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THEATER REVIEW

Promethean plays Cruz's other sister act

Nilo Cruz touches on the personal and the political in a play about two sisters under house arrest.

BY CHRISTINE DOLEN

cdolen@MiamiHerald.com

Nilo Cruz wrote Two Sisters and a Piano in 1999, just a few years before Anna in the Tropics transformed him from much-produced regional playwright into the first Latino winner of the Pulitzer Prize for drama.

In the world premiere production of Anna at New Theatre in 2002 were actors Deborah L. Sherman and Ursula Cataan. The two played sisters: Sherman the restless, married elder sister Conchita; Cataan (then using the name Ursula Freundlich), the romantic younger sister Marela.

The two have reunited on stage, again playing siblings, for the Promethean Theatre's new production of Two Sisters and a Piano. In the audience at the small Davie theater during opening weekend was Cruz, looking happy and declaring he was pleased with the production during a talk-back after Saturday night's performance.

And Promethean has done well -- mostly -- by Cruz's beautifully written tale of waiting, despair and passion.

Set in Cuba in 1991 and inspired by the real-life experience of an imprisoned poet, Two Sisters and a Piano tells the story of a pair of sisters under house arrest. María Celia (Sherman), the elder, is a married writer whose husband is in Europe, trying to bring attention to her case to get her out of Cuba. Sofia (Cataan), the much younger sister, is a gifted pianist growing increasingly restless in her forced confinement.

Men do enter the world of the sisters' once-elegant, now-decaying family home. They come first as soldiers searching for letters that might provide evidence of ongoing anti-government activity, roughing the place up and doing their best to terrify the sisters. Then, a new approach: Lieutenant Portuondo (Ricky Waugh) appears, offering to read passages of her husband's intercepted letters if María Celia will share her stories with him.

Is he an unlikely fan? A spy? The clever minder of a political prisoner? Two Sisters, which also features Mathew Chapman as a piano tuner who makes the love-starved Sofia glow, burrows to the heart of each person's longing.

Director Margaret M. Ledford and her design team -- Daniel Gelbmann, who did the rundown set; lighting designer Robert Coward; Ananda Keator, whose array of costumes includes a particularly striking party dress for María Celia; and sound designer-composer Matt Corey -- have conjured a world that is both nostalgically comforting and claustrophobic.

Chapman is very funny in his brief turn as the piano tuner, a guy who is drawn to but afraid of getting involved with a needy young woman under house arrest. With artful ease, Cataan takes the play's most convincing journey, from joy-filled girl to a young woman shattered by the reality of her life.

There is a crucial imbalance, however, between Waugh's lieutenant and Sherman's María Celia. Waugh finds all the mystery, manipulation and passion Cruz has written into Portuondo's character, but he has to persuade us that he truly wants to risk everything for a politically marked woman. Waugh does his part, but Sherman plays María Celia as tight-lipped, jittery, nearly unapproachable, so much so that when she does finally respond to her soldier-captor, you may find yourself thinking, ``Where did that come from?''