Nilo Cruz’s “Two Sisters and a Piano” defies Greek drama.
Much like the characters in the play “Waiting for Godot,” the sisters in the Cruz play wait for the deus ex machina or the “god out of a machine” to come and rescue them from their predicament, but it never happens. The question remains: Will either the father of the two sisters or the husband of one ever come and get them out of communist-run Cuba?
The two women find that all men appear to be their enemies and that they can trust only each other. The two sisters are under house arrest in Cuba because of their subversive activities and particularly because of the subversive writings of Maria Celia (Cheyenne Autumn Hernandez). Their mail is confiscated and examined by the government officials, and the intrusive government officials also take inventory of their property.
To add to their misery, the domineering Lieutenant Portuondo (Dashawn Anton Robert Clark) hounds Maria. The personification of sexism and hypocrisy, Portuondo will not even allow Maria to touch her husband’s letters, and although he is a communist who supposedly doesn’t believe in private ownership, he treats the two women as though he owns them.
In fact, a strong point about the play is that through Portuondo’s character, one can see the hypocrisy of communism: For all of its class-free and pro-feminism tenets, applied communism usually amounts to rule by dictator or bureaucracy. It’s tragic that a beautiful philosophy like communism cannot be applied to reality because of the nature of humanity.
The downside to the play raises immigration issues unless one can choose to ignore them, and the play is a little too melodramatic in its message that the two sisters can only be saved through escaping their own country and going to another country.
Unfortunately, the play stresses the point too hard that the viewer is supposed to feel sorry for these artistic, suffering sisters. The viewer naturally thinks this: Why can’t countries like Mexico and Cuba work out their own problems instead of expecting countries like the U.S. to clog up its systems with infinite herds of desperate people?
Nevertheless, it’s possible for the viewer to just enjoy the story of the play and the Bakersfield College production of the Cruz play, directed by Kimberly Chin, opens vividly enough with the two sisters being brutalized by the militia police (Edward Nathan Smith, Yazid Alawgarey, Richie Perez and Linda Castro, in addition to Dashawn Anton Robert Clark).
The actors played the nasty, sneering militia police with such ruthless perfection, I sat aghast in my seat.
Hernandez and Laura Lopez, who played Maria’s piano prodigy sister Sofia, appeared helpless and wildly terrified. Sofia’s terror seems imbued into her touching piano rendition of Pachebel’s “Canon,” which comes at the behest of the sisters’ mocking captors; Lopez somehow melded Sofia’s terror into the music.
However, the play is not all about terror; there are wistful moments when the incarcerated sisters reminisce about their deceased mother who “worked prayers into the soles of shoes” and their summers spent near the ocean.
There are humorous moments when the sisters speak about the deplorable conditions of Cuba. Sofia comments about the absence of certain products in Cuban stores noting that one often uses “Milk of Magnesia for deodorant and beet juice for lipstick.” Furthermore, an incident involving a visiting piano tuner caught by Sofia with his pants down in front of Maria because Maria suspects that he has hidden a government wire in his underpants proved to be hilarious.
Hernandez and Lopez convey the humor, desperation and longings of the two stir-crazy, man-hungry, government-distrusting sisters.
Clark as the anal retentive lieutenant pursuing Maria conveys Lieutenant Portuondo’s unreasonable manly calm and conviction that he is in the moral right by being the jailer and owner of the two women.