Review: GableStage’s ‘The Price’ is engrossing and beautifully acted

The character of Victor Franz (Gregg Weiner), at left, watches as his wife, Esther (Patti Gardner), converses with used-furniture dealer Gregory Solomon (Peter Haig) in Arthur Miller’s “The Price” at GableStage. (Photo courtesy of George Schiavone)

Forever on the short list of the greatest American playwrights, Arthur Miller had a gift for crafting dramas that were steeped in time and place, yet timeless in their exploration of truths about the complexities of the human experience.

In his major works — ranging from “All My Sons” in 1947 and his Pulitzer Prize-winning “Death of a Salesman” in 1949 to “The Crucible” in 1953, “A View from the Bridge” in 1955 and “The Price” in 1968 — Miller took on issues such as war profiteering, the crushing dark side of the American Dream, McCarthyism, illegal immigration, and the settling of familial scores.

Threaded thematically throughout Miller’s plays are questions about morality and the consequences of ignoring bedrock ethical principles.

After a sudden COVID-19 closure, the death of its longtime leader and a 20-month production pause during the pandemic, GableStage has come fully back to life with its newly opened production of Miller’s “The Price.” The play was to have been the last one directed by GableStage’s longtime producing artistic director, Joseph Adler, who passed away after a long battle with cancer. Now, it’s the first directed by his successor, Bari Newport, who has already put her stamp on the company in multiple ways.

Changes become apparent from the moment you walk up to GableStage’s space at the eastern end of Coral Gables’ historic Biltmore Hotel. A staffer checks for vaccination status or a recent negative COVID test, then issues a wristband before you proceed to an outdoor box office. Newport herself may be found outside, talking about the play and taking questions, and there’s more outdoor, pre-show seating. Additional staff members are in evidence, ready to help, and the house is open well before curtain time, a rarity in the Adler era.

The space inside is spruced-up but, except for Adler’s palpable absence, it is reassuringly familiar. After a welcoming speech from Newport, the art begins – and that too is familiar, engrossing and delivered at the company’s customary high level.

Set in 1968, “The Price” has four characters, but you could argue that Lyle Baskin’s set constitutes a fifth. Chockablock with the possessions and furniture of a once-wealthy family ruined by the Depression, the attic floor of a soon-to-be-demolished Manhattan brownstone symbolizes loss, betrayal and poisonous family secrets. It had been home to Victor’s late father until the elder man’s passing 16 years earlier. (Properties designer Beth Fath is responsible for the artfully chosen clutter in the attic.)

Victor Franz (Gregg Weiner), a New York police sergeant who has walked the beat for decades, is turning 50 and eligible to retire. He and wife Esther (Patti Gardner) are meeting used-furniture dealer Gregory Solomon (Peter Haig) at the attic. Missing, at least initially, is Victor’s estranged brother, Walter (Michael McKenzie), a successful doctor and the legal co-owner of all that clutter.

Though many contemporary plays run 90 minutes with no intermission, “The Price” is old-school:  2½ hours, with intermission, of character exploration and carefully plotted revelations.

In the first act, though Victor and Esther are at odds over the timing of his retirement, what he’ll do next and how some of her long-restrained dreams might finally be fulfilled, Miller makes room for humor. Solomon, on the cusp of turning 90, is a cagey old fellow with a lifetime of self-benefiting tactics at his disposal, including jokes, misdirection, delays and faux outrage.

But once Walter shows up and the second act gets rolling, “The Price” shifts into more serious territory as it becomes a reckoning between the brothers. Sacrifice, selfishness and sins of omission all come into play. And some of the twists are shocking, piercingly painful and, for anyone questioning the wisdom of life choices, unnerving.

The production is beautifully acted, with Weiner delivering a richly shaded performance as Victor. In his 18th GableStage show, the actor plays the cop-at-a-crossroads with warmth and restraint. Rather than being genuinely annoyed by Solomon, he’s more bemused, and the approach lifts the first-act comedy. The choice makes room for an explosive, take-the-gloves-off confrontation with McKenzie’s Walter, whose portrait of a cocky doctor accustomed to power ends up cracking to reveal the damaged man underneath.

Gardner’s Esther, who is known to enjoy a cocktail or three, is a lovely woman raggedly on the edge. She understands that this moment and Victor’s decisions may mean she’ll get some of the material things she’s long been denied. But she clips in some cajoling here and complaining there, as she doesn’t trust the good man who is her husband to do what she thinks is in their best interest.

Haig has a joyful, detailed field day as Solomon. Climbing the stairs to the attic may have presented a brief physical test to the former vaudevillian, but he’s a live wire by nature, and wrestling with whether to take on an attic full of furniture reenergizes him.

Lighting designer Tony Galaska, sound designer Matt Corey, costume designer Emil White and stage manager Katie Ellison have worked seamlessly with Newport, Baskin and the actors to give Miller’s play its due – and then some.

It isn’t difficult to speculate about why Adler, a celebrated director who left such a significant imprint on South Florida theater, chose “The Price” as his final production. He knew his remaining days were limited, and a play about choices and regrets spoke to him, as it does to us. Newport, who will carry GableStage into its future, has made sure of that.

To read a preview for this play, click here. 

 

WHAT: “The Price” by Arthur Miller

WHEN: 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; through Dec. 12 

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

COST: $35-$70 (plus an additional $5 processing fee and $5 COVID cleaning fee per ticket); discounts available for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test are required.

STREAMING: A streaming option is available beginning Nov. 17; cost is the same as the price of a regular ticket. Check with the box office for details.

INFORMATION: 305-445-1119; gablestage.org/the-price

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

Dan Clancy brings his ‘Middletown’ to South Florida

Adrian Zmed, left, plays Tom Hogan and Donny Most is Don Abrams in “Middletown,” opening at Actors’ Playhouse at The Miracle Theater in Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of IraKuzmaPhotos)

Dan Clancy is eager to tell the story about how his play “Middletown” got its start.

Unlike with the playwright’s “The Timekeepers” — a drama set during the Holocaust, which ran off-Broadway before being produced in 17 countries — there were no big aspirations for “Middletown,” he says. But, through a series of events, the four-character play, which will open Nov. 17 at Actors’ Playhouse at The Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, has come into its own and is a bona fide theatrical experience.

“Middletown” began as a good deed, as a favor for a theater in Fire Island, Clancy recalls.

“My husband, Charlie, and I had this summer cottage in Cherry Grove on Fire Island, and the community had this wonderful barn theater. The theater was in disrepair and I was asked if I could write something that they could use for a fundraiser,” Clancy says.

In 2017, he put together a play entitled, “Quartet,” for the Cherry Grove Community Theater.

“Now, I know from past experiences that when you write something for a fundraiser — and if there’s a cocktail party after that — you can’t make it longer than 50 minutes. Longer than that and the audience starts thinking to themselves, ‘Should I stick to wine or go for the extra dry martini?’ ” he says, half seriously.

So, there it was. A 50-minute play performed by four friends who were actors at the community theater.

“They were in their 60s and 70s and they told me, ‘Yes, we’ll do it, but we don’t want to memorize a script,’ ” he says.

This led to the framework for the play: It’s no longer than 50 minutes, written with characters in their 60s and 70s, with a script that could be presented as reader’s theater. And the story? “These four people had been friends for years. I’ll write about a friendship between two couples,” he says.

The fundraiser was a success, he says, and that was that — until The White Barn theater in Napa Valley wanted to present the play.

“One of the actors had a friend who ran the theater and she said, ‘They need some money, too,’ ” he recalls.

She asked Dan about giving “Quartet” to them for their fundraiser, and he complied. There was just one issue: Clancy remembers White Barn organizers telling him, ” ‘We have people that drive a distance, and they won’t want to drive for a shorter play.’ So, 50 minutes wasn’t going to work for them.”

Clancy added 15 minutes for The White Barn. Then “Quartet” took off and began a run on the fundraising circuit. Theaters were calling him from Palm Springs, Los Angeles, and Asheville, N.C., saying that the four-person play, which had a relatable story and didn’t require anyone to memorize lines, would be a perfect fit. Of course, more theaters meant more tweaks.

“One of the companies asked if I could change the name of the play from ‘Quartet’ to something else. They were concerned that people would expect to see musicians playing a piece by Brahms,” Clancy says.

The title “Middletown” worked on many levels, he says. The play takes place in Middletown, N.J., for one, and there’s probably a Middletown in every state, he says.

It’s about “a town people can relate to and a universal story of love and friendship,” says the playwright, who splits his time between Fort Lauderdale and New York City.

The play follows two married couples, Peg and Tom Hogan and Dotty and Don Abrams, and is staged without a set or many props. It has only music stands and a chair or stool behind each of the stands. The actors read directly from scripts, as if, Clancy explains, they are reading from the book of their own lives.

Seth Greenleaf, artistic director of GFour Productions, became familiar with “Middletown” during Jan McArt’s play-reading series at Boca Raton’s Lynn University in 2016. He could see its potential. GFour Productions has a cadre of Broadway and London’s West End shows in its portfolio, including the perennial hit, “Menopause The Musical.”

And there was a vision for “Middletown.” Part of that included keeping the structure of the play as it was. “After much conversation with Dan, and the way the play reads, it felt really right to keep it as is — to allow the storytelling and the soul of the actors to do the work,” Greenleaf says.

GFour Productions brought another idea to the table to draw in audiences: using familiar celebrities in the roles. For its first run at The Smith Center for the Performing Arts in Las Vegas in 2019, Didi Conn (known for her role as the pink-haired Frenchy in the 1978 film, “Grease,” among others) joined Donny Most (“Happy Days”), Adrian Zmed (“T.J. Hooker”) and Cindy Williams (“Laverne and Shirley”).

After Las Vegas, the show traveled throughout the United States, stopping in Chicago right before COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters. Actors Sally Struthers and Sandy Duncan joined the cast at different times, but Conn, Most and Zmed remained the regulars. For the Actors’ Playhouse run, Loretta Swit (“M*A*S*H”) joins the cast.

Greenleaf says the familiar faces work for many reasons. For one, they bring a familiarity to the characters from the get-go.

“Audiences already, perhaps, have had a relationship with these people, so it creates this emotional connection to the characters and their stories,” Greenleaf says. “Having been fans of theirs for so long, I think that helps the style work even better.”

Conn, who has appeared in productions of the show playing both Peg and Dotty, says she has experienced that from the audience.

“The truth is that we have been in people’s living rooms for many, many years,” she says. “They feel like they know us. We feel like we are coming into a theater and an audience of friends, and they feel the same about us. And the theme of the play is about friendship.”

Most says “Middletown’s” mix of acting and reading was ingenious, and it’s what attracted him to the play.

“Dan’s idea about the purity of the language and the purity of the story, and that coming through without the distractions of a set and props, maybe it forces the audience to be attentive,” he says.

Though he was known as the comedic Ralph Malph on the long-running ABC series, “Happy Days,” Most’s heart has always been in drama. Coming back to theater for him in a dramedy has been a good fit, he says.

“The characters are so richly drawn, [as is] the journey of their lives that the play follows. These two couples have been friends for so many years, through the highs and lows,” Most says.

The characters’ stories are told from the time they are in their 30s through their 70s. “I can personally relate to all the stages of what my character goes through,” says Most, who is 68.

For Greenleaf, who directs the show, bringing “Middletown” to South Florida and having GFour producing it with Actors’ Playhouse (the companies have previously developed shows together) brings everything full circle.

“It’s a homecoming,” he says. “We’ve done multiple iterations of this show. Now we know what it is and why we love it. This is really a celebration of the show and that felt really appropriate to do in South Florida.”

 

To read our review for this play, click here. 

 

WHAT: “Middletown” by Dan Clancy

WHEN: Nov. 17–Dec. 12, 2021; 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Saturdays-Sundays (no matinee on Saturday, Nov. 20)

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

COST: $40–$90

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Audience members age 12 and older are required to provide one of the following: a negative COVID-19 PCR result for a test conducted within 72 hours OR a negative COVID-19 Antigen result for a test done within 24 hours before the show OR proof of full COVID-19 vaccination. All audience members are required to wear a face covering at all times, “except when eating and drinking in designated areas,” according to the theater website.

LIVESTREAM OPTION: A $25 livestream ticket is available for 8 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 20

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293; actorsplayhouse.org

Nilo Cruz explores passion in a pair of Miami world premieres

Pulitzer-winning playwright Nilo Cruz will have two plays premiering at Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box Theatre. (Photo courtesy of Marc Richard Tousignant)

Desire ripples through the plays of Nilo Cruz, slipping past custom and convention, ignoring boundaries, embedding itself in characters parched with longing.

Miami’s own Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright, who arrived in South Florida in 1970 at age 10 on a Freedom Flight from Cuba, has been justifiably celebrated for the poetry that suffuses his stage language. But in many of his 15 plays, including the 2003 Pulitzer-winning “Anna in the Tropics,” desire simmers, then catches fire.

Certainly, that’s the case with a pair of commissioned Cruz world premieres that will debut at co-presenter Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s intimate On.Stage Black Box Theatre. Produced by Arca Images, the bilingual Miami theater company where Cruz has served as artistic director since 2013, the plays incorporate different kinds of daring from their author-director. But the language, the longing? Pure Cruz.

First up, and nearly sold out, is “Hotel Desiderium,” which has a five-performance run Nov. 18-21. The other world premiere, “Kisses Through the Glass,” is scheduled to follow in July 2022, with a run twice as long. Both plays are performed in English and had their premieres pushed back by the pandemic.

Arca founder and executive producing director Alexa Kuve understands the craving for a new Cruz play. And she appreciates the frustration likely to be felt by those unable to get a ticket to see “Hotel Desiderium” during its fleeting run at the in-demand, county-owned facility, which has reduced capacity in the interest of audience safety.

“I feel, ‘Oh my god, we’re only doing five shows. Oh my god, it’s such a short run. Oh my god, we can seat only 80 people at each performance,’” Kuve says. “I can complain, or I can be grateful that we’re doing theater. I’d rather feel blessed.”

Cruz himself is accepting of how brief the world premiere run is for “Hotel Desiderium” — “desiderium” is defined as an ardent desire or longing coupled with grief for something lost.

Since becoming the first Latino playwright to win the Pulitzer, Cruz has also been working in the world of opera, where lengthy developmental periods and relatively short runs can be the norm: He collaborated with Peruvian composer Jimmy López on the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s world premiere of “Bel Canto” in 2015; and his Spanish-language opera with composer Gabriela Lena Frank, “El último sueño de Frida y Diego” (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego), about an otherworldly reunion of Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, will have its delayed world premiere at the San Diego Opera in the fall of 2022.

“It is a crime that [“Hotel Desiderium” is] running only one weekend. It took a year to write,” he says. “But I adore exploring this play with a group of actors. It’s so worth it.”

Supported by grants from the Knight Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts and Funding Arts Network, “Hotel Desiderium” is set largely in a hotel with an international clientele and staff during the 2018 edition of Art Basel Miami Beach. The spark of the idea for the play, he says, came from a friend who worked at a South Beach restaurant.

“He told me about an immigrant worker who had an accident with a gas lamp that burned his face. He was terrified to go to the doctor for help,” Cruz says of the badly injured man, who didn’t have the papers to work legally. “I decided to write about that, then expanded it to writing about the people who work behind the scenes in hotels and those who benefit from their labor, the clientele.”

But as always with a Cruz play, and given the extra writing time he had during the pandemic, “Hotel Desiderium” evolved through a dozen drafts.

Now, the play centers on a trio of young lovers: Lucienne (Hannia Guillén), a nearly blind Spanish painter; Dante (Leo Oliva), an Italian painter also going blind; and Sunol (Gonzalo Trigueros), a Romani actor from Latin America who gets hired at the hotel and as a take-it-all-off go-go dancer at a nearby club.

Serafín Falcón plays Fedor, the Slovenian boss at the hotel; Anna Silvetti is Magda, a Spanish art dealer and Lucienne’s extremely protective mother; and Alejandra Corchado is Mikaela, Sunol’s Latin American coworker and the one who hooks him up with the dancing job. The play contains plenty of lust and longing, as well as brief nudity.

Four of the six actors have worked with Cruz in multiple productions of his plays. Only one, the Barcelona-born Silvetti, is based in Miami. The others have traveled from distant cities (Guillén from Paris) to appear in and help shape a Cruz world premiere.

“I hadn’t heard the play read until the first day of rehearsal,” Cruz says. “It’s amazing. We’re discovering so much. I don’t have full knowledge of the characters until I start working with the actors.”

He adds: “I’m not an argument-directed playwright. I follow the characters and discover things as I go along. I’m always surprised. I didn’t know there would be a ‘ménage à trois.’ I didn’t know that there would be two blind artists.”

As it evolved, he acknowledges, “the play got wild.”

Silvetti has previously appeared in multiple Cruz readings and plays, including “Sotto Voce,” “Beauty of the Father” and “The Color of Desire.”

“Nilo writes amazing characters for women, especially women my age, who are forgotten in theater nowadays,” Silvetti says. “His work is full of poetry. He’s among my three top guys: Nilo, Anton Chekhov and Federico García Lorca.”

Silvetti also believes that Cruz’s Cuban-American multicultural background and openness to multiple points of view are abundantly reflected in his work.

“Nilo is a perfect mixture of two cultures — he has been embedded in them since he got to America so young,” she says. “He can also absorb every culture easily, respecting the point of view of what he sees. He really is amazing.”

When the play warrants it, Cruz can be a voracious researcher, as he was when he was commissioned to write “Anna in the Tropics” for Coral Gables’ New Theatre in 2002. He became an expert on the “lectores” who would read to the Cuban-American workers in Ybor City’s cigar factories in the 1920s as they hand-rolled cigars. He thoroughly understood the politics and culture of a tradition on the cusp of change. But as much as that attention to detail lends authenticity to the stories Cruz chooses to tell, it’s his characters who drive the work.

“Kisses Through the Glass” is Cruz’s pandemic play, a piece born of isolation and myriad questions about how theater and human interaction could change as the result of COVID-19. Its two characters are Anabella Landi, a New York actress of Latin American descent, and Trevor Dos Santos, a Portuguese-American truck driver from Rhode Island. Passion, fear and a desire to protect one another follow them from their meeting in the cafeteria at a highway rest stop through a life-altering journey toward — could be salvation, might be oblivion.

In writing it, Cruz says, “I thought about reconstructing theater. About a reader’s theater. About [Samuel] Beckett as well. About how to do it without jeopardizing [the safety of] the actors.”

Arca Images producer Kuve, who last month showcased the company’s productions of Joel Cano’s “Fallen Angels” in Paris and Abel González Melo’s “Vuelve a contármelo todo” (Tell me Everything Again) in Madrid, is also an actor who has been directed by Cruz in three productions. Although it’s less common for playwrights to direct their own work in the United States, she believes no one stages a Cruz play better than Cruz.

“I’ve traveled to see other stagings of his plays, but his understanding of the play, its magic, its poetry is like no other,” she says. “Nilo has a path to find beauty in places you would never imagine.”

She also believes that fans of Cruz’s work will be intrigued by the differences in his newest plays.

“‘Kisses Through the Glass’ has Nilo’s stamp, but it surprised me. There’s poetry in every line. It’s subtle, delicate,” she observes. “‘Hotel Desiderium’ is very daring. It’s risky. Its characters are living on the edge.”

Silvetti says she becomes a better actor with each Cruz play — and echoes Kuve’s praise of his skill as a director.

“He’s a minimalist. He doesn’t need a huge palace to tell the audience we’re in a palace,” she says. “It’s the gift of synthesis. He has a wonderful imagination brushed with poetry and amazing ideas. The way he looks at the world is really different from the way the rest of us look at it.

“Nilo is a free spirit. When he writes, he doesn’t have any boundaries. ‘Hotel Desiderium’ is new territory. It’s the least conservative play of his that I’ve read. He doesn’t make any concessions. He expresses himself and his point of view. He doesn’t care what people will think.”

“Hotel Desiderium” is playing Nov. 18-21 in the On.Stage Black Box Theatre at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium, 2901 W. Flagler St., Miami. Most performances are sold out; masks and social distancing are required. For more information, visit arcaimages.org or call 786-327-4539; miamidadecountyauditorium.org or call 305-547-5414.

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

 

GableStage’s Bari Newport bridges past & future with an Arthur Miller classic

The characters played by Gregg Weiner, left, Patti Gardner and Michael McKenzie clash over choices in the GableStage production of “The Price.” (Photo courtesy of George Schiavone)

For any professional theater company, the journey from choosing a play to celebrating its opening night involves hundreds of decisions, endless creative collaboration, and the refining of a vision.

Now imagine the greater complexity of that process after a 20-month layoff due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Then, add to all of that the death of this particular theater’s award-winning producing artistic director, Joseph Adler – a man whose aesthetic was reflected in everything his company did – not long after the pandemic shutdown.

As GableStage’s Bari Newport gets ready to open her first production at the company she’ll lead into a new era, she has already faced all of those challenges. And she’s ready to take on the ones to come.

“My goal for GableStage is to have a healthy, vibrant theater company – a citizen of the arts community that goes way beyond the plays we do. And I want to make sure that the actors are a priority,” she says.

At the same time, she is relying on the team she has assembled – many longtime GableStage staff members and creative associates, others new to the company – to keep the theater moving forward while she’s in rehearsals for Arthur Miller’s “The Price.”

“I’m trying to do the most important thing we do: putting on depth-filled plays that tell human stories,” Newport says.

“The Price,” which premiered on Broadway in 1968, was to have opened at GableStage in March 2020 as Adler’s final production. However, in mid-March, the play’s opening was pushed back, then canceled. The cast, designers, staff and Adler were devastated, knowing how little time he had left and how much the playwright, the play and its themes meant to him.

After Newport left the Penobscot Theatre Co. in Bangor, Maine, to take the helm at GableStage, she began assembling an eclectic, adventurous first season. She chose “The Price” as her opener for reasons both practical and empathetic.

“The [Lyle Baskin] set was already onstage. We’ve added a lot to it, and also to the costumes, the sound, the lights,” she says. “People haven’t had time to properly grieve. It’s not like I’m taking over from someone who retired after five years. It’s a passing of the baton, with longtime GableStage actors.”

Set in the attic of a Manhattan brownstone in the late ’60s, Miller’s four-character play examines the consequences of choices, regret over roads not taken, the devastating power of family secrets.

New York police sergeant Victor Franz (Gregg Weiner) has come with his wife, Esther (Patti Gardner), to the place where his late father’s furniture and a lifetime of difficult memories are crammed together.

He hasn’t had luck communicating with his estranged doctor-brother Walter (Michael McKenzie) about getting rid of the stuff before the building is torn down, but an octogenarian, used-furniture dealer, Gregory Solomon (Peter Haig), is coming ’round to assess what the haul might be worth – and, Victor hopes, buy it all.

In taking on “The Price,” and incorporating another director’s vision into her own, Newport acknowledges that she faced some unique challenges.

“I did not know this play. I’m not an Arthur Miller aficionado,” says the director, who is now steeped in the world of “The Price.”

“I asked Katie [Ellison, the stage manager] for Joe’s blocking notes, so I could see why the furniture placement was the way it was to help me understand more about how Joe staged things,” she adds. “The movement indicates changes that happen, an idea of how he saw the play unfolding, what its beats were.”

Newport could also draw on the memories of Gardner and McKenzie, who were part of Adler’s production. (Actor Tom Wahl, originally cast as Victor, was committed to the upcoming Palm Beach Dramaworks world premiere of Michael McKeever’s “The People Downstairs,” so the role was re-cast with longtime GableStage actor Weiner.)

Nonetheless, Newport has crafted a version of “The Price” that reflects her interpretation of the play.

“Miller was a genius who wrote about complex themes that affect everyone. He wrote timeless pieces about our existential choices. He asked what price we pay for the choices we make, now or later,” she observes.

She points to a wide timeline on one wall near the stage, a paper with detailed notes about the events referenced in the play, from the ruinous Great Depression to 1968.

“This is different. I do things differently,” she says. “I’ve added the idea of time, which is extremely important, hence the timeline and the multiple clocks on the set. Beth [Fath, the props designer] and I have added more and more to it.”

GableStage’s theater space in the historic Biltmore Hotel has been refurbished and upgraded since Newport’s arrival, with fresh paint, new carpet, a better backstage area and more. For the cast, returning to a place where all except McKenzie had appeared in multiple Adler productions has been bittersweet, nostalgic and inspiring.

Weiner, who won two Carbonell Awards in 17 previous GableStage appearances, is now based in New York. He has felt complex emotions about returning to a place that helped shape him as an actor for more than two decades.

“I dreaded coming back here, because I thought it would hit me like a truck. But once the work began, I realized it wasn’t about being sad that someone is gone,” says the actor, who is tackling his first Miller work and who calls “The Price” a “dense-ass play.”

He adds of his late friend: “I never met anyone like Joe. His voice is in my head. I try to think what he would think, and I know. I miss him every day.”

Weiner and Gardner have worked together in a number of shows, though this is their first time playing husband and wife. But that history is beneficial.

“We listen and work off of each other. We know each other’s rhythms and intonations,” he says.

Gardner says doing her 11th GableStage show has filled her with emotion.

“Everyone remembers what it was like to leave and then revisit the play in just 18 months. I’m a different person now. It’s exciting and emotional,” she says. “Bari has been incredible. If anyone can take the ball and run with it, it’s Bari … Her communication skills are great, and she’s so collaborative.”

Doing his seventh GableStage show, Haig, who has appeared in two earlier productions of “The Price,” appreciates the chance to play the wily Solomon.

“This is a dream role for an older actor,” says Haig, who compares the character’s dialogue deep into the first act to an aria.

Although McKenzie has yet to experience his first GableStage opening night, he recalls Adler’s process during rehearsals.

“Joe really worked moment to moment. He would open up a moment, really zero in on something,” says McKenzie, whose acting resume includes three Broadway shows. “In this time off, the play has really percolated in my brain. I think I realized I was doing it totally wrong. I find myself wishing Joe could see it.”

Moving forward, Newport will continue to do things her way at GableStage.

She plans to be outside the theater an hour before every performance to talk about the company’s future and answer guests’ questions. For each show during the season, Newport and the cast will offer a talkback about the play following the first Sunday matinee of the run. She’s determined to grow the theater’s subscription audience and is hoping that her choices will also draw younger theatergoers.

Since taking the GableStage job, Newport has made a point of meeting as many people as possible in the theater and arts communities, and she has traveled throughout Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties to see shows at multiple theaters.

“Theater here is so unique. It’s incredibly distinctive for this place,” she says. “It’s hand-curated for this community, and it’s done exceptionally well. I’m thrilled to be a part of it.”

To read the review of this play, click here. 

 

WHAT: “The Price” by Arthur Miller

WHEN: 2 p.m. and 7 p.m. Wednesdays, 7 p.m. Thursdays, 8 p.m. Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays; through Dec. 12 

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

COST: $35-$70 (plus an additional $5 processing fee and $5 COVID cleaning fee per ticket); discounts available for students, groups, artists, military, veterans and Biltmore staff members

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a negative COVID-19 test are required.

STREAMING: A streaming option is available beginning Nov. 17; cost is the same as the price of a regular ticket. Check with the box office for details.

INFORMATION: 305-445-1119; gablestage.org/the-price

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

Review: Zoetic Stage’s ‘Frankenstein’ stitches together a potent mix of emotions, performances and vision

Actors Henry Gainza, Gabriell Salgado and Imran Hylton help bring to life the potent story behind playwright Nick Dear’s adaptation of “Frankenstein.” (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

It’s difficult not to draw parallels as a creature-man fights his way out of an alien-type pod at the beginning of Zoetic Stage’s “Frankenstein.”

Only minutes before, during opening night of the production, Zoetic artistic director Stuart Meltzer had welcomed the audience back to live theater with a speech laced with exuberance while tinged with an undertone of malaise from the past 19 months. Live theater was upended by COVID-19, as we all know, and Meltzer has been waiting to stage a show inside the company’s home at the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater.

The character of the Creature trying to break free of an isolative structure could easily be a metaphor for what an audience member feels like attending the first live performance in so many months. The “new theater normal” at the Arsht includes checking in outside to show either a negative antigen test or proof of vaccination. Then, ushers waiting at the theater door scan contactless tickets and assist those struggling to get the image to show on their phones. (And, of course, everyone but those on stage is wearing a mask.)

There’s a loneliness in British playwright Nick Dear’s 2011 adaptation of Mary Shelley’s 1818 gothic novel — and it isn’t lost on an audience just coming out of isolation.

This is where Meltzer’s production draws its strength. Most, if not all, of the characters in Dear’s play are struggling with some sort of inner turmoil and longing. First and foremost is the Creature (played with complete devotion by Gabriell Salgado ), who is created then abandoned to fend for himself. He must try to make meaning of the world alone, while judged at every turn by his appearance. Victor Frankenstein (Daniel Capote) deals with his ambitions as savior of the world, someone who can defy God by bringing the dead back to life. Then there is an internal battle of morals, which manifests itself in the love-hate relationship he has with his creation.

Elizabeth (Lindsey Corey) must deal with a workaholic fiance who has put off their wedding to focus on his servitude to science. De Lacey (Barry Tarallo), a blind man, has lived in a dark loneliness, finally finding companionship in the Creature who stumbles into his home. De Lacey gains a sense of purpose as he teaches the Creature about the great poets, scholars and writers, but he soon learns something’s amiss with his newfound friend’s appearance.

Meanwhile, De Lacey’s family have their own woes: Felix (Nate Promkul) and Agatha (Donesha Rose) can’t get their land, filled with rocks, to yield crops. And Frankenstein’s father (Matthew W. Korinko), already a widower, then loses a son – his isolation is wrapped in grief.

However, while this is a 13-person play (others in the cast are Henry Gainza, Jeni Hacker, Imran Hylton, Ross Kaplan, Alessandro J. Lopez and Seth Trucks), it might as well be a two-hander. The story belongs to Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. The supporting characters are only there to further their story.

Salgado, a 2019 graduate of the New World School of the Arts, makes his debut at Zoetic as the Creature. Makeup artist Kelly Flores has done an exceptional job of transforming Salgado into the Creature, but don’t expect the neck-bolted monster of the 1931 Boris Karloff movie. Gone is the ill-fitting suit and platform boots. This Creature wears only a loin cloth and is covered in stitches and scars, as if his skin has been patchworked onto his body.

The first two scenes have no dialogue, as the Creature writhes out of the womblike pod and tries to get his footing. There’s a choreography to how the Creature takes his first steps (fellow actor Hacker worked with the actor to finetune the movements). Salgado takes the Creature from a wide-eyed, childlike innocent to a hostile and murderous monster whose tenderness turns to rage.

This is a tale as old as time, in which a hideous beast loses its innocence after it acquires knowledge and is exposed to the selfishness of the world.

Yet, even as the Creature begins to commit heinous acts, Salgado never becomes a growling monster. There’s a human side that Salgado keeps ever-present, thereby eliciting sympathy from an audience who, like others in the play, won’t judge him.

Capote’s scientist is intense, hell-bent on proving to himself and others that he has done something spectacular. The actor finds a way to match the intensity of Salgado’s Creature by having us believe that he is a victim of circumstance. The scenes between Capote and Salgado are forceful yet eloquent.

As the Creature becomes more powerful, his creator’s control diminishes. The playwright’s words, as uttered by the Creature, are: “The son becomes the father, the master the slave.” We see what the scientist’s deeds have brought to him and how actions can create consequence.

The stage goes from one end of the black-box theater to the other, with bleacher-style chairs on both sides. It makes little difference which side of the stage you choose, as there’s nothing missed from either. However, there’s an overall sense of distance created in this choice of setup. The view is that of spectator to what is happening on-stage, not allowing for an immersion into Frankenstein’s world. Considering the limits of virtual performances during the COVID-19 pandemic, a staging that allowed for the audience to feel less like bystanders might have been a better choice.

Adding to the sense of emptiness and struggle, Meltzer keeps everything sparse on the stage, so the focus is on the main characters. Designers Natalie Taveras and Jodi Dellaventura go for the minimalistic. Rebecca Montero’s lighting design finds a middle ground between presenting necessary realism and keeping the dark mood. Matt Corey’s sound design has a similar approach. Marina Pareja’s costumes capture the era.

Though not in the original play notes, a choral rendition of composer Arvo Pärt’s “De Profundis” puts extra emphasis on the climatic ending. Meltzer uses his ensemble as a choir, under the direction of Anthony Cabrera, who is artistic director of the Miami Gay Men’s Chorus. As the scientist crawls through an Arctic tundra while his Creature torments him, the ensemble encircles the pair while singing.

The piece, which takes its name from the first lines of Psalm 130 (“Out of the depths … “), is a haunting ode to feelings of longing, hope and faith. After a two-hour roller coaster of despair, death, murder, madness — and a ruthless contemplation of what it is to be human — it is a fitting closure.

Click here to read Christine Dolen’s preview for this production.

WHAT: Zoetic Stage presents “Frankenstein” by Nick Dear

WHEN: Wednesdays-Sundays through Oct. 31, 2021

WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

COST: Ranges from $50-$60

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test are required.

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722; arshtcenter.org

 

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

Zoetic Stage creates a dark, enticing ‘Frankenstein’ in time for Halloween

Gabriell Salgado plays the tormented Creature in Zoetic Stage’s “Frankenstein.” (Photo courtesy of Chris Headshots)

Unless you’re familiar with Mary Shelley’s novel about an obsessed scientist and the creature he brings to life, forget what you think you know about “Frankenstein.”

Shelley’s 1818 origin story blends gothic horror and science-fiction in the chilling tale of hubristic scientist Victor Frankenstein and the Creature he creates then abandons. Though it feels seasonally appropriate, this is not the story of a huge monster with a bolt through its neck, ala Boris Karloff in the famous 1931 movie, nor a tongue-in-cheek take on the genre like the 1974 Mel Brooks comedy, “Young Frankenstein.”

The name Frankenstein, in fact, refers to the creator, not his creation.

So it’s that “Frankenstein” – dark, intense, with echoes of Prometheus, “Pygmalion” and “Paradise Lost” – that audiences will encounter as Miami’s Zoetic Stage returns to its home in the Adrienne Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater this week. The play will launch the Arsht’s 2021-2022 Theater Up Close series, previewing on Oct. 14, opening on Oct. 15 and running through Oct. 31.

In rehearsals for Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheeler’s “A Little Night Music” when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, Zoetic has waited 19 months to get back to presenting provocative theater inside the Arsht. Artistic director and company co-founder Stuart Meltzer chose British playwright Nick Dear’s 2011 version of “Frankenstein” as the piece to end the Zoetic’s transformative hiatus.

“I wanted to get back into the theater with guns a-blazin’,” says Meltzer, who turned to a play that premiered a decade ago at London’s Royal National Theatre.  “I fell in love with the sparseness of Nick’s script, the way it’s lean, contemporary and direct, and the many ways you could present it.”

The National Theatre’s “Frankenstein” featured stars Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller alternating in the roles of Dr. Victor Frankenstein and the Creature. (Both versions of the show were filmed, to showcase the acting challenge). Meltzer deliberately avoided watching the two Danny Boyle-directed versions of the play, preferring to find his own way into the story.

“In theater, certain shows – like ‘Kinky Boots’ or ‘Rent’ – have to be done a certain way. I tend to do things my own way. It’s refreshing to work things out with a team of people,” says Meltzer. “This play has so many elements, with so many special effects involving fire, snowfall, water. I had to figure out how to do them … And I fell in love with the empathy in Mary Shelley’s story. Its themes touched me so deeply.”

Embedded in the story of an innocent Creature who learns quickly and turns deadly after being shunned by his creator and the rest of the world, those themes involve “how we treat each other, how we can easily rip each other apart out of fear, and man’s desire to act as God in creating life without divinity,” Meltzer observes.

Zoetic’s “Frankenstein” is being performed by a diverse 13-member cast. Two Cuban-American actors from Miami are playing the leading roles, and the cast mixes veteran actors and young performers, several making their professional debuts.

Gabriell Salgado, a 2019 New World School of the Arts grad, lost 20 pounds, shaved his head and will spend a little over an hour before each performance donning special makeup to help him transform into the stitched-together Creature.

The Juilliard School grad Daniel Capote, who appeared previously in Zoetic’s “The Caretaker” and “Dracula,” plays the driven title character, Victor Frankenstein.

Also in the cast are Lindsey Corey, Henry Gainza, Jeni Hacker, Barry Tarallo, Matthew W. Korinko, Seth Trucks, Donesha Rose, Imran Hylton, Ross Kaplan, Nate Promkul and Alessandro J. Lopez.

Originally, Salgado was to have made his Zoetic debut as a non-singing butler in the 2020 production of “A Little Night Music.” Then he would have taken on the larger character of a Cuban-American guy in the world premiere of Hannah Benitez’s “GringoLandia” before playing the Creature. The pandemic forced postponements and upended the order of the shows, so now Salgado is beginning with the most intense, extensive of the three parts. (He’ll still appear in the rescheduled “GringoLandia” Jan. 13-30 and “A Little Night Music” March 17-April 10.)

When “Frankenstein” begins, the focus is entirely on the Creature, who emerges from a pod or orb, knowing nothing, with the scientist nowhere in sight.

“This is the most committed role I’ve ever done,” says Salgado, who asked his former teacher, Meltzer, to mentor him at New World and beyond. “With the year gap, I let this simmer, and I feel more confident that I had all of this time to work on my craft and skills.

“I had to think about the journey that the Creature has. I lean toward him being a clean slate or a blank hard drive. He’s a boy in a man’s body, so innocent, but no one lets him in. There are not many ways that can end. It’s so emotional and sensual – it’s quite the arc. It’s simple, but it’s not easy.”

Capote, who read Shelley’s “dense, detailed” novel several times and did extensive research before beginning rehearsals, thinks “Frankenstein” is far deeper than a play about a monster.

“This is heavy and very intense, though Stuart can always find moments of humor in things. It’s not a complete horror show, like going to a haunted house,” he says.  “It holds up a mirror to ugliness, hope and innocence – the whole gamut of human emotions.”

Victor Frankenstein, Capote says, is a man “who wants to be better than God, for fame, notoriety and prestige. And he’ll stop at nothing to get it.”

As the Creature acquires movement, speech, knowledge and feelings, as he reacts to the fear and rejection his appearance provokes, he demands Dr. Frankenstein create a female companion to lessen his loneliness. In her professional debut, New World grad Rose is playing that role and the part of Agatha, daughter-in-law of the blind man who becomes the Creature’s first teacher and friend.

Rose, single mom to a 4-year-old daughter, sees Agatha as “the glue who holds the family together … who does everything for everyone.” The female Creature, she feels, is “conjured in a dream by the male, as a mixture of the women he has come across after Frankenstein abandons him. He doesn’t have anyone.”

The play speaks to life today in multiple ways, she says.

“When people are not oppressed, they’re full of brotherly love. But when times are hard, you find out who your friends are. People are on edge,” she says.

Daughter of a Jamaican immigrant mom, Rose studied at New World during the years of the Trump presidency, the Black Lives Matter protests and the push for greater BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) presence in the arts. She enjoyed all the theatrical storytelling she did in school but was particularly moved by Oscar winner and fellow New World grad Tarell McCraney’s “In the Red and Brown Water,” which she performed in her senior year.

“Tarell writes stories that people who look like me understand. He’s successful. That’s what inspires me – I don’t feel like I won’t be heard,” she says.

Among Meltzer’s original choices in the production is the inclusion, near the end of the play, of the choral piece, “De Profundis,” by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. A version of Psalm 130 with lyrics in Latin, it requires powerful, accomplished singers – something the Zoetic cast has in abundance.

Hacker, Promkul and Gainza, for example, were in Zoetic’s Carbonell Award-winning “Sweeney Todd.” Tarallo and Gainza have performed on and Off-Broadway as well as in regional theaters throughout the country. Corey and Korinko are among the best and busiest musical theater actors in South Florida.

Gainza, who has been based in New York since graduating from the University of Miami, spent most of the pandemic here with family. He’s grateful that he can reenter the world of theater in his hometown in a pair of roles (one as a drifter, the other a grave robber) infused with a bit of humor that allows “more colors in our palette,” he says.

Healing through art and embracing laughter, he says, saved him after the death of his father in 2018. At the time, he was performing in a Milwaukee Repertory Theater co-production of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights.”

“Laughter is what saved me. So much was going on. In retrospect, it’s what kept me sane. You heal yourself,” Gainza says.

The actor has appeared twice at Zoetic, first in the company’s 2014 musical “Assassins” (as Giuseppe Zangara, a naturalized Italian-American and would-be assassin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt), then in 2019’s “Sweeney Todd” (as conniving Brit Beadle Bamford). Outside Miami, Gainza was typically cast in Latino roles as a “diversity hire,” he says. But at Zoetic, Meltzer has given him a chance to demonstrate the versatility of his talents.

“Everything I’ve seen at Zoetic reaches a level that is superior, detailed, nuanced,” Gainza says.

Given the nationwide pandemic-era reckoning over the way theater typically gets made – issues of equity, diversity, inclusion, hours, pay and more – Meltzer and his Zoetic colleagues came back to work at the Arsht trying to be and do better.

Workdays were reduced from six to five, and rehearsal hours were trimmed so that actors with side jobs could better manage their schedules. In addition to acting in the play, for example, Hacker signed on as intimacy coordinator and movement consultant to work on a pivotal violent scene involving the Creature and Corey as Victor Frankenstein’s bride.

Anthony Cabrera, artistic director of the Miami Gay Men’s Chorus and minister of liturgical arts at Coral Gables Congregational Church, came in to work with the cast on “De Profundis.” The extensive behind-the-scenes creative team also includes set designers Natalie Taveras and Jodi Dellaventura, lighting designer Rebecca Montero, costume designer Marina Pareja, makeup designer Kelly Flores, sound designer Matt Corey, stage manager Vanessa McCloskey, assistant stage manager Shannon Veguilla, fight coordinator Lee Soroko, dialect coach Rebecca Covey and COVID safety manager Annabel Herrera.

“We are working to create a sense of inclusion and ownership. To have grace when we make a mistake. To be human and respectful,” Meltzer says.

“I feel blessed to be at the Arsht and have an arts partner, to have [department director] Michael Spring and his colleagues at the Miami-Dade Department of Cultural Affairs* fight for us, to have the audience stand by us. And to have artists who couldn’t wait to get back to work at Zoetic.”

Click here to read Michelle Solomon’s review for this production.

WHAT: Zoetic Stage presents “Frankenstein” by Nick Dear

WHEN: Previews 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14; opens Oct. 15 for a run through Oct. 31

WHERE: Carnival Studio Theater at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

COST: $50 and $55

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: Masks and proof of vaccination or a recent negative COVID-19 test are required.

INFORMATION: 305-949-6722; arshtcenter.org

 

*The Miami-Dade County Department of Cultural Affairs helps support Artburst Miami.

 

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Knight New Work: ‘Sharing Grandmothers’ set to premiere online

Inez Barlatier, a Haitian-American musician and educator, is working with Caballero and Lornoar, a Cameroon-based singer-songwriter, on “Sharing Grandmothers.” (Photo courtesy of Inez Barlatier)

Like many in the performing arts community, Carlos Miguel Caballero, a Cuban-born actor and theater director, was left reeling from the effects of pandemic closures. Then he heard about available funding through the Knight New Work 2020 grant program.

It was a most welcome lifeline. “I wrote the application with my heart,” he says.

His dream was to collaborate with Inez Barlatier, a Haitian-American musician and educator, and Lornoar, a Cameroon-based singer-songwriter. Together, they wanted to produce “Sharing Grandmothers,” a music and theatrical dance performance that focuses on the human exchange.

The group is now on its way, as one of nine Miami winning projects sharing $300,000 in funds slated for artists and their projects through the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.

The awards are just the latest round of funding from Knight New Work 2020, which was created last year to support the performing arts community during the COVID-19 pandemic. The foundation allocated $10,000 each, first to 18 Miami-based artists and art organizations, then to 19 community leaders who got to direct the grant money to a person/group of their choosing.

Now, this new batch of artists have until year’s end to complete their pieces.

Adam Ganuza, program officer on the Knight Arts team, said the funds provide one way to help artists get back on track.

“They are all incredibly talented, and they are all doing fantastic work,” Ganuza says. “We have artists being incredibly creative under enormous constraints.”

‘SHARING GRANDMOTHERS’

For Caballero, this includes working with those who don’t speak the same language. Even though it’s a bit of a hurdle, the collaborators of “Sharing Grandmothers” all tap into universal experiences and messaging presented throughout a theatrical piece with original music and dance.

“It’s a very simple history about love and about life,” Caballero says. “It’s a great story about a cultural richness that is very powerful.”

One of the themes they will focus on is the cycle of life, says Barlatier.

“The show is telling a story about our people, from death to rebirth,” Barlatier says. “We’re going to start by giving thanks to our ancestors and the women who came before us.”

The performance is also meant to offer a message of unity, particularly to those who have a connection with the African diaspora, she says.

“The more I learn about my culture, the more I learn how every culture of the African diaspora is connected in some way,” she says. “And though we have our nationalities, in the end, we just were dropped off in different places. And so, this project is just that story.

“It’s important to know that this story is also a lot of people’s story in Miami,” she adds. “It’s not only about Cameroon, it’s about Cuba, it’s about Colombia, it’s about Bolivia. It’s about all the cultures that were touched by the movement of Africans before they even were called African.”

*”Sharing Grandmothers: Phase 1 Musical Component” is now scheduled to premiere at 7 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 30, on FUNDarte’s YouTube channel and Facebook page. Watch it free of charge. For more information, visit Fundarte.us or call 786-348-0789.

‘WHERE HOME IS’

Also investigating movement in his piece is Juraj Kojs, director of the Foundation for Emerging Technologies and Arts and assistant professor at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music. But the focus of his music composition for voices, instruments and computers, entitled “Where Home Is,” relies on immigration.

As a recently naturalized U.S. citizen from Slovakia, his explores what it’s like to relocate to another country.

Kojs describes himself as an “artphibian,” one who isn’t afraid to plunge headfirst into an array of artistic disciplines. His flexibility has allowed him to find new ways to express himself, and he offers encouragement for those who are struggling with the new artistic landscape.

“As an artist, you just can’t stop because art does not allow you to do that,” he says. “We can keep on making art. We don’t have to be paralyzed because we aren’t making music in a concert hall.”

(Juraj Kojs: Knight New Work 2020 from Knight Foundation on Vimeo)

His unique and steadfast approach has led him to launch his piece in an unlikely location: “We’re doing it in this incredible garage,” he says, with a laugh.

The experience includes going up and down escalators with 11 floors of performances, engagement activities, musical expression and theatrical dance.

“This will be all tied to immigration because all of the performers and participants are immigrant women,” he says.

In fact, he reveals that it was an immigrant woman who initially sparked the idea.

“What motivated this whole project is my great-great-great-great-grandmother, who came in the early 1900s to work in Chicago as a cleaning lady. In many ways, she inspired me to come to the States,” he says. “I was always curious. What did she experience? I wondered what it would have been like for a woman with potentially no language skills but [who] had the determination to make life better for those who she left behind.”

It’s a good question. If only he could travel back in time to find out …

‘MIAMI BUS STOP STORIES’

The creators of Juggerknot Theatre Co.’s “Miami Bus Stop Stories,” plan to do just that.

The theatrical production company, known for its popular “Miami Motel Stories,” will use the Knight funds to host virtual bus tours for students to hear from “historical figures” from various Miami neighborhoods, including Liberty City, Little Haiti and Coconut Grove.

“The idea is that they’re dropped off at a specific moment in time in neighborhoods when something pivotal happens,” said Tanya Bravo, Juggerknot’s founder and executive artistic director. “They will encounter a live person, an actor, and communicate with them from a different time period. By the time they finish, they will have an idea of what are some of the important moments that happened in those neighborhoods.”

For example, she said, they’ll learn about Overtown: “What was it like when the I-95 overpass was built through Overtown? How did it impact them?”

(Juggerknot Theatre Co: Knight New Work 2020 from Knight Foundation on Vimeo)

The bus tours will be part of an ongoing learning experience: “We’re also creating a resource guide and an activity book for the teachers, so that the conversation can continue” after the tours, said Bravo.

The Knight funds were a game-changer for Juggerknot.

“It allowed us to take a moment in time and really pivot and look at things in a different way because for us it was really difficult. We had to close our show, ‘Miami Motel Stories: North Beach,’ during the pandemic,” Bravo said. “It would have been impossible for us to do anything live, and also immersive during that time because we work in very small spaces. So, for us to be able to do something virtual and challenge ourselves to get as close as possible with our audience, but obviously, with a screen between us, was something really exciting.”

Despite the virtual component, “Miami Bus Stop Stories” will provide an in-depth view of the neighborhoods while challenging any preconceived notions.

“Virtual can be incredibly impactful if done the right way,” said Bravo. “So it’s a really great way to strip away any stigma and see what these communities are like. Let’s peek in there for a little bit, and maybe we’ll see that we’re not as different as we think we are.”

‘CUBLACK, INVISIBILIZED NO FURTHER!’

 Melissa Cobblah Gutierrez delves into what it means to be a Cuban woman of African descent in “CuBlack: Invisibilized No Further!”

Gutierrez, who was born on the island and raised in Ghana and Cape Verde, is a choreographer, performer and educator whose dance film and performance is intended to open conversations. Examining ideas about race and historical oppression is an important way to address issues in the community, she says. Her piece aims to provide both a voice for the voiceless and a platform for the Black community in Cuba.

Gutierrez’s experiences will serve as a backdrop. Arriving in the United States at age 14 was a balancing act, she says, as she embraced her Latin roots as well as the African-Americans who welcomed her.

“I am still part of the African-American community. The Afro-Cuban experience is a spectrum, but we are also close to our African roots. It’s going to be an interesting process, and I can’t wait to hear other people’s experiences,” she says, of the research part of the project. “I would love for everybody that comes to the theater to see themselves reflected in my work,” she says.

OTHER KNIGHT NEW WORK 2020 WINNERS

The other winners and their works, as described by Knight New Work 2020:

Fereshteh Toosi — “Oil Ancestors,” an immersive virtual performance on the cultural history of oil in Florida.

Maya Billig — “A Lot,” an interactive drive-in dance performance that aims to physicalize the experience of regaining momentum after being “parked” in place for a period of time.

Natasha Tsakos — “CARABOOM,” an immersive theatrical experience that aims to elicit human connection while people remain in their vehicles.

Najja Moon — “The Huddle is a Prayer Circle,” an immersive installation and
interactive performance focused on sound, visual art, scripture and movement.

Octavia Yearwood — “Life’s Interludes,” a mixtape of music and poetry plus visual components relating the experiences of queer artists “in a world where their lives feel like interludes.”

To learn more about the artists and their works, be sure to follow them on social media. For more on Knight New Work 2020, including any upcoming funding opportunities, go to Knightfoundation.org/knight-new-work-2020.

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

 

Review: ‘Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist’ is part of a timely, overdue conversation

Chasity Hart is Titania and Matthew Salas plays a character known only as the Director in Main Street Players’ “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist.” (Photo courtesy of Olimac Media)

William Shakespeare has been called many things in the centuries since he crafted many of the greatest works of the English language. He has been the subject of endless scholarly debate and investigation, and his plays have been interpreted and reinterpreted across time and countless cultures.

The Bard of Avon’s works were nothing if not thought-provoking, holding the mirror up to racism in “Othello” and antisemitism in “The Merchant of Venice.” Still, the title of Andrew Watring’s play – “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist” – is a provocation of a different sort, one designed to make you sit up, pay attention and think, “Was he?”

Though the play was written in 2017 and developed further in 2018 when Watring was a student at American University in Washington, D.C., it’s only now getting its professional world premiere with the Main Street Players in Miami Lakes.

Staged by Carey Brianna Hart, the piece is set in a rehearsal room given over to auditions. A young, white man referred to only as Director (Matthew Salas) is speaking passionately about creating a “really special” production of Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” with all the roles played by actors of color.

But as it turns out, the attention-grabbing title notwithstanding, the play is not so much about Shakespeare as it is about the experiences of those actors in theater itself.

Experimental in style, deliberately non-linear, “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist” is emerging at a time when issues surrounding equity, diversity and inclusion are finally getting a long-overdue spotlight in the arts. During the pandemic and concurrent with nationwide protests over the murder of George Floyd, BIPOC (Black, Indigenous and People of Color) artists spoke out about institutionalized racism, the lack of genuine opportunities and serious consideration for roles, colorism in casting, and the punishing toll of stereotyping.

Though the writing doesn’t rise to the level of Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’ “An Octoroon” or Quentin Tarantino’s “Django Unchained,” Watring’s script is observant, unsettling and, in one fever-dream passage near the end, savage in its depiction of usually unspoken racist thoughts and beliefs.

Except for the Director and a white woman called Actress (Erin Wilbanks), the auditioning actors all have Shakespearean names, a needlessly confusing conceit.

Macbeth (Roderick Randle), a Black actor who’s a flattery-prone pal of the Director, is going up for the part of Oberon. He assures the other actors that this guy is someone who really listens, who really makes space for them and their ideas. Yet it’s not long before the Director is pushing Macbeth, pushing him hard to go deeper, then asking the Black actor to perform something from “Othello.”

Juliet (Annette Monk), an Afro-Latina actor who is a bit older than the other women, is weary of not being able to play roles like Cleopatra, of being boxed into parts where she becomes invisible and silent. She complains that she’s told she doesn’t look Latina and that she doesn’t “perform blackness” to the expectations of white directors – or Black ones, for that matter.

Titania (Chasity Hart), a regal woman onstage and off, vividly illustrates colorism by willing the actors to line up according to their skin tone. She repeats a question she’s too often asked – “What are you?” – adding that the questioner then looks her over, “trying to piece together a racist genealogy for each of my features.”

Viola (Katlin Svadbik) and Ophelia (Vanessa Tamayo) are Latina actors often assumed to be white, and each has an issue.

Viola is dating the Director, who crosses personal boundaries in the rehearsal room, setting off resentment among the other actors. Her audition piece, a beautifully delivered version of Phebe’s monologue from “As You Like It,” is especially telling, as it perfectly applies to her callow beau.

Ophelia, who will be playing Puck in “Midsummer,” is trying to improve her English and lose a noticeable accent. Too often, she feels invisible, unseen and unheard.

“Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist” loops repetitively from auditions to rehearsals to performance, and though Alex Tarradell’s chimes-and-drum sound design is meant to help, it too is repetitive. Set and lighting designer Amanda Sparhawk’s rendition of a utilitarian rehearsal room and the stage beyond, with a mirror allowing the actors to do their makeup as we watch, brings the performers’ offstage world to the forefront. Angie Esposito has designed transformative costume pieces that allow us to observe the magic as actors in rehearsal clothes transform into the vivid characters of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.”

Full of unsettling but believable microaggressions, Watring’s script is challenging to act. And though it has necessary moments of tension-relieving humor – many of those delivered by Wilbanks as the flamboyant Actress – it’s also unnerving, sometimes painful to watch.

After being challenged over and over by the Director, his supposed friend, Randle’s Macbeth unravels, railing about Black stereotypes made palatable to white audiences, then sinking into himself as he tries to physically contain his pain. Randle’s work in the scene is both ferocious and excruciating.

Hart’s Titania commands the stage, sometimes deliberately, sometimes with nuanced subtlety. Hart is an actor who works infrequently in South Florida theater, but she deserves a wider range of opportunities.

Despite some opening-night nerves, each of the actors plumbed the anxieties and disappointments of the characters. Salas, though, should ratchet up the clueless tyranny of the Director, who naively believes himself enlightened and different.

The director of “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist,” Carey Brianna Hart (no relation to Chasity Hart), has staged the play with the authority and insight of an artist who deeply understands the world of Watring’s play. Throughout her career as an actor, director, stage manager and educator, she has been in a position to observe the good, the bad and the sporadic ugly racism of the way theater gets made in South Florida. At the Main Street Playhouse, she and her cast get to chime in on a reckoning too long in coming.

 

WHAT: “Shakespeare Is a White Supremacist” by Andrew Watring

WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Sundays (except Oct. 10), through Oct. 17

WHERE: Main Street Playhouse, 6766 Main St., Miami Lakes

COST:  $30 for general admission; $25 for students, seniors and military personnel

SAFETY PROTOCOLS: The Main Street Playhouse has decreased seat capacity, among its safety changes, and encourages mask wearing for “all unvaccinated patrons” and social distancing. Additionally, a streaming version of the play will become available on Oct. 15 and run until Nov. 21 for those not yet comfortable returning to the theater. Streaming tickets will be $10 a person. 

INFORMATION: 305-558-3737; Mainstreetplayers.com

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

Review: A solo Latina tour de force lights up Actors’ Playhouse at Miracle Theatre

Elena María García plays an event planner and 20 other women in “¡FUÁCATA! or A Latina’s Guide to Surviving the Universe,” an Actors’ Playhouse production at The Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables. (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Throughout the long days and months, and more than a year since COVID-19 so vastly altered our lives, those who love the arts have persevered through isolation and the consolation of online entertainment, clinging to a dream: that gathering safely inside a theater would become possible again.

For Actors’ Playhouse at The Miracle Theatre in Coral Gables, the time for that reunion of artists and audiences is now.

The company is taking a carefully considered step back into the realm of mainstage theater with “¡FUÁCATA! or A Latina’s Guide to Surviving the Universe.” Cowritten by Elena María García and Stuart Meltzer, performed by García and directed by Meltzer, the solo show got its Zoetic Stage world premiere at Miami’s Arsht Center for the Performing Arts in 2017, then returned there for a second run in 2018.

(Video courtesy of Diego Pocoví)

Running now in The Miracle Theatre’s 600-seat mainstage theater through mid-September, this third iteration of the 90-minute “¡FUÁCATA!” has been tweaked and minimally trimmed, but it remains the work of the original creative team: García, Meltzer, set designer Michael McKeever, lighting designer Rebecca Montero and sound designer Anton Church.

Watching the show in a traditional proscenium space vs. the more intimate black box where it premiered is a different experience. Given the Delta variant, surging COVID cases and the contentiousness over vaccinations, Actors’ Playhouse has to put safety first. Masked theatergoers are scattered throughout the auditorium, with space in between, which means the crowd’s spirited communal response to the work is necessarily dialed back.

Even so, the brilliant García demonstrates yet again just how powerful a single performer can be.

A three-time Carbonell Award-winning actor, García is one of theater’s funniest women, an artist with the chameleonic abilities of Lily Tomlin and physical prowess of vintage Lucille Ball. She’s a master of improv comedy – she coached the company and performed in “Zoetic Schmoetic,” an outdoor improv show earlier this year at the Arsht’s Thomson Plaza – and she’s also a deft and moving actor.

All of those skills come into play in “¡FUÁCATA!,” which takes its title from a Cuban slang term meaning a back-handed slap.

The piece works so well because its roots are deeply personal, yet the myriad subjects it takes on are universal, particularly if you happen to live in melting-pot Miami. Lasting love and transactional attraction, assimilation and enduring pride in one’s heritage, intergenerational conflict, the pressure women feel to excel in multiple roles – all are part of García’s resonant love letter to Latinas.

The play’s key character is a Cuban-American event planner named Elena Flores, whose namesake company is called Elena Plans Big Things. As she explains up front, she’s a “super Latina superhero” (wife, mom, working professional and at least a dozen other things) who could no more function without her trio of daily “cafecitos” than her car with its misbehaving seatbelt could run without gas.

As Elena moves throughout her day, we meet two dozen other characters, most of them Latinas, with a couple of guys and non-Latina ladies tossed into the mix.

With an assist from sound and lighting effects, sometimes with a new character’s name projected onto McKeever’s Mondrian-inspired set, García transforms flawlessly into some very different women.

Elena’s Mami, for example, is an old-school Cuban matriarch who expresses love via her from-scratch cooking and has dinner prepared by 10:30 a.m. daily. Estrella, who rules the takeout roost at Elena’s beloved La Isla Café, confides that she was an accountant at the Tropicana in Havana – and that she enjoys lording it over her caffeine-desperate Miami customers. Marisol, who sells chilled bottled water at southwest Eighth Street and 27th Avenue every day, tells a harrowing story of escaping the threat of violence and death in Honduras at age 17, riding atop a train racing through Mexico, walking the last 70 miles into the United States, then being smuggled from Texas to Miami.

Another character, Beatrice Goldberg, the quintessential Jewish matron, is using Elena (whom she calls “Ellen”) to plan a 50th anniversary party in celebration of a not entirely blissful union with her once-hairy hubby, Murray. For entertainment, she’s thinking Elena can book Graciela, an out-there Spanish performance artist whose act is, at its tamest, R-rated.

Sandy Holmes, the power-crazed new Parent-Teacher Association leader at the Gloria and Emilio Estefan Middle School that Elena’s daughter attends, reveals her Trumpian stripes in comments about English-as-a-second-language students and the diverse cultures represented at the school’s International Day celebration.

Monica, who has spent most of her adult life running from her Mexican heritage, frets about how to reply when her 11-year-old asks why immigrant kids are being put in cages.

García and Meltzer cover a spectrum of Latina life in Miami – much of it funny, some painful, all of it rich in specific detail. Some of those details are drawn from García’s life and repurposed; for instance, the about-to-retire teacher Mrs. Puig says she arrived in the United States as a kid via a Pedro Pan flight on Feb. 22, 1962.  That’s the date García’s parents got married.

The dialogue blends English and rapid-fire Spanish, though the latter is always restated or paraphrased for the monolingual “que no hablan español.”

South Florida’s return to live performance will be happening throughout the fall and into winter. How successful that will be is as unpredictable as COVID-19 itself. But theater fans yearning to go back to their happy place should know this: Inside The Miracle Theatre, thanks to a masterful performer and the insightful “¡FUÁCATA!,” a gem awaits.

 

WHAT: “¡FUÁCATA! or A Latina’s Guide to Surviving the Universe,” by Elena María García and Stuart Meltzer

WHEN: 8 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Sept. 12

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

COST: $30-$75 (10 percent off for seniors at weekday performances, $15 student rush tickets)

INFORMATION: 305-444-9293; Actorsplayhouse.org

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‘Save the Bay’ PSA contest has a message – and a winner!

Jeano Michel stars in the titular role of Captain BayWatch in Jayme Gershen’s laugh-out-loud PSA meant to inspire residents to take better care of their environment. (Photo courtesy of Diana Larrea)

A small crowd gathered in the online waiting room.

Oolite Arts greeted the participants in a chat window and urged them to introduce themselves. A steady stream of salutations, friendly banter and comments on chosen beverages for the evening (pear juice with a shot of Haitian rum) followed.

“I feel like I’m in an AOL chatroom from 1998,” one viewer commented.

“Let’s get this party started!” wrote another.

After much enthusiasm, a momentary lull descended as Oolite Arts cinematic arts manager Danielle Bender appeared on the screen.

“Good evening, everyone. Thanks for joining us for the Save the Bay PSA screening, where we will unveil our 1-minute PSAs about Biscayne Bay,” she said.

The public service announcement videos are the result of Oolite Arts’ open call for submissions, and five finalists each received $2,500 to produce pieces highlighting the plight of Biscayne Bay, thanks to funding by the Lynn and Louis Wolfson II Family Foundation.

Oolite Arts launched the contest in cooperation with Miami-Dade County and its chief bay officer, Irela Bague, with the aim of shining a spotlight on South Florida’s once-pristine bay, which suffers from hypersalinity and a host of contaminants including sewage spills, fertilizers and other plastic pollutants.

The public had the chance to cast their vote through Aug. 11 and choose their favorite from the group of five PSA finalists and three honorable mentions. (The honorable mentions each received $1,000 for their proposals.) Hundreds of filmmakers submitted their ideas and, judging by the vibrant chat screening on July 28, viewers responded enthusiastically as well.

“When you use an independent jury, comprised of professional filmmakers, you’re bound to get a wonderful winner,” said Dennis Scholl, president and CEO of Oolite Arts.

The People’s Choice Award went to Alexa Caravia’s “Video Letter.” She received $1,000 as part of the prize.

Interested filmmakers who missed this contest have another chance to throw their hat in the ring.

“Given how much everybody has loved this … we announced [during the screening] that we’re going to do it again,” Scholl said.

This time, Oolites Arts is teaming up with the City of Miami Beach to host a Sustainability in Action PSA video contest, with funding from the Wolfson foundation. The finalists, who will receive a $2,500 production budget to persuade residents to reuse and conserve, will have their video featured at a public screening in November at SoundScape Park. The deadline to submit a pitch is Monday, Aug. 16.

For those willing to tackle the project, Scholl offered some advice: “Filmmaking is a difficult process. You’ve really got to show us in your application that you have the ability to make the film.”

When you combine both professionalism and passion, he said, the two become unbeatable.

“When you put those two things together … you get magic.”

Below is a sneak peek of the five winning finalists.

Helen Peña: ‘The Siren’

An ebony face manifests grief, with emerald-green tears streaming. Transfixed, you watch the mermaid’s mournful dance. It is a dance meant to capture the pain of Biscayne Bay.

“How did we come this far? What happened?” said Helen Peña, creator of the PSA entitled “The Siren,” in an interview. “You could once drink directly from the water. It’s just mind-blowing that it was freshwater and that once the waters were crystal clear.”

Billed as a “a black feminist reminder and a black feminist awakening,” Peña’s ad pays homage to Haitian Vodou spirituality — and to one Haitian artist, in particular, as its inspiration.

“I’m Dominican, and so I honor the relationship between our siblings on the island,” she said. “I was inspired by the Haitian community’s depictions of La Sirene and Haitian Vodou flags (drapos), and also by the art of Edouard Duval-Carrié, where he depicts a lot of water spirits, animals and lively personalities. They’re blue and purple but they almost glow in the dark.

“I was really inspired by those visual references, and particularly the use of a really deep royal blue, almost like glitter,” she continued.

The eye-catching assortment of colors used in her piece collectively has a spiritual reference as well: “It alludes to all of the water spirits at the depths of the ocean.”

Peña hopes “The Siren” and the ad campaign will help to plant the seeds of change.

“I want us to remember the essence of our humanity, and that we are the ocean. She is our mother, and as such we have a responsibility to her,” she said. “We have a responsibility to life and to protect all life on Earth.”

Jayme Gershen: ‘Captain BayWatch’

A charismatic and charming Jeano Michel stars in the titular role of Captain BayWatch in this laugh-out-loud PSA meant to nudge residents into taking better care of their environment.

Its creator, Jayme Gershen, is a firm believer that employing humor and finding common ground among viewers are instrumental to getting a message across. In the video, to the audience’s delight, Michel riffs on the issues in English, with a sprinkling of Haitian Creole and Spanish phrases.

“I think that humor wins hearts and minds,” Gershen said. “With a serious topic that relates to everybody, I was thinking, how do we reach all these pockets in Miami: Young. Old. Rich. Poor. Haitian. Latino. Gringo. The Miami bro. The tourists. The homeowner. How do we make everybody laugh?

“And I really think that sometimes when we go at things with humor, [it reaches] people a little more than banging them over the head with everything that we do wrong.”

When it came to shooting techniques, Gershen looked to another PSA: “In my proposal, I referenced the American Airlines safety video. I just loved that video. It is such a great way to teach people and engage them. And that video is a masterpiece at working with a lot of mirrors, with a big crew behind you. It’s tricky as hell.”

The project taught her a lesson in perseverance — and reiterated for her the importance of teamwork.

“Filming an outdoor PSA in the summer is not easy. It’s hot and wet,” she said. “We planned this thing to a tee … and then the day we did it … it rained all day. So that was a lesson in patience and adapting and making it work. It was just amazing how people showed up to help. I didn’t do this alone, and I couldn’t have done it without everyone putting all hands on deck.”

Though Gershen definitely has fans in her immediate circle, she admitted that one relative wanted to keep an open mind about his favorite: her 9-year-old nephew, who helped out on the set.

“He said, ‘I would have to watch the other PSAs, just in case,’” Gershen said. “I hope he thinks it’s worth it!”

 Milly Cohen: ‘Save the Bay’

Albert Einstein makes a brief cameo in Milly Cohen’s quirky, whimsical piece, which also takes a lighthearted approach while delivering a serious message.

Showing animated scenes from Florida’s ecosystem, this PSA aims to spur residents to actively participate in protecting the environment.

“I want people to really dive deeper and see what they can do in their community to help the bay. This video is meant to be a catalyst for you to dive deeper,” Cohen said. “You can join a beach cleanup and maybe even donate to some organizations that support Florida wildlife and the environment … I strongly believe that people can make a difference in their day to day.”

As long as we remain vigilant, Cohen believes that circumstances are bound to improve.

“I want people to know that even if things look bad, ocean life is very resilient,” Cohen said. “I also think it’s a beautiful thing that there are people who are really dedicated towards making that happen. If the surrounding community kind of just tags along and follows that lead, then this could be a really powerful movement. We should all be optimistic about the future of the bay.”

Shireen Rahimi: ‘What Happened to the Bay?!’

Shireen Rahimi teamed up with Maxx McInerney to deliver a visually captivating photographic testimony on how pollution and neglect affect the natural beauty of Biscayne Bay.

“This is a great opportunity because I had funding for it, and it was something that I really cared about,” Rahimi said. “It was really fun to have that creative freedom and to put my time into making something that I hope will have an impact.”

In the PSA — entitled “What Happened to the Bay?!” — Rahimi is seen diving into the bay and documenting her underwater surroundings. Though well-acquainted with the area’s obstacles, she said she was stunned with what she learned while producing this project.

“It was really shocking to me to see was how much construction had had such a negative impact on the bay,” said Rahimi, referring to dust and debris spilling into waters.

To bring their message home, they duo decided to largely focus on highlighting the gorgeous underwater landscape beneath the waves of the bay, but they encountered a snag in their plans.

“We went out to film, and we were trying to look for a dock that we thought was there and it wasn’t,” Rahimi said.

They ended up knocking on a stranger’s door. Luckily, they found a fan.

“We asked if we could use their dock because it looked really nice from what we could see,” Rahimi said. “The guy was super-helpful and super-enthusiastic. He was like, ‘I love the bay. I spend so much time there and I want to do whatever I can to help.’

“It was really nice, and I find that whenever I’m doing a project that is in line with my values and my vision for what I want my work to be, everything else kind of falls into place. People help and everything else kind of works out because we all have a shared vision.”

Alexa Caravia: ‘Video Letter’

A mesmerizing voice from the past is sounding the alarm on Biscayne Bay’s future.

In “Video Letter” by Alexa Caravia, black-and-white archival footage collides with colorful long-range shots of sailboats and a closeup of a dead fish floating in the sea. What feels very much like a documentary doubles as a love letter from someone who is desperately trying to warn her unborn grandchild about the delicate imbalance of the bay.

“What I wanted to do was create a piece that would encourage a reflection on our connection to the bay,” Caravia said. “I thought that the most effective way to do that would be to provide a visual documentation of [its] changing face.”

Caravia tapped into Miami Dade College’s Wolfson Archives for the images she needed: “Since I don’t have an underwater camera, I had to … find that footage and let history tell itself.”

The narration of the piece was also a key element, so she drafted Elizabeth Calella, her unsuspecting next-door neighbor, to help out.

“It was really at the last minute. I just walked over there at the 11th hour and asked her if she could do it,” Caravia said.

Calella, who does voiceovers, often spends evenings with her husband watching the sun set over the bay. “She loves the bay as much as I do!” Caravia said.

Having grown up fascinated by the water and marine life, Caravia jumped at the chance to make a PSA.

“When we see the bay from afar, it looks so idyllic and so serene, and we sometimes tend to ignore the chaos that’s happening underneath,” Caravia said. “We have an awesome responsibility. [The bay] surrounds us. It sustains us. It’s our city. It’s life here in Miami.”

Check out all the “Save the Bay” ads at oolitearts.org/save-the-bay.

Submit pitches for the “Sustainability in Action” contest by 6 p.m. Aug. 16 at oolitearts.org/sustainabilityinaction.

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Review: ‘Wolf & Badger’ at Main Street Playhouse contains seeds of something more powerful

Melissa Bibliowicz, Brandon Hoffman and Joshua Lyons manipulate each other in the world premiere of “Wolf & Badger.” (Photo courtesy of Olimac Media)

From the Bible’s Cain and Abel to the Tyrone boys of “Long Day’s Journey Into Night” to the polar opposite siblings of “True West,” warring brothers have always been a fertile source of drama.

Playwright Michael John McGoldrick has drawn from that thematic well in crafting “Wolf & Badger,” a drama now getting its Main Street Players world premiere in Miami Lakes with artistic director Danny Nieves at the helm.

Set in upstate New York after the 2008 financial crisis, the play takes on not just the fraught relationship of at-odds brothers but the many factors that got them to what could – or might not – be a turning point. Familial, societal, racial and economic forces have shaped the two angry young men, bringing them to this clear fork in life’s road.

Landon (Brandon Hoffman), the elder brother, is an aggrieved 26-year-old whose wife has just given him the heave-ho. After being fired from what could have been a legit career as a plumber, he turned to dealing opioids, supporting and ensnaring his family with the profits from misery.

His younger half-brother, Maddox (Joshua Lyons), is 19 and the caregiver to their seriously ill mother. The next morning, he’s to be tested and sworn into the U.S. Army, so he’s pushing back hard against Landon’s demands that they go out for one last night of partying. Like his older brother, the biracial Maddox has plenty of demons, including a clear case of obsessive-compulsive disorder.

After the two spend time revisiting old arguments and tangling via new ones, an unwelcome blast from the past shows up. Ainsley (Melissa Bibliowicz), Maddox’s high school girlfriend, had dumped him for a drug dealer. Now she’s appeared, high and agitated, trying to sell an authenticated (but likely stolen) Ted Williams baseball bat to Landon so she can come up with bail money for her bad-boy honey Trevor.

Landon and Maddox’s mother remains unseen as she undergoes home dialysis in her upstairs bedroom. But the playwright paints her in enough detail that a vivid portrait emerges. This is a woman who lived hard, was abandoned by both of her sons’ fathers, liked her men and her booze, and played her own part in turning her boys into damaged men.

Part of what McGoldrick is exploring in “Wolf & Badger” is the way some people get mentally stuck, returning over and over to the same thoughts and arguments.  Maddox is trying to make an abrupt change, escaping a world of routine and temptation for an environment that will bring him the discipline and order he craves. Landon can’t break free from his warring impulses toward his brother – one to build Maddox up and help him succeed, the other to keep his little bro mired in chaos.

Playwright and director Nieves conveys respites from the tension through brief interludes when the brothers play cards, look at childhood memorabilia or reminisce about things that made them happy – for Maddox, the breeze of summer, listening to Top 40 hits on the radio, drinking Mountain Dew, popping mini-donuts.

But those moments of calm and warmth are fleeting. And McGoldrick’s choice of deliberately circling back to statements, issues and feelings soon makes “Wolf & Badger” feel less-than-artfully repetitive.

The preponderance of high-tension exchanges doesn’t give the actors much chance to emotionally color their performances, and neither Hoffman nor Lyons has the skill set yet to fully flesh out his character. Hoffman’s Landon is a guy whose bedrock insecurity makes him bluster and rage. Lyons’ Maddox is torn between duty and self-preservation. Those are the straightforward notes the actors play.

Bibliowicz, on the other hand, is fascinating to watch and wholly believable as Ainsley. Lying – to others, to herself – is her default mode. Bibliowicz conveys the vestiges of feeling Ainsley has for Maddox, while making it clear that the woman is mired in self-destructive quicksand.

“Wolf & Badger” plays out in a tidily kept, modest home designed by Amanda Sparhawk. The lighting is also by Sparhawk, with sound by Nieves and costumes by Angie Esposito.

Although “Wolf & Badger” marks the return of in-person performance to the Main Street Playhouse after 16 months of pandemic closure, the company is bringing theater back in two ways: this live production running through Aug. 29 and a streaming version available from July 30 to Sept. 5. Maybe offering that choice will help expand Main Street Players’ audience and get those still wary of gathering in person primed to come back to the theater.

As alluring as the notion of a world premiere is for theaters and audiences, not many new works are problem-free the first time they hit the stage. Script development is a process, with a sometimes-flawed first production a key step in a play’s future life. “Wolf & Badger” contains the seeds of something more powerful and resonant, but that better version hasn’t reached fruition.

 

WHAT: World premiere of “Wolf & Badger” by Michael John McGoldrick

WHEN: 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays and 2 p.m. Sundays, through Aug. 29

WHERE: Main Street Playhouse, 6766 Main St., Miami Lakes

COST: $30 general admission; $25 for students, seniors and military personnel

VIRTUAL VERSION: Available July 30-Sept. 5 for $10; go to Mainstreetplayers.com/tickets and click on “Video On Demand”

INFORMATION: 305-558-3737; Mainstreetplayers.com

 

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