The Promethean Theater's staging of Nilo Cruz's Two Sisters and a Piano arrives with a pedigree that dates to the world premiere in Coral Gables of Cruz's Anna in the Tropics, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize. It's directed by Margaret M. Ledford, who was production stage manager for the 2002 debut of Anna, and playing the eponymous sisters are actresses who played sisters in "Anna": Deborah L. Sherman, now Promethean's producing artistic director, and Ursula Cataan, then billed as Ursula Freundlich.
This is a talented cast, including Ricky Waugh and Mathew Chapman, under an accomplished director in a play of courage and heartbreak. The results are disappointingly and bafflingly uneven.
The production does well in handling the institutionalized suspicion, personal mistrust and the bartering commercial and psychological endemic to the totalitarian state that long has been Cuba. But too many moments of anger or panic on the part of the state police officers erupt into shouting that's too loud for the 168-seat auditorium.
The setting is the Havana home of sisters Maria Celia, 36, and a writer and dissident whose husband has fled to Sweden, and Sofia, 24, an unmarried pianist. Having been imprisoned two years for Maria Celia's backing of perestroika, they're now on house arrest.
This is 1991, toward the end of the Pan-American Games in Havana and at the start of the Soviet Union's break-up. Into their lives come the state militia guard, in the person of Lt. Portuondo (Ricky Waugh), who is intercepting the letters between Maria Celia and her husband, and a piano tuner (Mathew Chapman).
Two Sisters and a Piano was written a few years before Anna in the Tropics and is infused with the enhanced language that Cruz became known for with the later, award-winning, play. Sofia recalls that when her father left Cuba he told her "not to fall in love, not to get married, because he was going to send for us. I felt my feet stop growing, my bones, my breasts, as if I had frozen in time, because I was saving myself for North America."
The production often sings, and there's nice tech work evocative set and lighting, original music in the style of old Cuban melodies but the eruption of decibels works against it.
Deborah L. Unger & Ursula Cataan
