Miami New Drama’s ‘The Cubans’ is all about family

Clockwise from left: René Granado, Adriana Gaviria, Ruben Rabasa, Ashley Alvarez, Vivian Ruiz, James Puig, Andhy Mendez, Caleb Scott and Jezabel Montero star in “The Cubans.” (Photo courtesy of Andres Manner)

Michael Leon is a successful New York-based actor who grew up in Miami. Since graduating from Florida International University and Manhattan’s Atlantic Acting School, he has worked with high-profile companies including the LAByrinth Theater Co., New York Theatre Workshop, Rattlestick Playwrights Theater, Steppenwolf Theatre, Northlight Theatre, INTAR Theatre and more.

Leon also has been an admirer of complex family plays, but he’s felt that diverse voices are too often missing.

“I got tired of going to the theater and not seeing myself and my family represented. We deserve more. I felt compelled to start creating something, not for me but for my community,” he says.

This week, after four years of writing and readings and rewrites, Leon’s creative response to what he felt was missing will get its world premiere when Miami New Drama opens “The Cubans” at the Colony Theatre on Miami Beach’s Lincoln Road.

Company co-founder and artistic director Michel Hausmann credits Erik J. Rodriguez, Miami New Drama’s director of new work, with championing Leon’s play.

“Erik insisted I should consider it further and organized a reading,” Hausmann says. “I love that Michael is exploring his generation, his community. It’s his Miami play. There is a lot to explore in the Cuban-American experience … lo bonito, lo feo (the pretty, the ugly) … and he’s writing with a critical eye. I’m producing ‘The Cubans’ because I also want to produce Michael’s second play, his third play.”

Hausmann thinks director Victoria Collado – fresh from her staging of Miami’s much-extended immersive theater hit, “The Amparo Experience” – has been a great creative partner for Leon, given her success at juggling multiple simultaneous storylines.

“Sometimes, this play has seven conversations going at the same time. That is so true to a lot of Hispanic families. It’s as if great musicians are playing at the same time,” he says.

Leon began writing “The Cubans” in 2016. Then 30, he had gone through an identity crisis after leaving South Florida and moving to Chicago, then New York.

“I grew up in a place with a Cuban-American majority, then went to Chicago and suddenly felt like a minority,” he says. “When I went out for roles, they’d look at me to play gangsters. Yet in New York, there’s an incredible group of Latinx writers. We should be further along by now.”

Over cafecito Cubano and tostones, Leon, Collado and others read through “The Cubans” on the day after Thanksgiving 2016 in Collado’s New York apartment. At that gathering, Leon asked Collado, also an FIU grad, to direct his debut play.

Four years into the script’s evolution, Collado says, “The audience should expect to see a very heightened version of themselves. It’s not a form of criticism or stereotyping. It’s an opportunity for the Cuban people of Miami to see themselves onstage – with a little extra.”

“The Cubans” centers on a pair of family gatherings in the middle-class Westchester home of Martica (Vivian Ruiz) and husband Jesus (James Puig). Their struggling actor-daughter Christy (Ashley Alvarez) has come from New York for a summer get-together celebrating her younger brother Mati’s graduation from the University of Florida.

Also part of the party are nephew Ramoncito (Andhy Mendez), estranged from his widower father; family friends Vero (Adriana Gaviria) and Pepe (René Granado); free-spirited aunt Ana (Jezabel Montero) and her younger boyfriend, Eric (Caleb Scott); and Manolito (Ruben Rabasa), Jesus’ oldest friend from Cuba, who is struggling with cognitive impairment.

In the second act, family and friends have come together again for Nochebuena, and much has changed. Mati isn’t seen, yet he’s omnipresent. Ana’s on her own, but Ramoncito has brought Anthony (also played by Scott), a “friend” from work. Manolito is obviously worse, and the old Westchester house is continuing to fall apart.

Most significantly, the realistic tone of the first act shifts into intricately staged absurdist theater. Carbonell Award-winning designers Christopher and Justin Swader enhance that tonal shift with their dining room set, which is placed between an onstage audience seating area and the Colony’s standard seats.

The themes and issues within “The Cubans” include parental expectations and disappointment, criticism and acceptance, the power of familial love and loss. And Cuba, always Cuba, with its pull and its multiple meanings to different generations.

Collado, who worked with Granado, Rabasa and Ruiz on “The Amparo Experience,” says the cast for Leon’s play features “titans of acting.”

Rabasa, now 81, came to the United States in 1955, “before Fidel.” He has made dozens of movies, many with low budgets and no big star names. He is known as a great comic actor but turns tearful as he talks about playing a man exiled from Cuba, a man battling Alzheimer’s disease.

“Manolito had to leave the country against his will. He knew no English. He had no family. Nobody,” says Rabasa, who then thinks about what might have been with his own career. “There are so many things I wanted to do. Maybe I couldn’t make it because of my English.”

In the play, the mother-and-daughter characters played by Alvarez and Ruiz are at odds over Christy’s slow-to-start career. In life, the two actors have had different experiences in terms of family support for pursuing their acting dreams.

“Like Christy, I’m a first-generation American. My mom is a dancer, but my whole life she said I should be a doctor or a lawyer, because she wanted me to have the American dream,” says Alvarez, who is married to Leon and is a fellow FIU grad.

“I relate to Martica, who is very much like my mom and the women in my family,” Ruiz says. “But I started as an actress and dancer, and my mom would go to all my shows. She was in Cuba in the late 1930s and wanted to be an actress.  She lived her dream through mine.”

Puig, who like Ruiz was in the Miami New Drama world premiere of Carmen Pelaez’s play “Fake,” has an impressive body of work, from Broadway to Off-Broadway to regional theater and 14 productions at Miami’s historic Coconut Grove Playhouse. He recalls being deeply moved when he read “The Cubans.”

“Michael’s writing got to me so much that I couldn’t stop crying when I read the second act,” he says. “I’ve been in over 200 plays, but I’ve only played a few Hispanic characters.  Doing this [at Miami New Drama] is a dream.”

Collado, who has spent the better part of two years working on “The Amparo Experience” (about the exile of the family that created Havana Club Rum) and “The Cubans,” has at times become emotional about being immersed in such deeply Cuban stories. But telling them is vital, she says.

“It has become clear to me what we as a community are avoiding. We’ve had to experience fear, paranoia, generational trauma. This house [in ‘The Cubans’] is the bubble that we built for ourselves,” she observes. “I’m getting more appreciation for those who came before us. That generation made a ton of sacrifices so that we can do this. If my dad hadn’t written a letter explaining what he went through on the Mariel boatlift, my view [of Cuban Miami] might be ‘Scarface.’”

“The Cubans,” she adds, demonstrates that “Amparo” isn’t a “once-in-a-lifetime thing. These people are working on what they want to be working on.”

What: Miami New Drama production of “The Cubans” by Michael Leon 

When: Previews 8 p.m. Jan. 23-24; opens 8 p.m. Jan. 25 (opening night sold out); regular performances at 8 p.m. Thursdays-Fridays, 2 and 8 p.m. Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Feb. 16

Where: Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach

Cost: $39-$75

More information: 305-674-1040; colonymb.org

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Miami Short Film Festival to present its seven 2019 winners

Memo Sauceda’s three-minute film, “Moriendum,” won for “Best Experimental Short Film.” (Photo courtesy of Memo Sauceda)

The culmination of a yearlong search for the best short films is about to be on display.

The Miami Short Film Festival, started in 2002 by filmmaker William Vela, celebrates its 2019 festival winners on Jan. 19 at the Deering Estate Theatre in Miami.

Seven films out of more than 1,000 submissions made the final cut and will show at the event. Categories include best narrative, animated, foreign, musical, documentary, experimental and South Florida production.

“A.M.A.,” by director Peter Ebanks, won for “Best South Florida Production.” The 15-minute film is a stylish, tense drama whose terse synopsis – “A self-driving car is forced to make a moral decision” – only hints at the extreme ethical question that unfolds.

The premise is straightforward: A married man texts for a ride to take him to see his mistress, and the vehicle that arrives ends up being a self-driving car, named A.M.A. The Alexa-like voice in the car – it turns out that A.M.A. stand for Artificial Moral Agent – goes beyond simply providing transportation: “She” probes deep into, and ends up judging, the man’s personal life, setting up a decidedly uncomfortable situation.

“I wanted to speak about technology and how it’s moving forward so fast,” says Ebanks, 39, who attended the University of Miami and the University of Florida, then graduated from Florida Atlantic University. “I wanted to leave the audience with the question of, ‘Is it OK for a computer algorithm to make a determination if you live or die?’

“That’s very drastic, because we have computer algorithms talking about what things we should buy and focusing on our online habits, telling us what we should be purchasing based on ads off YouTube, Facebook and so forth. What would happen if we took things one step further?”

Ebanks was born and raised in Fort Lauderdale, and he gets the most out of his hometown in this film, with quick nightlife scenes involving The Historic Downtowner tavern and other clubs on Las Olas Boulevard, plus noirish music by the Wilkes Booth Band, which helps set an ominous tone from the start.

“You try to lead the audience,” Ebanks says. “Directing is not only camera, movement and actors, but what your audience sees, feels and hears.”

Another work is the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it “Moriendum,” a three-minute film by Memo Sauceda that won for “Best Experimental Short Film.” It’s a surreal, cryptic effort that’s autobiographical, based on a rock-bottom period in the 54-year-old father of three’s life.

Its synopsis? “A father with many responsibilities tries to make sense of them all, but sometimes, the weight of life is too much to bear.”

Sauceda explains: “When you’re a dad, you have many things going through your mind, and when I wrote it, work was kind of slow, and my kid was going to college, so there were a lot of expenses, and everything just came together and it was a difficult time.”

“Moriendum” is Latin for “dying.” And the rapid-fire visuals in the film show Sauceda levitating out of bed, being swallowed into the earth, hit by a school bus, drowning underwater and other situations that demonstrate how overwhelmed he was feeling.

Sauceda sees the title as an existential struggle.

“You choose: Do you want to live your life as a dying man, or as a guy that enjoys life?”

Sauceda moved to Miami in 1997 from Monterey, Mexico, and says he’s normally a very happy person, very positive.

“It’s very rare for me to be that unhappy,” he says. “Most of the things I do are comedy, and I don’t believe that you have to be miserable to do your best work. I look at the positive side of things. So to be able to write that, I think I was in a hole, a place where I didn’t know if I was going to be able to provide for my family and be able to do all the things that I needed to.

“But now I can say that I overcame it. To create the short was a way to exorcise all that.”

For Sauceda, short films are superior in many ways to feature films.

“I love things that you can start and finish quickly,” he says. “It’s very nice to be able to say you’re gonna do something tomorrow, and you’ll have it ready tomorrow. And you focus totally on one thing. Sometimes in movies, you feel when they don’t know how to continue, and you feel a gap, so all the energy just goes down, and that’s when you, if you’re a dad, kind of doze off at the cinema. So I don’t like those dramatic drops. With a short film, everything has to be there. If it’s good, people won’t get distracted, and you can tell your message in a very succinct way. It’s beautiful.”

Ebanks takes his praise of short films a step further.

“I think it’s the wave of the future,” he says. “As people’s time becomes more valuable, and people start just digesting information, the time spans are shorter. Our feature films right now have gotten shorter – they’re not those 2 1/2-hour things that we grew up with in the past. It’s just smaller, and there are really great, interesting stories that you can encapsulate in 10, 15 minutes. It’s a great format and a great medium.”

 

What: Miami Short Film Festival presents the 2019 winners

When: Cocktail reception at 6 p.m. Jan. 19; film workshop hosted by Memo Sauceda at 6:30 p.m.; show time at 7 p.m.; question-and-answer session at 8:15 p.m.)

Where: Deering Estate, Visitor Center Theatre, 16701 SW 72nd Ave., Miami

Cost: $12

More information: miamishortfilmfestival.com

 

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Miami grad returns to Florida Grand Opera in ‘Madama Butterfly’

Soprano Sandra Lopez – who is returning to South Florida in the Florida Grand Opera’s “Madama Butterfly” – has a story not many performers can tell.

She was one of the first singers on the second-largest performing arts stage in the United States: the Ziff Ballet Opera House at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts.

In 2006, she had just completed Florida Grand Opera’s Young Artists Program, when she was asked to help out at the soon-to-open Arsht, then named the Carnival Center.

Along with a baritone, Lopez was called in to sing with a full orchestra to help acoustical experts tweak the sound.

“They were putting the finishing touches on the stage,” she says. “The orchestra played, and we sang, and the experts would listen from various points in the theater.”

When the center opened on Oct. 5, 2006, Lopez performed at its gala celebration.

“I learned something then about acoustics,” she says. “Having sung now in many of the older opera houses in Europe, I realize that acoustics are part of the magic for the audience being inside a theater listening to opera.”

She returned to the same stage 12 years later to sing the title role in Daniel Catán’s “Florencia en el Amazonas” for the Florida Grand Opera.

For the Miami Palmetto Senior High and University of Miami Frost School of Music graduate, this latest return to the Arsht is a dream come true. She will perform a role she has become known for and has come to cherish in her hometown of Miami, as well as in Fort Lauderdale’s Broward Center.

“I’ve sung ‘Madama Butterfly’ all over the United States and in Europe,” she says.

In the middle of the Florida Grand Opera’s run of the show, Lopez will hit the milestone of 50 performances of playing Cio-Cio San, the geisha girl who marries a U.S. Navy lieutenant named Pinkerton.

Lopez is fascinated with the message of cultural understanding, or lack thereof, in the storyline of “Madama Butterfly.” She was born to a Cuban father and a mother of European descent who was born and grew up in Ecuador. Though originally from New York, Lopez was soon swept up in moving from place to place overseas.

“My father was an international businessman. We lived in Hawaii, Singapore, passed through Japan, Mexico City for a year and a half, and then we moved back to the states,” she says. “I constantly felt that I had gone through so many cultures, and here I was a Hispanic-American.”

When the family moved to Miami while she was a teenager, she didn’t speak Spanish well. “I taught myself Spanish, and now I am completely fluent.”

She was always obsessed with music, playing piano and viola, and influenced by her father’s love for classical music – but when she learned a second language, the intrigue of other languages began to mix with her passion for music.

“I became interested in the stories that opera was telling. What does the language tell me about this character? What is the history that’s being told in this story?”

It all came together when a music teacher said she had the voice for opera.

Her career has taken her throughout the world. One of the many highlights: performing on tour with tenor Andrea Bocelli. It was memorable on many levels, she says, but she recalls a particularly unforgettable moment at a show in Puerto Rico.

Bocelli had been singing a song in Spanish throughout the tour. “He had been doing it with a Spanish accent everywhere we played. We were in San Juan and, at intermission, he came running into my dressing room and he wanted to speak through the words with me. He wanted to change the pronunciation of the words to be appropriate for South America and not for Spain. He wanted it to be right for the people of Puerto Rico.

“I found that to be such a level of love for his audience,” she says. “The respect he has for the music is something I completely admire.”

For the mother of two girls, ages 9 and 17 months, music is all in the family. Her husband is tenor Stuart Neill. The two met while performing as Mimi and Rodolfo in a production of Puccini’s “La Boheme.” The couple live north of Atlanta.

Puccini has a place in Lopez’s personal and professional life. She has a deep affection for “Madama Butterfly” and Cio-Cio San because of a cherished childhood memory. She was told that her great-great-grandmother studied singing and was also a soprano.

“My grandmother remembers as a young girl that her grandmother would hum ‘Un bel di vedremo’ to put her to sleep. This is ‘Madama Butterfly’s’ most famous aria,” she says. “My grandmother used to sing to me a couple of bars of ‘Un bel di’ and tell me how beautiful the music was. When it turned out that I had a voice that could sing ‘Butterfly,’ it was mind-blowing.”

With this latest performance, Lopez says she’s looking at “Butterfly” differently.

“There’s more humanity in this production than I’ve been able to experience before.”

She credits E. Loren Meeker, one of the four female stage directors the Florida Grand Opera has helming each production of its 2019-2020 season.

To bring authenticity to the 116-year-old opera by Giacomo Puccini set in 1904 in Nagasaki, Meeker worked with cultural consultants from Japan, Lopez says.

“I have done certain things in every production I’ve performed in of ‘Butterfly.’ I have seen things done in productions, but this director will say, ‘Actually, that’s not correct for this particular time period,’ or she’ll say that my character would not have done something a certain way because traditionally it was done this way.’

“She is very much wanting to tell the story for it to feel very real. People will feel the humanity in this production. These are not archetypal characters; these are real people. And we have a front-row seat to what’s going on in their hearts and in their minds.”

What: Florida Grand Opera’s “Madama Butterfly”

When/where: The production will open Jan. 18 with a Butterfly Ball commemorating Florida Grand Opera’s 79th season. The evening will include cocktails at 5 p.m., the opera at 6 p.m., and dinner and dancing afterward.

*8 p.m. Jan. 21 and Jan. 23, and 2 p.m. Jan. 26 at Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

*7:30 p.m. Jan. 30 and Feb. 1 at Broward Center for the Performing Arts, 201 SW Fifth Ave., Fort Lauderdale

Cost: Tickets start at $15 in Miami and $21 in Fort Lauderdale

More information: 800-741-1010; fgo.org

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Top photo: Soprano Sandra Lopez and Brian Jagde in the Virginia Opera’s 2011 production of “Madama Butterfly.” (Photo courtesy of Anne M. Peterson)

Zoetic Stage’s ‘American Son’ represents S. Florida theater at its finest  

Like many contemporary plays, Christopher Demos-Brown’s “American Son” is a small-cast drama, one that unfolds in a taut 84 minutes. But those minutes hold a story of uncommon depth, one that is straightforward yet layered, observant, achingly real and ultimately devastating.

Demos-Brown’s finest play to date was created in Miami and is set here, though its world premiere was in 2016 in Massachusetts, followed by a high-profile Broadway run in 2018 and a Netflix debut in 2019.

But those who take in the new Zoetic Stage production of “American Son” at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts – and anyone who loves intensely engaging theater should seek it out – will understand that the wait for the play’s homecoming was worth it.

The work on the stage at the Arsht’s Carnival Studio Theater represents South Florida theater at its finest.

Demos-Brown, a lawyer/playwright whose excellent work has made him a key part of the region’s growing playwriting scene, and Zoetic Artistic Director Stuart Meltzer, who has staged four Demos-Brown world premieres, are superb creative collaborators.

Actors Karen Stephens, Clive Cholerton, Ryan Didato (all of whom worked on developmental readings of the play) and Zoetic newcomer James Samuel Randolph are at the top of their game in “American Son.”

Zoetic’s creative team has devised a Miami police station waiting area that becomes a sleek circle of hell for parents awaiting news of their 18-year-old biracial son after they’re told he has been involved in an early-morning “incident.”

Like the couple’s frustration, the intensity of “American Son” ebbs and flows as Demos-Brown artfully doles out information. Initially, black psychology professor Kendra Ellis-Connor (Stephens) is nervously waiting alone, trying to reach her missing son, Jamal. She leaves him a voicemail demanding he call back, then another that communicates her love and worry. When the young white (and obviously green) Officer Paul Larkin (Didato) appears, she also varies her tactics, combatively pushing for information, getting infuriated by the racial stereotyping of his questions about Jamal, then becoming more conciliatory when the pleasant by-the-book officer finally loses his temper.

Kendra’s estranged husband, Scott (Cholerton), a white FBI agent, finally arrives when she’s out of the room, and Larkin mistakes him for the morning public affairs liaison officer who will take over the handling of the case – and of Kendra. More cringe-inducing racism from Larkin ensues, until Kendra reappears and he realizes his error. Professionally starstruck, Larkin fetches coffee and more information for Scott, to Kendra’s disgust.

As they wait, the couple revisits familiar marital and parenting arguments, eventually touching on the things that first drew them together. Racial issues infuse their conversation and shape their perspectives, which differ sharply when it comes to Jamal’s future.

Then Scott’s brother, who works at a local TV station, sends him an alarming video that rockets the couple into panic mode just as Lt. John Stokes (Randolph), a black veteran cop who is the actual liaison officer, arrives. From that moment, the play hurtles toward a terrible and all-too-familiar conclusion.

To a person, the actors in Zoetic’s cast are ideally suited to their roles.

Stephens, among the region’s most powerful actors, portrays a fierce and intelligent woman so agitated with worry that she just might jump out of her skin. Cholerton, a director who stepped away from acting for more than a decade, is utterly comfortable onstage, endearing in spite of the familial upheaval caused by Scott’s departure, then explosively fearful and heartbreakingly distraught.

Didato, properly amiable and naive as Larkin, effectively navigates the character’s goofy humor and reflexive racism. Randolph, whose Stokes gets the least stage time, is a towering force in the play as he supplies the law enforcement perspective in the incendiary debate over policing and deadly force. His one-on-one conversation with Stephens’ Kendra, just another scene in other productions, is utterly riveting.

Set designers Natalie Taveras and Jodi Dellaventura, lighting designer Rebecca Montero, sound designer and composer Matt Corey, and costume designer Marina Pareja create an atmosphere that perfectly serves the play, supplying sudden rainstorms that run down the station’s windows, the twirling red-and-blue lights and sudden sirens of police cars, the claustrophobic atmosphere of a government building in early morning where the couple must await the most relieving or worst news of their lives.

“American Son,” now published by Samuel French and slated for future productions in the United States and around the world, has had several impactful productions since the summer of 2016. But Zoetic’s rivals or surpasses all of them, thanks to a playwright and director who understand each other’s language and to a quartet of actors giving performances as powerful as anything they’ve ever done.

What: “American Son,” a play by Christopher Demos-Brown 

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays, through Jan. 26

Where: Zoetic Stage production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

Cost: $50 and $55

More information: 305-949-6722; arshtcenter.org

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Top photo: Scott (Clive Cholerton) and Kendra (Karen Stephens) wait nervously for news of their missing teen son in Christopher Demos-Brown’s “American Son.” (Photo courtesy of Justin Namon)

Christopher Demos-Brown’s ‘American Son’ comes home

A parent’s worst nightmare can take many forms, but this is indisputably one of them.

You get a call from the police in the wee small hours of the morning. A car given to your high-achieving son for his 18th birthday has been involved in what is only described as “an incident.” You frantically call his cellphone, which goes to voicemail again and again.

At 4 a.m., you’re in a Miami-Dade County police station trying to pry answers out of a tight-lipped rookie officer as you await your estranged husband, who not so long ago moved out and moved on. The intricate, incendiary issues of race add another layer to the mounting tension: You are black; your ex is white; your missing son, Jamal, is biracial – his whereabouts something the young white cop can’t, or won’t, reveal.

Thus begins Christopher Demos-Brown’s “American Son,” which previews Jan. 9 and opens Jan. 10 in a Zoetic Stage production that will run in the Carnival Studio Theater at Miami’s Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts through Jan. 26.

Although this marks the Florida premiere of a play that was running on Broadway just a year ago – a devastatingly intense drama that was adapted for and debuted on Netflix two months ago – both Demos-Brown and Zoetic Artistic Director Stuart Meltzer describe the new production as a homecoming.

The set-in-Miami play was written as part of the Playwright Development Program financed by Miami-Dade County’s Department of Cultural Affairs. It had several major staged readings in South Florida before going on to its world premiere at Barrington Stage Co. in Pittsfield, Mass., in the summer of 2016.

“Scandal” TV star Kerry Washington played psychology professor Kendra Ellis-Connor on Broadway from November 2018 to January 2019, opposite Steven Pasquale as her FBI agent husband, Scott. Jeremy Jordan played the rookie officer, Paul Larkin, and Eugene Lee completed the ensemble as the seasoned black police lieutenant John Stokes. Tony Award winner Kenny Leon staged the Broadway production.

All that said, while writing the play, Demos-Brown had in his head the voices of three of the four actors in Zoetic’s production.

“Unlike people who write novels, when you write for theater, you really depend on a community of artists, especially actors. If you don’t have a group of artists you trust, it’s hard to see if something isn’t working because of the actor or the material,” the playwright says.

In the case of “American Son,” Demos-Brown imagined Carbonell Award winner Karen Stephens, who appeared in the Zoetic world premiere of his play, “Fear Up Harsh,” as the worried mother; Carbonell-winning director and actor Clive Cholerton as the estranged husband; and Ryan Didato, who was in the Zoetic world premiere of the playwright’s “Wrongful Death and Other Circus Acts,” as the rookie officer.

Carbonell winner and New World School of the Arts associate professor James Samuel Randolph, who portrays Stokes, is new to the play and to Zoetic.

Of Stephens, Demos-Brown says: “Karen is not lacking in strong opinions. She wasn’t deterred by the fact that the play has had four productions and 16 readings, that it ran on Broadway and has been published by Samuel French. She would tell me what she thought needed to be changed … She has a toughness about her, and she wears it on her sleeve. But life has taken some shots at her, and that’s who Kendra is.”

Cholerton, who directed Stephens in “Clybourne Park” when he was running the Caldwell Theatre Co. in Boca Raton, has extensive acting and directing credits in the United States and his native Canada. Demos-Brown thinks Cholerton’s physicality as a former semipro athlete, his intelligence and his “Canadian gentleness” work well in portraying the husband. That he and Stephens are closer to the ages the playwright intended the characters to be is another asset.

“That gives their relationship with their son more poignancy,” Demos-Brown says. “This is it for them. They’re much more on the back-end of life.”

Cholerton is father to an 18-year-old, college-bound high school senior (whose mom is Carbonell winner Margery Lowe).  Although the play’s circumstances are intense and particular, Cholerton finds it easy to identify with his character’s reactions.

“Scott is a logical FBI guy, but when your child’s life is at stake, you will go to any length. It’s an almost animalistic feeling,” he says of a drama that takes him to an extreme emotional place in every performance. “I don’t know that I could do the play for more than three weeks.”

For her part, Stephens also identifies with multiple aspects of Kendra’s character.

“Kendra straddles two worlds, being married to a white man and having her career in academia, and being a black woman and black mother. She struggles and juggles, and on this night her worlds collide,” she says.

“I navigate that every day of my life. Sometimes, you don’t want to sacrifice your own culture. You just want to be who you are. But you’re forced to adhere to the perceptions of the majority culture if you want to get ahead. It creates great emotional and intellectual stress.”

Randolph grew up in Miami as the son of teachers and administrators whose friends included civic leaders and people in law enforcement. As a theater student, he was often out late at night driving home from rehearsals, something that worried his mother.

“I was pulled over once or twice when I was young, probably for driving while black. I stayed calm and listened to the better angels of my mother’s nature in my head,” the actor says. “This is a well-made play grounded in truth. We get to know this [missing] young man, even though we never see him.”

Didato saw “American Son” on Broadway and auditioned to be the production’s male understudy.  He “skipped around” the Netflix version and says Demos-Brown has told him he wrote the role of Larkin with “my voice, my energy in mind.”

But he thinks that tonally, Zoetic’s production will be noticeably different from the Broadway version.

“Chris is the smartest person in any room, and all his characters are smart, relatable, flawed,” Didato says. “He has created characters who are very real, so engaging. You empathize with the mother and the police officers. Clive’s Scott is so likeable, such a nice guy … You laugh a lot at Larkin’s expense. Stuart is so great at mining comedy, and playing with being uncomfortable is in my wheelhouse. The play has a lot more laughs than most people are expecting.”

Observes Randolph: “Humor lets people survive day in and day out. The more humor you find in this 90-minute play, the more hard-hitting it is when it’s no longer funny.”

Cholerton notes that he and Stephens, who have known each other a long time, are also focusing on “finding the quiet moments between the lines, when they look at each other and reflect, moments when they get reminded of something. It’s all there.”Finding real and funny moments has been crucial to Meltzer’s vision of the play.

“I’ve been working hard not to telegraph the ending of the play from the beginning,” the director says. “The big responsibility for me is to interpret it. The benefit I have is understanding Chris and his writing. His tempo, humor, wit and the sardonic nature of it. I can look at it with empathy from years of work alongside him.”

Although “American Son” has a history elsewhere, Meltzer adds, “This is a big homecoming for the play. It was born in Miami of a writer who knows and loves this community.”

“American Son” will also have a life after Miami. Samuel French has licensed 15 productions around the United States, and there are productions planned in Israel, France, Belgium, Brazil and India.

Demos-Brown, who continues working as an attorney with wife and law partner Stephanie Demos, is finalizing a contract to write a miniseries for FX based on a true crime story. He is continuing to work on “Coral Gables,” a companion piece to his play, “Captiva,” which had its world premiere at Zoetic in 2011.

Despite having had a play on Broadway, he is still trying to get his plays done at larger American regional theaters.

“Being an older, white male playwright is not a growth industry,” he says. “I can’t get larger theaters to bite. Family dysfunction stuff all seems the same – until you see the plays.”

The playwright got some pushback in New York for being exactly who he is: a white male writing insightfully about race and policing. Stephens argues that’s unfair.

“Throughout history, we have had white allies who marched with us and died with us. We’ve asked white America to see our pain. And when someone does that, we question it? I think it’s admirable and validating,” she says.

What: “American Son,” a play by Christopher Demos-Brown 

When: Preview at 7:30 p.m. Jan. 9; opening 7:30 p.m. Jan. 10; regular performances 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Saturdays and 3 p.m. Sundays , through Jan. 26. Additional matinee 3 p.m. Jan. 11.

Where: Zoetic Stage production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

Cost: $50 and $55

More information: 305-949-6722; arshtcenter.org

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Top photo: Karen Stephens and Clive Cholerton play estranged parents trying to get answers about their missing son in Zoetic Stage’s “American Son.” (Photo courtesy of Chris Headshots)

Miami Jewish Film Festival to open with ‘Saul & Ruby’ world premiere about Holocaust survivors’ band

Documentarian Tod Lending goes into his films knowing that he doesn’t know what’s going to happen in them. Longitudinal documentaries, or long docs, are his niche.

“I follow people for years, however long it takes for the story to present itself,” Lending said.

At the heart of his latest – “Saul & Ruby, To Life!” – are two Holocaust survivors, Saul Dreier, 94, of Coconut Creek and Reuwen “Ruby” Sosnowicz, 90, of Delray Beach, and their Holocaust Survivor Band.

The documentary will open the Miami Jewish Film Festival on Jan. 9 at the Aventura Arts & Cultural Center. The festival will run through Jan. 23 at 14 venues throughout Miami-Dade County, and feature more than 100 films from 25 countries.

“Even though I’m Jewish, I’ve never done a Jewish-themed story,” said Lending, 60, a native of Chicago. “I always wondered if I would ever make a film that had a connection to my own background and history.”

He never could’ve imagined where their story would take him.

At first, the film delved into their pasts in Poland and how Dreier found out about Sosnowicz when he wanted to form a Holocaust survivor klezmer band in 2014. Lending began filming in 2015, while the band was playing in community centers and becoming known.

As the film progressed, so did the lives of the two men and the trajectory of the band. On the personal side, the two men lost their wives to illnesses during filming, and on the professional side, they found a way to play their dream concert in Poland.

“We had no idea they would make it to Poland when we began,” Lending said.

The harrowing stories of the Holocaust are interspersed within the film. Dreier tells of how his family was killed by Nazis, and he expresses his wonder on how he was the one who survived.

“To survive is a 99 percent miracle,” he said in the documentary. “Ask me from day to day, I can’t comprehend. The way I was living, the way I was eating.”

In the film, Sosnowicz recalls living in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter: “I had five sisters and four brothers. I was the youngest. When Germany invaded, my father knew how to get out of town.”

But when they arrived at the Poland-Russia border, the young boy ran the wrong way and lost his family as they crossed the border. A farmer found him and kept him hidden and fed throughout the war.

“Ruby had a different experience than Saul, and both stories will resonate with audiences,” Lending said. “I will always be inspired by these two men and their drive to live and to be connected to the world in spite of what they went through.”

After a friend showed him a short documentary online in the New York Times about the pair, “I fell in love with these two guys,” Lending said. He remembers learning that film companies had already contacted them.

“I was ready to jump on this. I flew to Florida immediately to meet with Saul,” he said.

While he would go through his normal fundraising channels, Lending decided this was the film he had been waiting for. “I had put money aside throughout the years for a passion project, and this was it,” he said.

Lending was intrigued by the Holocaust Survivor Band, made up of survivors and children of survivors.

The idea for the band began when Dreier read a newspaper article about the death of Alice Herz-Sommer, a 110-year-old woman in England who had survived her time in concentration camps by playing piano in concerts the Nazis arranged.

“I want to do something for her,” Dreier recalled thinking. “I’m going to put together a band.”

In 1945, Dreier was 19 and played drums in a displaced persons camp after the U.S. Army liberated him from a concentration camp in Linz, Austria.

“One day, a truck arrived with a piano and a set of drums. The director of the camp asked who wants to play the piano, and a man from Yugoslavia raised his hand. No one wanted to play the drums, so I volunteered,” he said.

He stopped playing the drums, he said, “when I moved to the United States, went to work, got married and had a family.”

Sosnowicz learned to play music at a displaced persons camp in Germany, where he acquired his first accordion. When he migrated to Israel and served in the Israeli Army, he formed a band. When he lived in Paris, he played his accordion in the streets. He later moved to Montreal, then eventually settled in the United States, where he continued to play as a professional musician, including entertaining through the Borscht Belt of upstate New York before retiring to Florida.

“Saul & Ruby, To Life!” already has a distribution deal with Samuel Goldwyn Films, which means it will be shown throughout U.S. movie theaters. It is the 13th feature film to be acquired from the Miami Jewish Film Festival in the past seven years, according to the festival’s director, Igor Shteyrenberg.

Before “Saul & Ruby, To Life!”, Lending completed “Omar & Pete,” which followed two men in the period before their release from prison and then two years after.

“The majority of my work has been on social justice and has always been stories about minorities, drug addiction, incarceration, sexual abuse,” Lending said.

Lending was nominated for an Academy Award in 2001 for his feature-length documentary, “Legacy,” which he filmed over a five-year period, about an African-American family’s struggle and how they overcame community violence, drug addiction and the loss of a child.

What: “Saul & Ruby, To Life!” will open the Miami Jewish Film Festival

When: 7 p.m. Jan. 9; the festival runs through Jan. 23

Where: Aventura Arts & Cultural Center, 3385 NE 188th St.; the festival includes 13 other venues

Cost: $15 for single tickets; $325 for festival badge passes

More information: 305-573-7304; miamijewishfilmfestival.org

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Top photo: From left, Reuwen “Ruby” Sosnowicz withdaughter Chana Rose Sosnowicz and Saul Dreier in a clip from”Saul & Ruby, To Life!” (Photo courtesy of Tod Lending)

‘Macbeth’ takes a murderous quest for power to 4 Miami-Dade locations

Actor Seth Trucks has been living with Macbeth and “Macbeth” – one of William Shakespeare’s great roles in one of his great tragedies – for much of the current theater season.

In August, Trucks played the ruthlessly pragmatic Scottish king in an intimate New City Players production at The Vanguard in Fort Lauderdale. Now, throughout January, the accomplished actor is going bigger, of necessity: He’ll play Macbeth, the once-valiant general who murders his way onto the throne, at four outdoor locations in Miami-Dade County, the smallest of which seats 550 people.

“Playing him twice has given me an increased familiarity with the role, allowing for intimate finetuning and detail work,” Trucks acknowledges via email, adding, “but the change in space requires a larger, more performative approach, which has been an interesting tightrope to walk.”

Trucks is working on his second “Macbeth” in six months with Florida Shakespeare Theater’s founding producing artistic director, Colleen Stovall. The company will take the play, which Stovall has placed in the early 12th century, to the North Beach Bandshell in Miami Beach on Jan. 3-5, the Downtown Doral Park in Doral on Jan. 10-12, The Barnacle Historic State Park in Miami’s Coconut Grove neighborhood on Jan. 17-19, and Pinecrest Gardens in Pinecrest on Jan. 24-26. Admission is free.

Stovall – who previously directed Trucks in the title role in “Hamlet” and as Shylock in “The Merchant of Venice” – has paired him with Sara Grant as Lady Macbeth. The director first staged “Macbeth” for the company a decade ago, and she has intricate ideas about what she wants to communicate in this new production.

“I wanted to chart the trajectory of a man who was beloved and heroic [as he became] someone who laid a country to waste for his own base needs and desires,” Stovall writes in an email. “[Seth] works to find and project the spark of humanity in each of his characters … Although Macbeth is a villain, Seth manages to show us his mental anguish and confusion when everything goes wrong.”

As for Lady Macbeth, Stovall has added an opening sequence that shows the grieving character giving up her dead baby, suggesting “why she might be angry at the world and so eager to call up the dark side in order to wreak havoc,” the director notes. “Sara’s confidence at the top of the show devolves into anger, regret and eventually madness. Our main goal is to show the progression of both characters.”

Grant explains that “Colleen was concerned that we build a character arc for Lady Macbeth that showed her brilliance, her brains and her initial control over Macbeth, and not just paint a flat, one-dimensional villain.”

Taking a cast of 17 professional actors and two interns to a new venue each week is just one of the challenges of performing Shakespeare in large outdoor settings.

Weather is another, as is achieving topnotch outdoor theatrical sound. Stovall designed and built 22 of the more than 40 costumes, which have layers of leather, fur, wool or linen-like fabric. The spare, bare set has to be put up, taken down and moved each week. Everything is designed to bring to vibrant life a play that Stovall calls “Shakespeare’s most accessible tragedy.”

Trucks, also an experienced fight choreographer, will execute a large-scale broadsword duel choreographed by Joey Costello. He’ll also be focusing on how he delivers Shakespeare’s language.

“With Shakespeare, I always begin by trying to make each line sound perfectly casual and understandable coming out of my mouth, then I add what poetry I think the delivery calls for,” he says. “With Macbeth, that is an ongoing process, as his words are particularly rich, even for Shakespeare. Try saying ‘the multitudinous seas incarnadine’ casually.”

What: Florida Shakespeare Theater’s “Macbeth”

When/where:

Jan. 3-5 at North Beach Bandshell, 7275 Collins Ave., Miami Beach

Jan. 10-12 at Downtown Doral Park, 8395 NW 53rd St., Doral

Jan. 17-19 at The Barnacle Historic State Park , 3485 Main Highway, Miami

Jan. 24-26 at Pinecrest Gardens, 11000 Red Road, Pinecrest

Hours: 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 6 p.m. Sundays (matinee 2 p.m. Jan. 25)

Cost: Free

More information: floridashakes.com 

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Top photo: Sara Grant as Lady Macbeth and Seth Trucks as Macbeth rehearse for the Florida Shakespeare Theater production. (Photo courtesy of Joey Costello)

Revenge and dinner are served in Faena Theater’s Immersive ‘The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover’

Immersive theater is having way more than a moment in Miami, thanks to the ongoing success of Juggerknot Theatre Co.’s original “Miami Motel Stories” productions and “Amparo,” which closed last month after multiple extensions.

Now the Faena Theater at Miami Beach’s Faena Hotel is adding to the immersive trend with a lavish production of “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” adapted by playwright Scott Gilmour from the 1989 Peter Greenaway film.

If you know the movie – a work of cinematic art that was also intensely sexual and graphically violent (Miramax released it unrated rather than go with an X rating) – you may well wonder just how such a story could be turned into a piece of musical theater with a running time of under two hours and a three-course, Michelle Bernstein-devised dinner included. After all, the show’s promotional pitch sells it this way: “Revenge is a dish best served cold. Do you have the stomach for it?”

The short answer to the how-is-this-possible question is that Faena’s “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover,” created in collaboration with Unigram Theatrical, carefully walks a line between paying tribute to the original and nearly (but not quite) sending it up.

Thus, you don’t get full nudity in the athletically sensuous love scenes between the Wife (Kristin Guerin) and the Lover (Parker Murphy), nor are you forced to endure believably horrific violence as the Thief (Donal Brophy) and his thugs execute Leonardo Soroko’s fight choreography to exact deadly revenge on the Lover.

So you can safely savor both the show and Bernstein’s menu: deconstructed ceviche to start; Wagyu Short Rib Beef Wellington as the main course; and a chocolate sphere dessert that you smash open with a small wooden mallet to reveal an oozing bloody berry filling. A vegan menu is available.

The action takes place on the evening of Oct. 13, 1989, a nod to the Greenaway movie’s London release.

Set designer Kenneth MacLeod has transformed the Faena Theater into the utterly opulent Le Hollandais Restaurant, whose new owner, Albert Spica (aka the Thief) is about to pay a visit with his chic, much-abused wife Georgina in tow. Spica’s “goons” and the actor-singer-dancers who play the restaurant’s uniformed staff circulate before their boss arrives, advising diners that Spica is a very private guy, so no photos or filming, or else.

And once he’s seated with Georgina and another couple at an elevated table – under a massive chandelier that lighting designer Grant Anderson often bathes in red – you understand the need for wariness in dealing with Spica.

Dublin native Brophy, a handsome actor whose credits include Manhattan’s immersive “Sleep No More,” Off-Broadway classics, TV and film (and who is a real-life Greenwich Village restaurateur), plays Spica as a cockney lout, loudly sharing details of his sexual history with the wife he calls “Georgie,” toggling between crude charm and rude abuse.

The whippet-thin Georgina, dressed in a white fascinator and revealing white dress over black lingerie (Anna Bingemann and MacLeod are both credited with costume design) keeps catching the eye of a guy seated alone next to the stage, a man seemingly absorbed in reading a book. Wearing glasses, his hair pulled back into a man bun, the Lover soon sheds his specs and his caution, taking Georgina into an onstage “restroom” behind a see-through curtain; the audience sees their encounters, though Brophy’s Spica must pretend he does not.

Georgina has an ally in the Cook (Thiana Berrick), gender-reversed from the movie so that the story’s gruesome finale comes across as self-empowered women giving an abusive monster his just desserts. Or a gag-inducing main course, if you will.

Structurally, Faena’s immersive experience is timed to intersperse interludes of dining and theatrical action. Musical director/pianist Paul Tine, playing with cellist Madalina Macovei and violinist Liubov Ohrimenco, guides seven talented young performers through a score of ’80s hits, songs that come across as pointed or ironic, given the context. Consider the titles.

Lily Ockwell, for example, sings “I Think We’re Alone Now,” then Amanda Lynn Williams adds Christine McVie’s “Everywhere” as a song for the roaming lovers. Bruno Faria performs Robert Palmer’s “Addicted to Love,” followed by Nate Promkul’s plaintive rendition of “Broken Wings.” Bianca DiSarro performs “(I Just) Died in Your Arms Tonight” and “Girls Just Wanna Have Fun.” Ori David Meyer and Evelyn Robaina join their castmates in singing and performing EJ Boyle’s movement and choreography. And after the bows, as you exit the theater, you hear a new title song written and recorded by Boy George.

Director Andrew Panton keeps the storytelling flowing with perfect precision. He does not, however, have a theatrically powerful script to work with. Gilmour’s script necessarily gives short shrift to the principals’ stories, and it jams the affair into brief scenes. The tale goes from passion to revenge served roasted in the blink of an eye. Actors Guerin and Murphy, who remain dressed in their underwear, are more reminiscent of dazzling Cirque du Soleil performers than actors playing characters engaged in a passionate doomed relationship.

“The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” is high-end theater (dining/show tickets are $230 and $280, with show-only tickets priced at $95), which the audience seems to enjoy immensely. The collaboration of international and Miami talent, plus the quality of Bernstein’s menu, turn what could have been a shocking evening into a palatable immersive experience for artistic adventurers.

What: “The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover” by Scott Gilmour, based on the film by Peter Greenaway 

Where: Faena and Unigram Theatrical production at the Faena Theater, 3201 Collins Ave., Miami Beach

When: 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 7 p.m. Sundays (doors open 45 minutes in advance), through late April

Cost: $95-$280

More information: 786-655-5741; faenatheater.com

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City Theatre folds humor, conflict and compassion into ‘The Cake’

America’s culture wars get an illuminating skirmish in “The Cake,” Bekah Brunstetter’s play about a North Carolina woman named Jen, who returns to her hometown from Brooklyn to plan the traditional wedding of her dreams.

In her case, the other figure atop the spectacular cake will be a second bride. And that’s a hurdle that Della, a Christian baker whose best friend was Jen’s late mother, can’t – or won’t – scale.

Initially thrilled when she thinks Jen has a groom waiting in the wings, Della pleads a packed schedule when it becomes clear that Macy, the inquisitive young, black woman who has come into Della’s bakery, is Jen’s intended.

“The Cake” asks of both the baker and the bride: What do you do when someone you love does something you can’t accept?

City Theatre has just opened in the Carnival Studio Theater of Miami’s Arsht Center an insightful, bittersweet, tenderly wrought version of Brunstetter’s much-produced play.

Like the playwright, director Margaret M. Ledford gives weight and respect to the conflicting beliefs and emotions in the script. “The Cake” aims to dig deeper than the us vs. them positions that fuel so much ugliness in discourse. It wants us to listen, to think, to consider different perspectives. And, as an audience, we do.

When first we meet Della (Irene Adjan), she’s in her shop preparing to compete on “The Big American Bake-Off,” a reality TV show modeled on “The Great British Baking Show.”

As she talks about her faith in full-fat baking and following a recipe with scientific precision, a sensuousness sneaks into her often funny commentary. Later, as she imagines the voice of the hot British host of “Bake-Off” (Daniel Llaca) getting way too personal with her, it becomes clear that there’s a lot of sublimation going on in Della’s life. That’s underscored by the lack of passion in her companionable relationship with her plumber hubby Tim (Michael Gioia), who unquestioningly accepts the Bible as the guidebook to living.

But with the arrival of Jen (Lexi Langs) and Macy (Stephon Duncan), Della begins to ponder her settled life and beliefs, and to long for more. Going home again also makes Jen think about the ideas that shaped her, about the push toward the traditional, about the unexpected joy of finding the love she’d always dreamed of with an out-and-proud black lesbian. For her part, Macy is dismayed that the rocky homecoming and Della’s awkward excuse about the wedding cake have amped up Jen’s pre-wedding jitters.

Brunstetter packs a lot, and plenty of frank sexual talk, into a 90-minute play that was inspired in part by what became the Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop vs. the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, in which a baker refused to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

In creating her rich characters, the former “This Is Us” writer-producer sometimes resorts to provocative shorthand in defining them. Jen, for example, uses the “c” word with Della as she describes her anguish at being torn between her past and present.

Although Adjan’s Della displays a reflexive narrow-mindedness, the actor infuses her character with warmth and complexity. It would also be easy to view Tim as a traditional Southern guy who views himself as the leader of his two-person family, but Gioia’s aura of fondness for Della and, finally, his playfulness make Tim more than an archetype.

If Langs’ Jen and Duncan’s Macy aren’t an obvious match, that’s more in the writing than in the actors’ performances. Jen is a skittish beauty who has yet to emotionally meld the Southern traditions that shaped her with her hip life in Brooklyn. As Macy, Duncan is adept at conveying both frankness and a simmering pain.

Creatively, costume designer Ellis Tillman has done beautifully expressive and character-underscoring work, outfitting the petite Adjan in cheerful prints and a drop-dead gorgeous emerald green cocktail dress; drawing the contrast between Jen’s traditional look and Macy’s free-spirited one, even in their striking wedding attire; putting Tim in work clothes and PJs.

Eric Nelson’s lighting helps shift the action on Joe Rawda’s segmented set: from Della’s shop, with its display cases of baked goods; to her homey bedroom; to the bedroom at Jen’s cousin’s house, where she and Macy have just made love; and to the burnished place where Della’s fantasies and worries play out.

That little jingling bell that sounds whenever someone enters through the unseen door to Della’s shop? That’s the work of sound designer Matt Corey.

Can “The Cake” shift entrenched beliefs? Maybe not. But City Theatre’s production accomplishes what the playwright, Ledford, the actors and the creative team intended. Theatergoers think and feel, talk and debate, as love and understanding rise to the top.

What: “The Cake” by Bekah Brunstetter

Where: City Theatre production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

When: 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, 3 p.m. Sundays, through Dec. 22

Cost: $45, $50

More information: 305-949-6722 or www.arshtcenter.org

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Top photo: Brides Jen (Lexi Langs, left) and Macy (Stephon Duncan) share a tender moment on their wedding day in City Theatre’s “The Cake.”

‘Ordinary Americans’ focuses on woman who’s been ‘so forgotten in our society’

Playwright Joseph McDonough, artistic director William Hayes and actor David Kwiat had something in common when they began working on “Ordinary Americans,” the already-extended play that will get its world premiere at Palm Beach Dramaworks this week before moving on to a run at GableStage in mid-January.

Not one of the seasoned theater artists was familiar with the multitalented woman at the heart of the show, Gertrude Berg.

Berg – who created a 15-minute radio comedy titled “The Rise of the Goldbergs” in 1929 and later took the retitled “The Goldbergs” to CBS television in 1949 –wrote more than 12,000 scripts while playing Molly Goldberg, the matriarch of a Jewish family living in a Bronx tenement.

“She acted, wrote and produced,” says Carbonell Award-winning actor Elizabeth Dimon, who portrays Goldberg in “Ordinary Americans” and who had the idea for the play. “Today, she would be Oprah Winfrey.”

Originally, Dimon intended to write the play herself. Hayes told her about a Theatre Communications Grant for “mature” artists, but that didn’t come through, and Dimon thinks that’s just as well.

“I’m not a writer. My strong suit is bringing your words to life,” she says.

By then, Hayes was hooked on the idea, so he commissioned Cincinnati-based playwright McDonough, whose play “Edgar and Emily” (a fantasy about a meeting between poet Emily Dickinson and the long-dead writer Edgar Allan Poe) was developed at Dramaworks’ Dramaworkshop and subsequently got a main stage premiere in 2018.

The men have spent about 2 1/2 years working together on “Ordinary Americans,” with McDonough writing and Hayes serving as director and dramaturg. They have developed the script in person and over the phone, doing workshops with Dimon and most of the actors now involved in the show.

During the play’s evolution, a key tragedy was moved from the middle of the play to the end, a character was eliminated, and the script was tightened to about 90 minutes. Thematically, “Ordinary Americans” grew from a portrait of Berg to an examination of the way McCarthyism and the blacklist of the early 1950s affected Berg, her fellow cast members and her show.

Kwiat, a Carbonell-winning actor who retired after a long teaching career at Miami’s New World School of the Arts, plays Philip Loeb in “Ordinary Americans.” Loeb played Molly’s husband, Jake, on “The Goldbergs,” and as an activist with many organizations, he helped Actors’ Equity secure rehearsal pay for actors.

Loeb, who was the sole support of an adult son with schizophrenia, wound up in the infamous “Red Channels” report on alleged Communist influence in radio and television. CBS demanded that Berg fire Loeb, which she initially refused to do.  “The Goldbergs” was yanked off the air for more than a year, putting everyone out of work, though it returned after Loeb agreed to accept a settlement from Berg and leave the show.

That decision, however, was the beginning of the end for Loeb.

Although “Ordinary Americans” contains some funny scenes showcasing the comedy of “The Goldbergs,” Kwiat says that the play “is pretty dark, since it involves McCarthyism and blacklisting. The majority of it is dealing with the painful struggle of the politics of that day … I don’t think the audience knows what it will be seeing. Bill and Joe wanted to write a tragedy.”

Researching Loeb through extensive reading and watching clips on YouTube, Kwiat observes, “He was a total minimalist.  It was Gertrude Berg’s show, and he deferred to her.”

Dimon, who had a deep interest in the blacklist, felt she could play Berg, “a woman of a certain age, a certain size … People connected with her because of her warmth. She would say, ‘Greetings from our family to your family.’ The first time I did it, I almost choked up.”

Berg, called “Tillie” by her friends and family, was a sophisticated New Yorker who would win the first Emmy Award given to best lead actress in a comedy in 1951 and a best actress Tony Award in 1959 for her performance in the Broadway production of “A Majority of One.”

On “The Goldbergs,” the characters spoke in a dialect – Molly would be beckoned to her window by a neighbor calling, “Yoo-hoo, Mrs. Goldberg!” – and when the series returned to the air, the appetite for a comedy about a Jewish family had waned.

“The culture had changed. Nobody wanted to see ethnicity anymore,” Dimon says. “When I first thought of this play, I wanted it to be about her.  But it was very important that it be focused on the time period and the blacklist. I’m so afraid it will repeat.”

Hayes dreams of a larger future for “Ordinary Americans,” and the first step was partnering with Joseph Adler and GableStage to co-produce the world premiere. Dimon, Kwiat, Rob Donohoe and Tom Wahl will do the play at both theaters; Margery Lowe will appear in the Dramaworks version but has another commitment next month, so Patti Gardner will step into the role of Berg’s business manager and best friend when the show moves to GableStage.

“I believe theaters need to find opportunities to partner and not be competitive,” Hayes says. “We’re stronger together. A lot of excitement and momentum happens when you do such things. It keeps the momentum going for the play, and exposure to each other’s audiences helps Joe and me and all the artists involved.”

The director, playwright and actors all feel the contemporary resonance of “Ordinary Americans.”

“There’s fear and paranoia in our society. People are as politically divided as they were in the ’50s,” McDonough says. “I’ve tried not to be heavy-handed. I’m trying to be truthful to their story and not drop in external things. But the parallels write themselves.”

Research is a process McDonough enjoys when he’s writing plays involving historical figures. He read a biography as well as Berg’s autobiography and watched a documentary on her. But he didn’t find a great deal of additional source material.

“She’s been so forgotten in our society,” he says.

As for Loeb, McDonough found something deeply moving at the New York Public Library.

“I discovered his personal papers, his handwritten notes as he prepared to testify … ” the playwright says. Loeb went before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1952. “That was very awe-inspiring. It felt like a sacred calling to reflect his thoughts.”

“Ordinary Americans” previews Dec. 4-5, then runs Dec. 6-Jan. 5 at Palm Beach Dramaworks, 201 Clematis St., West Palm Beach. The play moves to GableStage, 1200 Anastasia Ave., Coral Gables, from Jan. 18-Feb. 16.

Dramaworks show times are 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays-Thursdays and some Sundays, 8 p.m. Fridays-Saturdays, 2 p.m. Wednesdays and Saturdays-Sundays (additional matinee 2 p.m. Dec. 26). Tickets cost $77 (previews $57; students $15; Pay Your Age tickets for theatergoers 18-40). To order, call 561-514-4042 or go to palmbeachdramaworks.org.

GableStage showtimes are 8 p.m. Thursdays-Saturdays, 2 and 7 p.m. Sundays (no 7 p.m. show Jan. 19). Prices are $50-$65 (students pay $15 on Thursdays). For more information, call 305-445-1119 or go to gablestage.org. 

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Top photo: Elizabeth Dimon plays writer-producer-actor Gertrude Berg in the world premiere of “Ordinary Americans.” (Photo courtesy of Samantha Mighdoll)

City Theatre Miami’s ‘The Cake’ serves up resonant, touching comedy

The loveliest and most expensive cake most of us will ever buy is, without doubt, a wedding cake. A focus on one of the most special days in a couple’s life, the cake is a sweet, beautifully decorated symbol of good fortune and marital happiness.

But in recent years, as some bakers have refused to make cakes for same-sex couples, a cherished tradition has become one more focus of America’s culture wars.

Playwright and former “This Is Us” writer-producer Bekah Brunstetter has responded with “The Cake,” a play about a pair of brides-to-be and the Christian bake-shop owner who feels she just can’t go against her beliefs to make the women a wedding cake.

City Theatre Miami, best known for more than two decades of championing short plays and musicals via its Summer Shorts festivals, is making “The Cake” one of its rare full-length productions. The play previews on Dec. 5-6 and opens Dec. 7 for a run through Dec. 22, as part of the Theater Up Close series in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County.

Brunstetter says she was inspired in part by what became the 2018 U.S. Supreme Court case Masterpiece Cakeshop v. Colorado Civil Rights Commission. In that case, the court overturned on narrow grounds a lower court decision stating that a baker in Lakewood, Colo., was within his rights to refuse to make a wedding cake for a gay couple.

“I thought it was a great jumping-off place for a play,” Brunstetter says. “But I’m not into docudrama.”

Instead, the playwright used her imagination and folded in bits of her background. She grew up in Winston-Salem, N.C., where her family’s conservative Baptist faith was a big part of her childhood. When Brunstetter was in college, her father, former state Sen. Peter S. Brunstetter, “put forth legislation that would ban gay marriage in North Carolina.”

Though she is straight, married to actor Morrison Keddie, Brunstetter has many gay and lesbian friends, and her father’s bill didn’t sit well.

“I would make my opposition clear, but then back away. My mom and I are peacemakers. We try to consider other points of view,” she says. “The play itself is my attempt to make my argument.”

Flipping the gender of the focal couple came about, she says, “because there’s less light shone on gay women, and I’m a woman. What if I’d brought a woman home?”

“The Cake,” which has had about 70 productions since its 2017 Los Angeles premiere, is set in North Carolina. Della Brady, the owner of Della’s Sweets, is getting ready to compete on the reality TV show, “The Big American Bake-Off,” when an attractive black New Yorker named Macy enters her shop and starts quizzing her, jotting down notes.

Della soon learns that Macy is about to marry Jen, the daughter of Della’s late best friend. Jen wants Della to make the wedding cake, but Della awkwardly begs off, claiming she’s already overbooked for October. That night at bedtime, the baker shares her anguished feelings with her good ol’ boy husband Tim, who cites the Bible as he assures her that saying no was her only choice. Yet as the play goes on, Brunstetter explores the virtues and flaws of all four characters and their arguments.

Staged by Artistic Director Margaret M. Ledford, City Theatre’s production features three-time Carbonell Award winner Irene Adjan as Della, Lexi Langs as Jen, Stephon Duncan as Macy, and Michael Gioia as Tim.

“I fell in love with the play for so many reasons,” says Ledford, who grew up in Tennessee and enjoys baking. “Not only because of how current the topic is, but also because both sides of the coin are so fleshed out, so deep. In our polarizing world, we have to be able to look at someone in their totality. Nobody’s right here. Nobody’s wrong.”

As for Adjan, she did something she rarely does, lobbying Ledford to consider her for the role of Della.

“I read about this play before City announced it,” she says. “I have a degree in international baking and pastries from the Florida Culinary Institute. And I tend to get offered the same type of roles as [original ‘Cake’ star] Debra Jo Rupp.”

Adjan welcomes the chance to advocate for understanding through a resonant, touching, observant comedy.

“Like many people, I have fatigue with political disagreements. So many people are busy arguing and yelling and not talking to each other. People think, ‘If you disagree with me, you’re my enemy,’” she says.

“Della is very religious, but she did go to college. As she says, ‘I have a brain and a heart at war.’ I think a lot of people are going to feel understood when they see this play … People are not as black and white as we make them. As long as people are trying, that’s all we can ask of them.”

Born and raised in Miami, Gioia played lots of Southern men when he was in grad school at the University of Florida. He sees Tim, whose intimate relationship with Della has diminished over the years, as an alpha male “whose doctrine tells him that he’s right, that you don’t have to talk about things, because they’re already decided … But Tim eventually does try. He literally says that. They take their first steps – but it’s not going to be easy.”

The New York-based Langs has been steeped in the world of weddings, having married husband Ian Aric just a few weeks ago.

“I read a lot of interviews with Bekah, and I see a lot of her in Jen,” Langs says. “She’s hopeful, optimistic, full of joy. She looks for the good in people … In the play, everyone is able to find a sense of empathy for another person. It is possible to talk with one another and treat each other with respect.”

Duncan, who says one of her goals has been to work in a show at the Arsht Center, sees Macy as “a firecracker. She’s unapologetic about who she is. She’s different from me in the way she moves. The way she owns her space is so forward … In the first scene, she’s playing with making Della uncomfortable, with figuring Della out. She’s in the South, where the mentality is that being gay is wrong.”

Brunstetter, whose career is flourishing with projects such as making a movie of “The Cake,” writing a pilot for Hulu and developing a contemporary TV remake of “Oklahoma!,” continues to write plays. Her parents first saw a North Carolina production of “The Cake” two years ago – then, she says, “it was a lot for them to take in” – but then they traveled to New York to see it Off-Broadway.

“They’re wonderful, supportive and proud of me. We don’t always agree. Certainly, we make each other mad. But we try to support each other,” Brunstetter says.

Ledford, who used intimacy choreography to stage certain moments between Della and Tim and between Jen and Macy, emphasizes that even though the subject matter in “The Cake” is deeply important, Brunstetter’s approach makes for an enjoyable experience.

“’The Cake’ is filled with love and humor,” she says. “It doesn’t feel like a heavy night. What better gift for the holidays?”

What: “The Cake” by Bekah Brunstetter

Where: City Theatre production in the Carnival Studio Theater at the Adrienne Arsht Center for the Performing Arts of Miami-Dade County, 1300 Biscayne Blvd., Miami

When: Previews 7:30 p.m. Dec. 5-6, opens 7:30 p.m. Dec. 7; regular performances 7:30 p.m. Wednesdays, 3 p.m. Sundays (additional matinee 3 p.m. Dec. 7), through Dec. 22

Cost: $45, $50

More information: 305-949-6722 or www.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.

Top photo: Irene Adjan as Della offers a slice of red velvet cake to a reluctant Stephon Duncan as Macy in City Theatre’s “The Cake” at the Arsht Center. (Photo courtesy of George Schiavone)