Translation from the Spanish by Esther Whitfield.
When Antigonón, un contingente épico opened in 2013 in the space that is home to Teatro el Público, spectators in Havana were excited. The staging by Carlos Díaz, who has directed the company since its founding in 1992, renewed people’s interest in his craft: a series of aesthetic, erotic, political and moral provocations, combined in a theatrical poetics that aims to leave no-one indifferent. With this Teatro El Públio added to its repertoire the name Rogelio Orizondo, a young dramaturge who has recently graduated from the Insitituto Superior del Arte and is one of the most talented of the generation known as the “novísimos,” or “newest of the new.” On stage, three young actresses and two actors stood naked to express their idea of the Nation, their eroded relationship to the Fatherland and their revolutionary epic, in an act of disrespect that nevertheless confirmed them as Cubans and as witnesses, part and counterpart of an image of today’s Cuba. Carlos Díaz – who in the past has worked with texts by Shakespeare, Racine, Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Virgilio Piñera, Abilio Estévez, Rainer Fassbinder and Slawomir Mrozek – took a risk with this wild and violent declaration, showing that his past experience and new perspectives combined could produce surprises for his audience.
The Cuba represented in today’s theater is no less intense, in examples like these, than Cuba itself. The most theatrical blow that the island has taken in recent times is, of course, the one that struck us on December 17, 2014: the re-establishing of ties between the Cuban and American governments. In a show that opened in 2015, by a very young director, this surprising event became the axis of a political cabaret that was recognized as the best show of the year. Pedro Franco plotted with very young actors and actresses to creat CCPC: Cuban Coffee by Portazo’s Cooperative. The acronym recalls that of the former USSR (CCCP in Russian); and the show blends – with violence and nerve, in a postmodern collage full of Cuban humor – José Martí’s letters, poems and fragments from the theater of the “novísimos,” parodies of moments in national history, love songs and pop music, from los Van Van to Nueva Trova. El Portazo is the name of this group, which has tried to stay afloat by navigating the new forms of economic entrepreneurship that the Cuban State authorized after years of officially refusing economic alternatives. Thinking about theater as a show, driven by prices, demand and supply, and the interests of a viewing public, is a challenge that young artists have faced throughout these performances, as cast members have changed according to the dynamics that bring the real Cuba closer to the distorting mirror that is the Cuba of the theater, as well as vice versa.
Until the late 1980s, when the Island was a socialist bubble in the Caribbean sustained by the socialist nations of Eastern Europe, theater in Cuba was dominated by large groups. In 1989, the National Council of Dramatic Arts was formed as an entity that would govern theater across the country; as winds of change swept through the second half of the decade, the creation of small projects was approved. With these, actors and directors could try their luck beyond the larger groups and, if they were successful, form stable groups themselves. The unexpected arrival of the Special Period stopped in its tracks this post-Wall Cuba, a tropical bubble that forged ahead with European-style socialism even as it found itself alone in its utopian endeavors. Theater suffered a serious blow, and survived the power outages and transportation shortages as well as it could. Many theater artists fled to television or found work in exile. The breach that Cuban society lived left its mark on the theatrical image of the country, sometimes with strong political overtones that caused problems beyond the theater, thanks to the daring of pieces as interesting as Niñita querida (based on the text of Virgilio Piñera and performed by Teatro El Público in 1993); Manteca (based on the text of Alberto Pedro and directed by Miriam Lezcano for Teatro Mío), and El Arca (written and directed by Victor Varela for Teatro Obstáculo in 1995). At the same time, masters like Abelardo Estornio were rethinking Cubanness in works like Vagos Rumores and Parece Blanca – the ghosts of the poet José Jacinto Milanés and the mythical mulata Cecilia Valdés animated these modern revisions of the nineteenth century. And children’s theater was able to sustain spectators’ interest, thanks to dialogues consecrated artists like Armando Morales and René Fernández initiated with their followers and to the birth of groups that, like Teatro de las Estaciones, positioned puppet theater at the aesthetic vanguard.
The fragmented history of modern Cuban theater has had to reorient itself yet again. Intent in the 1950s on renewing itself through productions in small Havana theaters; expanded and driven to experiment in the 1960s, thanks to the frenzy of the revolution; constrained in the 1970s by censorship and official moral prejudice against homosexuals; reborn in the 1980s and attempting to staunch the wounds of the previous decades… This was all reworked once more in the survival mode of the 1990s, when events opened early to make the most of natural light as there was no electricity. In those years, Abilio Estévez wrote three of the period’s essential plays: Perla marina, Santa Cecilia and The Night: allegories of a Cuba in pain searching through its myths and poetry for the pillars of a new idea of salvation. Now that this frenzy is over, the best of Cuban theater is to be found in the works of a few easily identifiable groups that came to light in the 1990s. Teatro Buendía, founded in 1986 by the actress and director Flora Lauten, has given rise to such valuable projects as Argos Teatro (created by Carlos Celdrán), and El Ciervo Encantado, led by Nelda Castillo. Carlos Díaz, with Teatro El Público, has brought festive and provocative leanings to the idea of a visually provocative theater: he is the most versatile of our directors. Raúl Martín, a disciple of Roberto Blanco and Carlos Díaz, has armed his Teatro de la Luna with an apparently light aesthetic that nevertheless offers sharp insights on the pleasures and traumas of Cubanness, in spectacles like his Delirio habanero, with a text by Alberto Pedro, in which Celia Cruz, Benny Moré and a great Cuban barman meet one impossible night to invoke a lost Havana beneath the roof of a cabaret set for demolition. Teatro de las Estaciones has recuperated the memory of the Camejo siblings and Pepe Carril, founders of the traditional puppeteering profession and victims of the repressions of the 1970s. Memory, that fundamental obsession of theater, resolves itself as these directors dialogue with the echo of their masters, some already deceased: Vicente Revuelta (the island’s greatest creator of spectacles, founder of the mythic and now extinct Teatro Estudio), Berta Martínez, Roberto Blanco, Armando Suárez del Villar, etc. Virgilio Piñera, our greatest dramaturge, who died in 1979 completely ostracized from society, has made a forceful return to the stage since the 1990s in the hands of some of these creators; and as Carlos Celdrán proved with his extraordinary approach to Piñera’s Aire Frío, in 2012, he is an invincible classic, able to dialogue with spectators of any generation.
Coinciding on the Cuban stage at the moment are survivors of 1950s art theater; those who made their name as dramaturges and directors during the fervor of the 1960s (some still active, as are José Milián, Nicolás Dorr, Eugenio Hernández Espinosa and Gerardo Fulleda León); their heirs who were schooled at the Instituto Superior de Arte, and a newer generation: irreverent, crude, anxious for the change that their strident, imperfect, raw and poetic texts demand, as screams and not merely metaphors for the Nation itself. There are other groups, other longings, other qualities. Many of these stick to well-worn formulas and tired repertoires that contrast with what the more interesting companies in Havana and some provinces have to offer. Like a mirror of the island and its moment, theater takes place in an unresolved tension between longing and discovery, and sometimes sparks fly because of the critical nature of the works. “How will Cuban theater survive in the new moment that lies ahead?” is a question very like “how will the Nation survive?”: inside or outside the myth of the revolution, inside or outside official and alternative performance spaces, inside or outside proven forms or the new ones imposed sometimes too mimetically? Inside or outside this unsettled and unpredictable scene? As this question evolves, all Cubans – those of us who live on the island and those outside – will be main characters.