s artistic director, guides a cast that includes Jovon Jacobs, Corey, Alvarez, Moreland and several festival interns to performances worthy of a surefire Miranda hit. The ear-worm music has echoes of his “In the Heights” and “Hamilton,” and Sandra Portal-Andreu’s choreography is a piece of electric beauty.

Written by hot-right-now playwright Dominique Morriseau and staged by Randolph, “Night Vision” focuses on an expectant couple shaken by an encounter in the park near their apartment.  Ayanna (Duncan) and Ezra (Jacobs) have shifting interpretations of the violent incident they witnessed, and as they debate calling the police, the complex undercurrents of race come into play.

Dead-serious lexicographers encounter a social media tsunami in Jacqueline Bircher’s “Webster’s Bitch,” a smart comedy staged by Michael Yawney.  Focused Gwen (Corey) and her snippy colleague Nick (Llaca) are on deadline for weekly online updates of Webster’s Dictionary.  Gwen’s smilingly disruptive sis Ellie (Garle) raises a ruckus about going out for tequila, then drops a bombshell gleaned from Twitter: Their editor-in-chief has called Joyce (Moreland), their immediate supervisor, “my bitch.” And there’s video. Frantic chaos doesn’t begin to describe the aftermath of that discovery.

“Tango! The Musical!” by City Theatre co-founder Susan Westfall and composer-lyricist Joe Ilick, offers a new take on a play first produced at the 2013 festival.  Director Ledford and her savvy cast – Wahl as set-in-his-ways hubby Joe, Moreland as his dutiful wife Sandy, Alvarez as the charismatic server Carlos, Garle as his beautiful coworker Maria – convey all the humor, poignance and reawakened connection in the tango-infused piece.  Moreland’s responses to Alvarez, who oozes sensuality as he guides her around the dance floor, are priceless.

Festival favorite Steve Yockey has contributed another world premiere, “Go Get ‘Em, Tiger!.”  Staged by Yawney, the play finds husband John (Alvarez) and his wife Linda (Corey) in hot water as they sit in a holding room at the zoo.  Linda, it seems, dropped her purse into the tiger enclosure, so John hopped in to retrieve it.  He’s a little dirty and sporting some claw marks, sure, but he’s alive.  The deadpan funny Zookeeper (Llaca) arrives to try to make them feel as terrible as possible, then sends in a guest who has asked to speak with them: none other than the Tiger himself (Jacobs).

Endlessly inventive designer Ellis Tillman, who has created innumerable Summer Shorts costumes through the years, outdoes himself in dressing the Tiger. Jacobs sports a flashy tiger-striped suit and glittering gold slip-on shoes, and his delivery sounds a bit like Idris Elba trying out tiger growls.  He’s the very definition of a glorious scene stealer in a play that, for all its early laughs, takes a serious turn.

The 25th edition of Summer Shorts wraps up with Rolin Jones’s “Chronicles Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass.”  Directed by Garcia and first staged at the 2008 festival, the bonkers play features a terrorizing trio of fourth-grade girls – Chronicles Simpkins (Corey), Rachel Melendez (Duncan) and their dental headgear-wearing pal Jessica (Moreland) – who bully one and all on the playground.

Tetherball champ Chronicles is only too happy to take on sixth-grader Billy Conn (Jacobs) in her preferred form of warfare.  But she plays dirty, and when the principal Mr. Finkel (Wahl) gets involved, Chronicles and her girl gang do their best to mess him up too.  Jones’s play is funny, but it’s also anarchic and unsettling.

Like Tillman, set designer Jodi Dellaventura, lighting designer Eric Nelson, sound designer Steve Shapiro, properties designer Jameelah Bailey and projection designer Steven Covey (whose contributions include moving clouds in the skydiving play and ominous park views in “Night Vision”) have elevated this special version of a much-missed festival.

So, too, do the masterful actors, who change costumes and characters in a matter of seconds.

If you’ve been to past Summer Shorts festivals, you should know that the 25^th is especially strong.  If not, and you need some laughter in your life, City Theatre is ready to make that happen.

WHAT: City Theatre’s 25th annual Summer Shorts Festival

WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater in the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.

WHEN: Regular performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through July 2.

TICKETS: $50 and $60 (VIP, $65 and $75)

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.

One-person show multi-dimensional in GableStage’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’

Sara Morsey as author Joan Didion in GableStage’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, through June 26. (Photo courtesy of Magnus Stark)

Perhaps you have read Joan Didion’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” her 2005 memoir about the year following the sudden death of her husband John Gregory Dunne.  Maybe you’ve seen a production of her 2007 solo show on the subject, a piece that also explores the loss of the couple’s beloved only child.

But it’s safe to say that, even if you are familiar with Didion’s exploration of loss, profound grief, and gradual healing, you have never experienced the story in the way GableStage is now telling it.

Producing artistic director Bari Newport and her creative collaborators imagine Didion, here portrayed by Sara Morsey, speaking from inside a void – a void representing the magical thinking that helped carry her through her first year as a widow. From the reflective black floor to dark walls that become a canvas for the projection of abstract images, the space is a physical manifestation of the darkness that can afflict a survivor after a profound loss.

The dark palette, artfully pierced by Tony Galaska’s lighting, brings Morsey into sharp relief.  About the same age Didion was when Dunne died of a heart attack, Morse is slender and fit, the latter vital to staying on her feet for the play’s 100-minute running time.  She doesn’t much look or sound like the petite, reed-thin Didion, but that scarcely matters. The words, the reflections, the storytelling, the commonality of grief – those are the things that matter.

Costume designer Camilla Haith has Morsey dressed in black, from the headband that holds back the actor’s shoulder-length white hair to the simple shirt and pants she wears.  She walks the stage barefoot, and her expressive face and hands become even more powerful storytelling tools as they glow in light or recede into darkness.

Early on, she shares this observation from the memoir:  “Life changes fast. Life changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends…”

Such insights are laced throughout the play, enriching Didion’s stories about her life with Dunne, her spouse of four decades, and daughter Quintana Roo, who died at 39.

Theirs was an uncommonly glamorous existence, one filled with books, magazine pieces, screenplays and acclaim, not to mention a host of famous friends (actor Katharine Ross, Didion says, taught Quintana to swim in her Malibu pool).

But what makes “The Year of Magical Thinking” speak to and connect with an audience are the common experiences of loss as expressed by an observant writer.

(Read the interview with Sara Morsey in the Artburstmiami.com preview here.)

In less than two years, the deep ongoing bonds of Didion’s life as a wife and mother ended.  She tried to cope with journalistic research, controlling what she could, engaging in magical thinking – which, at its worst, became a kind of obsessive vortex.  Slowly, so slowly, healing and acceptance happened, as they do.

Newport, who has been busy running and growing GableStage since directing the season-opening production of Arthur Miller’s “The Price,” underscores her range as a director with “The Year of Magical Thinking.” The roots of her creative approach are in the script, but she has interpreted the work in a highly original way.

Didion, who died in December at the age of 87, never came across as a showy dynamo.  Nor, deliberately, does Morsey.  She speaks in the confiding tones of a woman with a personal yet resonant story to tell.  Though the production requires real physical and mental stamina, her movement is generally contained and controlled.  Thanks in part to Galaska’s lighting, she appears to glow from within.

Newport’s bold interpretation of “The Year of Magical Thinking” becomes a collaborative work of theater art with the collective talents of Galaska, Haith, and the rest of the design team’s contributions.

Frank J. Oliva, scenic and projection designer, has created eerie patterns – something like water on a window or an X-ray view of something inside the body – that appear and vanish.  Matt Corey underscores the play with music and sound, muted enough so that Morsey can be heard.

Some may find GableStage’s version of the play too dark and stark as it adheres to Newport’s concept.  Not everything works as it should; at first, we see only a sliver of Morsey’s face, for instance.  The actor does an engaging job of guiding theatergoers through Didion’s journey, but perhaps once the daunting amount of text becomes ingrained, that engagement can deepen.

GableStage announced its 2022-2023 season and it’s a safe bet that the productions will be as eclectic as Newport’s choices for her second season at the helm.  But as “The Year of Magical Thinking” demonstrates, it’s likely she has only begun to explore the possibilities and potential of the much-admired company.

Two more shows close out its 2021-2022 season:  “Rubenology” by Vanessa Garcia and Ruben Rabasa (July 14-31), and “Fade” by Tanya Saracho (Aug. 19-Sept. 18). After a break, the new season begins with Simon Stephens’s “Heisenberg” (Oct. 28-Nov. 20), followed by David Meyers’ “We Will Not Be Silent” (Jan. 6-29), Lucas Hnath’s “A Doll’s House, Part 2” (Feb.  24-March 19), Charise Castro Smith’s “El Huracán” (April 14-May 24) and Karen Zacarias’s “Native Gardens” (June 9-July 1, 2023). Go to gablestage.org/season for information.

WHAT: “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

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

WHEN: Performances 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 26 (streaming version available June 8-26 during regular performances. Find out more about streaming here.)

TICKETS:  $35-$70 (processing fee additional; ticket discounts for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members)

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

(Check theater’s COVID policies before you go.)

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.

A year’s worth of work comes to light in ‘Here and Now 2022’

“In the Brackish Water,” a theatrical praise song to Miami by Alejandro Rodriguez, features Vanya Allen, Ranses Colon on bass, Donell McCant on percussion, and Richard Padron on guitar,  as part of “Here and Now: 2022.”  (Photo courtesy of Kevin Alvarez Cordova) 

Alejandro Rodriguez remembers being a theater kid in Miami. He vividly recalls his mother trying her darndest to support his interest in arts.

“She drove me to Coconut Grove Playhouse and inside its smaller Encore Room, there was a solo show going on,” Rodriguez says.

It was 2002 and Teo Castellanos was performing in his original “NE 2nd Avenue.” It was Beth Boone, artistic and executive director of Miami Light Project, who had first commissioned the piece as MLP’s inagural full-length work from a Miami artist.

Rodriguez decided he wanted to be an actor and left for New York to attend The Juilliard School. He worked in theater, on television, and doing other performing arts jobs, but in 2020, after 15 years, he returned to Miami.

“The first outing I did when it felt safe enough to go out after COVID-19 was the 2021 ‘Here & Now’ showings. Beth was there as she so often is.” He had never forgotten that “NE 2^nd Avenue,” which had such a profound effect on him, was incubated at Miami Light Project. That night, he told Boone how he had been thinking he might like to try something. “I was so jazzed by what I saw at ‘Here & Now,’ I went home and started my application.”

He is now one of six artists included in “Here & Now: 2022” at The Light Box at Goldman Warehouse, Thursday, June 2, Friday, June 3 and Saturday, June 4.

In addition to Rodriguez’s work, “In the Brackish Water,” other commissions include Jenna Balfe’s “Organesis,” Cecilia Benitez and Stephanie Perez in “Manteca,” Symone Titania Major’s “Home” and Randolph Ward’s “Unconventional.”

Miami Light Project launched “Here & Now” in 1999, a year after Boone came on board. In addition to a commission fee of $5,000 for South Florida-based performing and multi-media artists selected from submitted applications, the artists receive rehearsal space, technical assistance, and professional development. Boone says “Here & Now” artists have access to everything Miami Light Project has to offer in “perpetuity.”

“This is truly my favorite program initiative that we have at Miami Light Project because I believe it is our most important work — investing in the artists who make Miami home. I am so moved by the creativity and the generosity of all the artists when they come to this blank slate,” she says. Since its inception, Miami Light Project has commissioned work from more than 100 South Florida-based creatives. Artists are in residence for a year developing their commissions. “Here and Now” is the culmination of that work.

For Ward, the “Here and Now” opportunity gave him time to dig into “Unconventional,” which is constructed in four acts and explores notions of identity through the work of a drag queen, pole dancer, female boxer, and a Black transgender Vogue dance artist. “These are all people who have all made their money in very unconventional ways.”

While he’s not new to staging original productions, Ward says for him, “Here and Now” was all about having the space and time for development. And, there was another concrete plus. “I was actually in the theater using the theater space where we’d be performing. I didn’t have to rent a studio space. ‘Here and Now’ is just a great platform.”

Rodriguez says that having a place that is all about the creative process has made an impact. “As an artist who is still very much in the learning and growing phase, you just desperately need a place to try stuff. To make bad choices, go too far,  mix art forms that maybe haven’t gone together before. To put it bluntly, you need to be able to fail as an artist before you can break any new ground. This is a place with a safety net,” he says.

His work, “In the Brackish Water,” combines spoken word, live music, and movement in a theatrical monument to Miami’s precarious future. “There’s a priestess character backed by a trio of musicians who has gathered us all for a ceremony to show us something that we ought to see as people who call this city home.”

The other pieces in “Here and Now: 2022” are “Organesis,” a performative narrative that explores human value and fulfillment in a time of overstimulation, overpopulation, and perceived emotional scarcity. “It is a mash up of music, dance, and theater. You can’t pin it to a discipline because Jenna (Balfe) has got all of it. It’s smart and very funny,” Boone says.

“Manteca“ is a dance tribute to the game of dominoes— with a feminist twist. Boone says the three-part piece by Cecilia Benitez and Stephanie Perez is about identity and is “beautifully expressed in dance and choreography.”

“Home” is described as an expressional journey of poetry, performance, and photography in an interactive work of art. “Symone (Titania Major) is just joyful to watch. ‘Home’ is told in such a personal way on issues that we are all grappling with every single day in our world. It’s just exquisitely realized,” Boone says.

For those like Rodriguez who become immediately inspired after “Here and Now: 2022,” Boone says to be on the lookout. “We try to make the applications (for next year) available right on the heels of the ‘Here and Now’ performance program because artists in the community are all jazzed up and saying, ‘How can I do this?’ ”

WHAT: Miami Light Project’s “Here and Now: 2022” 

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

WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, June 2, Friday, June 3 and Saturday, June 4. 

TICKETS:  $15 and $25 (processing fee additional) at eventbrite.com

INFORMATION: 305-576-4390 or 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.

In a time of loss and grief, GableStage brings Joan Didion’s ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’ to life

 Sara Morsey as author Joan Didion in GableStage’s “The Year of Magical Thinking” at the Biltmore Hotel, Coral Gables, opening June 4 through June 26. (Photo courtesy of Nick Adams/Florida Repertory Theatre)

Celebrated writers Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were married for four decades, partners in life and sometimes in their work.

They were, as she said to her nephew Griffin Dunne in the 2017 Netflix documentary “The Center Will Not Hold,” each other’s first reader. If one wrote the first draft of a screenplay, the other would function as a kind of “super editor (“Didion’s term), changing and rewriting until it was nearly impossible to tell who did what.

In other words, their lives were uncommonly entwined.

So when Dunne died suddenly of a heart attack in December 2003, Didion’s world was forever altered.

After some months, the novelist-screenwriter-essayist – author of “Play It As It Lays,” “A Book of Common Prayer,” “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” “The White Album,” “Miami” and so much more influential work – responded as she so often did throughout her long career.  In personal ways and in a larger cultural context, she made sense of her loss and grief by writing about them in 2005’s “The Year of Magical Thinking,” which became a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Didion then challenged herself by transforming the book into a play, a piece that (unlike the book) also deals with the death of the couple’s beloved daughter, Quintana Roo Dunne Michael.  In 2011, Didion wrote about her relationship with her daughter and the loss in the book “Blue Nights.” Her death, of acute pancreatitis at the age of 39,  was less than two years after her father’s passing.

The solo show, “The Year of Magical Thinking,” opened on Broadway in 2007 with the very tall Vanessa Redgrave portraying the very tiny Didion under the direction of British playwright-screenwriter David Hare.

Paying artistic tribute to Didion, who died in December at the age of 87, GableStage is about to open a new production of “The Year of Magical Thinking” with Gainesville-based actor Sara Morsey as Didion.

A preview is set for Friday, June 3, then the play officially opens Saturday, June 4, and run through Sunday, June 26 at the company’s intimate space at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

It was first produced in South Florida a dozen years ago by the now-defunct Women’s Theatre Project.  After Didion’s death, GableStage producing artistic director Bari Newport made room in her inaugural season for “The Year of Magical Thinking.”

“At first I thought we should do a reading of it. Then, after the omicron variant (of COVID) hit, I thought we could reimagine it in a different way. I’d read the play a number of times but had never seen it, and I wondered about doing it in an abstract way,” says Newport, who is staging the production and directed Morsey in “Ripcord” when Newport was running the Penobscot Theatre Company in Bangor, Maine.

Newport’s concept is to place Morsey and thus the audience in a space representing that magical thinking –”if I do this, then that will happen” – which Didion used to help her cope in the year after Dunne’s death.  She refused to give his shoes away, for instance, because she knew he would need them when he came back. Not if he came back. When he came back. If only wishing could make it so.

“Sara is one of the best actresses I’ve known. She’s in incredible shape physically and mentally, which is good because there’s nowhere to sit (on the set),”  Newport says. “I’ve never not seen it as an activated piece.  It’s easy to just tell the audience a story. If you’re going to do that, you might as well read the book.”

Morsey first played Didion a decade ago at Florida Repertory Theatre in Fort Myers. That production was done in a small space on a set designed to look like an inviting room in a home.

During rehearsals, Morsey’s mother died. So the kind of grief Didion expresses in the play was painfully fresh.

“I thought I was too young then. Now I’m as old as Joan was when John died,” says Morsey, who will turn 70 in late June. “And I have so many more thoughts about death and grief.  I never married or had children. I’ve entered that part of my life when I’m losing people. So many. COVID has done something to all of us.”

Newport concurs.

“Everybody is grieving now,” she says. “The piece is the epitome of catharsis – that’s its purpose.”

The play’s opening lines underscore the commonality of profound loss and grief.

“This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem awhile ago but it won’t when it happens to you,” Didion wrote.”And it will happen to you.  The details will be different, but it will happen to you.”

Morsey, whose work recording audiobooks kept her busy during pandemic isolation, has played some challenging and often lengthy roles onstage, including Mary Tyrone in “Long Day’s Journey into Night,” Violet Weston in “August: Osage County” and Maria Callas in “Master Class.” But playing Didion is daunting in another way, she says.

“This one’s scarier. It’s only me,” she says. “It’s also inordinately long for a one-person show… But this is really a wonderful experience.”

The show runs 1 hour and 40 minutes without an intermission.

Morsey adds that as a director Newport “is fearless and articulate.  She’s very encouraging and always has more notes. You begin and end (rehearsals) in a regular space, but then you have to be ready to go.”

For her part, Newport is relishing being able to exercise her artistic muscles as a director after some months of focusing on the challenges involved in running GableStage, including losing the last week of the successful run of “Boca” when the latest COVID wave hit the cast.

“I love working on one-person shows.  You just get to have a more intimate relationship. It’s such a personal journey.  I admire Sara – she’s an effervescent, spiritual being,” says Newport, whose design team for the production is filling the space with shifting lights, sounds, and underscoring. “This will have theatrical beauty galore.”

The play’s only performer is quick to emphasize that, while she has done her research by reading Didion’s work and watching multiple video interviews with the late author, she isn’t trying to transform into the woman she’s playing. For one thing, like Redgrave, Morsey is tall and fit. Didion was petite, weighed under 100 pounds, and for many years started her writing day with a cold Coca-Cola, a handful of nuts, and one cigarette after another.

“She had this ethereal quality. I watched a lot of her, not to be like her but to see her thinking, see how the world added up for her,” Morsey says. “I have not in any way tried to do a capturing of her personality.  She’s fairly inarticulate as a speaker, but she gets it on the page – it’s totally articulate… I’m not trying to impersonate her, but I hope I’m closer to her essence.”

WHAT: “The Year of Magical Thinking” by Joan Didion

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

WHEN: Preview 7 p.m. June 3, opening 8 p.m. June 4; regular performances 2 and 7 p.m. Wednesday, 7 p.m. Thursday, 8 p.m. Friday, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturday, 2 p.m. Sunday, through June 26 (streaming version available June 8-26 during regular performances. Find out more about streaming here.)

TICKETS:  $35-$70 (processing fee additional; ticket discounts for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members)

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

(Check theater’s COVID policies before you go.)

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.

After a pandemic pause, ‘Summer Shorts’ marks 25 years with new plays, proven hits

Daniel Llaca, Lindsey Corey, Stephon Duncan, and Diana Garle take a leap in City Theatre’s “Summer Shorts” through July 2 at the Adrienne Arsht Center.  (Photo courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)

Miami’s City Theatre was preparing to produce and party in 2020 with a splashy 25th-anniversary edition of “Summer Shorts,” its annual festival of short-form comedies, dramas, and musicals.

After the COVID-19 pandemic hit hard that March, those plans were put on indefinite hold.  The company did plenty of virtual programming, but returning to a full-fledged, in-person indoor event still looked risky in June 2021, so that festival was scratched too.

But cofounder/literary director Susan Westfall and artistic director Margaret M. Ledford are as tenacious as they are creative.  And so, 27 years after Westfall, Stephanie Heller and Elena Wohl created City Theatre, the postponed 25^th festival is happening Thursday, June 2 to Saturday, July 2 in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts – on the Susan Westfall Playwrights Stage, no less.

Ledford, who is directing the Lin-Manuel Miranda musical “21 Chump Street” (first presented in the 2017 festival) and the world premiere of “Tango! The Musical!” by Westfall and composer Joe Illick, is also overseeing the festival. This year’s “Summer Shorts” goes big with eight additional plays, four more directors, eight actors, a musical director and a choreographer.

“Being back started feeling normal around Day 2 of rehearsals,” says Ledford. “There’s been such anticipation about this.  We’re ready and excited, but at the same time it’s a little unfamiliar – which allows it to be new, in a way.”

Initially, the thought was that this special festival would return to its two-program roots, with audiences being able to see a lineup of all-new plays, a collection of favorites from earlier festivals, or both.  But after discussions with a core group, company leaders decided on a single program combining new works and past hits.

“We didn’t know what health and safety would mean at the time of the festival,” says Westfall. “National surveys show a situation of audience reluctance (to return to theaters), and it’s generational.”

Indeed, the company must now contend with South Florida’s spike to a high-risk  COVID transmission category, so a two-program lineup likely would have been a tougher sell at the box office.

Playwright Steve Yockey, whose “Go Get ‘em, Tiger!” will have its world premiere in this year’s festival, has been commissioned by City Theatre more than any other playwright.  He made his Summer Shorts debut with “Serendipity” in 2013. “Go Get ’em, Tiger!” will be his ninth City-produced script.

Yockey, you should know, is one very prolific writer, producer and television showrunner.  He was a producer on “Supernatural” in 2017-2018, is executive producer and showrunner for “The Flight Attendant” on HBO Max, has a pilot called “Dead Boy Detectives” filming and may get another series, “Cindy Snow” (a black comedy about a meteorologist) picked up by FOX.

He’s also continuing to create full-length plays – often dark comedies – which “allows me to write about a topic or emotional turmoil. It’s free therapy, then you get to walk around happy, and the audience has the turmoil,” Yockey says via Zoom from his office in Los Angeles.

Yet busy as he is, when City Theatre asks him for a new short play, he says yes.

“A great short play has real emotional heft and real spectacle.  You can do anything to people for 10 minutes… And when I saw the level of City Theatre’s production values, I knew I could go to town,” he says.

He continues: “I don’t think you can overstate how important City is at a national level in finding new talent. They bring thoughtfulness and care to how they select a slate of plays, how they bring playwrights in, how they do so many bookstore readings.”

Ledford, who directed “Serendipity” and remains a Yockey fan, says his voice is “so fresh, so smart, so emotionally connected.  So funny and outlandish. The audience has to know within a minute they’re in good hands.”

This year’s acting company, hired for the canceled 2020 festival, consists of “Summer Shorts” veterans and newbies.

Of the eight actors, Tom Wahl holds the record for most “Summer Shorts” appearances – this is his 11^th, plus two editions of “Winter Shorts.”  Margot Moreland, Alex Alvarez, Lindsey Corey, Diana Garle, and Jovon Jacobs have all done the festival before, while Stephon Duncan and Daniel Llaca (both of whom have appeared in other City Theatre productions) are “Summer Shorts” newcomers.

“I’m in five (pieces), including Susi’s musical.  I don’t sing but I do a little dancing,” says Wahl.  “I like being in a room when all that creativity is happening – it’s miraculous.”

Fellow veteran Moreland, who was part of the company for the first three festivals, cites varied roles as part of the “Summer Shorts” appeal for an actor.

“You’re so easily pigeonholed in this business, but not in ‘Summer Shorts,’ ” says Moreland, who will also appear in five of the 10 plays. “This gets you back to your soul of being an actor. It’s electrifying, and the directors are great… It’s an extraordinary experience.”

This year’s company, she adds, is “kick-ass.”

Jacobs’s last show before the pandemic had him playing a philologist courting a princess (played by his “Summer Shorts” castmate Garle) in Alix Sobler’s “The Glass Piano” at Theatre Lab in Boca Raton. He began doing more film and television work during the long COVID pause, then returned to the stage not long ago with a powerful performance in Lynn Nottage’s “Intimate Apparel” at Palm Beach Dramaworks.

The St. Croix native appreciates the chances he gets to stretch in “Summer Shorts,” “different things you might not do in any other theater… and it brings together actors who otherwise might not work together. It’s a melting pot of different things, refreshing.”

Though theater itself went through a period of deep self-examination in terms of equity, diversity, and inclusion for BIPOC artists during the pandemic, Jacobs believes inclusive companies like City Theatre are still more the exception than the rule.

“I wish I would be seen for more things, but I don’t think things will change so fast.  I do see more Black plays inserted in seasons, and I have played non-traditional roles.  But I’m usually seen for Black roles,” he says.

Four of the five festival directors have been at the helm of “Summer Shorts” productions before.

Ledford is doing the musicals, and City Theatre’s founding artistic director Gail S. Garrisan is directing the late Staci Swedeen’s “A Little Bit of Culture” (first done in the 1999 festival) and David Lindsay-Abaire’s “Misdial.”

Elena Maria Garcia, who has performed in multiple editions of “Summer Shorts,” is making her festival directing debut with two short comedies: Daniel Hirsch’s “A Small Breach in Protocol at Big Rick’s Rockin’ Skydive Academy” and Rolin Jones’s “Chronicles[CQ] Simpkins Will Cut Your Ass” (a hit at the 2008 festival). Michael Yawney is directing the world premiere of Yockey’s “Go Get ’em, Tiger!” and Jacqueline Bircher’s “Webster’s Bitch.”  James Randolph is staging  MacArthur “genius grant” fellow Dominique Morriseau’s “Night Vision” and Amy Berryman’s “Winner.”

Yawney, who teaches theater at Florida International University and runs FIU’s new play development program The Greenhouse, appreciates the creative freedom of Summer Shorts.

“The plays are so short that you can really be bold. And if the audience hates it, don’t worry – there’s another 10-minute play coming up,” he says. “It’s exciting. Like jumping out of a plane and hoping the ground will be there.”

He describes “Go Get ’em, Tiger!” as being like “all the best Steve Yockey plays. You think it’s one thing, then it’s another.  It’s funny, heartbreaking, a fantasy that seems real. It’s like working with nitroglycerine.”

Yawney, who once worked in publishing and in the world of reference books, relates to “Webster’s Bitch” (winner of City Theatre’s 2020 National Contest for Short Playwriting and was staged previously as part of the 2019 City Theatre-Thinking Cap Theatre She Shorts festival in Fort Lauderdale). He says it is spot-on in its depiction of office politics and pop culture.

“It’s interesting how some of these plays that are being revisited feel different with a different cast,” he says, adding, “the ending of ‘Webster’s Bitch’ was Margot’s idea. It’s much better than anything I could have come up with.”

Garcia, a Carbonell Award-winning actor who teaches at Barry University, recently co-directed “Our Dear Dead Drug Lord” at the Carnival Studio Theater with Zoetic Stage artistic director Stuart Meltzer. She blocked both “Skydive” and “Chronicles” the first day and communicated what she believes Summer Shorts should be.

“You need enthusiasm and energy. It’s a festival. It’s fun. We’re not doing Lorca,” says Garcia.

But though she arrives to rehearsals prepared, she stays open to collaborating with her casts.

“It’s a misconception that the director knows exactly what they want,” she says. “I don’t know who’s going to give me a gift.”

In addition to the playwrights, directors, and actors who have been so vital to the long-running success of “Summer Shorts,” numerous other artists are playing key roles in this year’s festival.

Musical director Caryl Fantel, who will also lead a live band at performances, joined Ledford in rehearsing the musicals. Choreographer Sandra Portal-Andreu, scenic designer Jodi Dellaventura, sound designer Steve Shapiro, costume designer Ellis Tillman, props designer Jameelah Bailey, plus a host of interns and others are part of the creative village bringing Summer Shorts to life.

Also, a significant part of the City’s festival programming is the production of “Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds,”  which runs June 22-July 9.

With music by the late, great Marley, the family-friendly show is based on the children’s book “Every Little Thing” by his daughter Cedella.  Tickets are $30 ($20 for children under 12), and they’re still available for the 7:30 p.m. performances June 22 and July 8-9, plus 11 a.m. matinees June 25 and July 2.  Visit www.arshtcenter.org for information.

And another longtime component of the festival, the annual CityWrights playwrights’ gathering, also returns June 29-July 2.  As literary director and cofounder, Westfall will again lead that conference.

First, though, there’s the newest iteration of a piece that began in 2013 as a play titled “Feel the Tango.”  Westfall did some rewriting and rechristened it “Be the Change” for a 2016 Shorts Gone Wild coproduction with Island City Stage in Wilton Manors.  Then her friend Illick, a Santa Fe-based opera composer and conductor, suggested turning the play into a short opera titled “Feel the Tango, the Opera” for a 2017 festival of short operas – and indeed, the short score for that version was quite operatic.

“In 2019, I asked Joe if he could adapt it into a musical with me,” says Westfall, who wrote the book and collaborated with composer Ilick on lyrics for “Tango! The Musical!”

“The piece just tickled me as it changed. I guess that’s the playwright and producer in me… But I do believe this is the end for something that started as a little play.”

WHAT: City Theatre’s 25th annual Summer Shorts Festival

WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater in the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami.

WHEN: Previews 7:30 p.m. June 2-3, opens 7:30 p.m. June 4; regular performances 7:30 p.m. Thursday-Friday, 3 and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through July 2.

TICKETS: $50 and $60 (VIP, $65 and $75)

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.