By Michael Kuchwara. .c The Associated Press
NEW YORK, 16 (AP) - Despite the stark political reality underlining "Two Sisters and a Piano,'' there is a haunting, otherworldly quality to Nilo Cruz's provocative new play about siblings under house arrest in Castro's Cuba.
This ethereal drama, on view off-Broadway at the Public Theater, deals in dreams and longing, attempts by older sister Maria Celia and the younger Sofia to find a bit of happiness in the flirtatious visits of two men.
Maria Celia finds a lusty attraction to Lt. Portuondo, a military man who comes to read letters to her. They are confiscated correspondence from her political activist husband, now living in exile in Europe. It's a seductive device that brings the two willful people together, at least for a
moment or two.
The impulsive, almost childlike Sofia has other designs. She desires Victor Manuel, a tuner come to work on the piano in the women's decaying ancestral home. Their relationship is playful, sweetly romantic, particularly on the part of Sofia, an overly romantic girl.
Sofia is portrayed with a beguiling innocence by Daphne Rubin-Vega, best-known as Mimi in the original cast of ``Rent.'' Rubin-Vega has matured into a fine actress, displaying a vulnerability here that immediately gets the audience on her side.
Adriana Sevan plays Maria Celia with a fierce intelligence, getting across that the woman is a successful writer who has been stymied by years of incarceration, first in prison and then in her own home.
The men are less skillfully drawn, particularly the amorous military man, a role that also suffers from Paul Caldero's wooden performance. Gary Perez has more luck as the likable piano tuner.
Cruz's play saves its best moments for the interaction between the two sisters. Their confinement is artfully drawn, an imprisonment of the mind as well as the body. It's a fact underscored by designer Robert Brill's simple, almost impressionistic setting - the stuff of nightmares as well as
pleasant reveries.
The women bicker and even fight, but, for the most part, Cruz's language approximates the poetic, conveying a sense of dreaminess that director Loretta Greco captures in her delicate spinning of the story.
In one lovely moment in the second act, these two women dance together in an almost defiant stance against their captors. It is a reminder that the chains by which they are held can almost always be broken by imagination.
AP-NY-02-16-00 1752EST
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