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Veteran
Cuban American playwright Eduardo Machado
gives the exile community tough love i86g
By Christine Dolen, [emailprotected].
Posted on Sun, Dec. 14, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
NEW YORK - Like so many Cubans whose lives
were forever altered by Fidel Castro's revolution,
Eduardo Machado has spent years contemplating
his fractured homeland.
In 2001, he explored one side of the schism
between Cubans who left and those who stayed
in Havana Is Waiting, a play about a gay
Cuban-American who returns to visit the
land he left as a child, much as Machado
has done a number of times.
In The Cook, his powerful new play at the
Off-Broadway INTAR 53 Theater, he writes
from the perspective of those who did not
or could not leave Cuba. His writing, as
always, is political and unflinching, rich
in its character portraits, rough on certain
Cuban exiles. Though it was funded in part
with a prestigious AT&T OnStage grant,
it is not, he believes, a play that could
be done in Miami.
''I went to Cuba two summers ago because
I wanted to write a play in Cuba,'' says
Machado over breakfast at the Edison Hotel's
bustling coffee shop, a theater district
hangout immortalized by Neil Simon in the
play 45 Seconds from Broadway.
"I thought I'd capture the rhythms
of the language in a way I hadn't. I wanted
to write a play about the prostitutes and
the economics of the country. But I was
bored stiff.''
Inspiration hit when he started going to
a paladar, a home-based restaurant where
tourists pay in dollars, and began talking
to the 73-year-old cook, a woman named Gladys.
He noticed a photograph of a blond woman
on the wall, and Gladys told him, ''She
used to live here.'' Later, the cook called
to tell Machado, "I'm making you a
plate of tamales. It's our only indigenous
food. I'm bringing them to you because I
know you love this country.''
INTO THE KITCHEN
A cook named Gladys, a departed upper-class
blond, the paladar, tamales -- all are in
The Cook, a play that time-travels from
1958 to 1972 to 1997 without leaving the
kitchen of a mansion in Havana's El Vedado
district.
The title character is played by Zabryna
Guevara, a simultaneously stalwart and glowing
woman who busily cooks throughout the play.
In the first scene, she is busily whipping
up appetizers and readying a Baked Alaska
dessert for the guests at a posh New Year's
Eve party on the last night of 1958, the
night that Fulgencio Batista will flee and
Castro will change everyone's lives.
Gladys' elegant employer, Adria (Maggie
Bofill), nervously awaits her tardy husband.
She reminisces with Gladys, who began working
for the family at 13, and shares the wondrous
news that she's pregnant. But when the political
turmoil of that New Year's Eve becomes clear,
she exacts a promise: Gladys and her husband
Carlos (Jason Madera) will stay in the mansion
and watch over it until Adria can return
from what she's certain will be just a few
months of exile.
Those months stretch into decades, but
Gladys faithfully keeps her promise, despite
no communication from Adria. Carlos becomes
a low-level Communist party official, and
because of his connections, Gladys is able
to keep the house from being carved into
apartments. For years, she resists wearing
the clothing Adria left behind, then relents.
She is still waiting, using her cooking
skills to run a paladar, when Adria's look-alike
daughter Lourdes (also played by Bofill)
arrives to play the ugly Cuban-American.
TOO HOT TO HANDLE
It is in this final scene that The Cook
becomes incendiary, undoubtedly too hot
for many in Miami to handle. The audience
shares Gladys' perspective and her shock
at this woman who looks back in anger at
her exiled mother's losses. Extremes of
blame, bitterness, cultural insults and
racism, a mixture of her mother's sentiments
and her own, all spew from Lourdes. Gladys
is blindsided and we, having come to know
her as a principled person who has survived
one loss after another, recoil right along
with her.
It's that difference in perspective that
got to director Michael John Garcs,
who directed Havana Is Waiting Off-Broadway
and Machado's Once Removed last spring at
the Coconut Grove Playhouse. When Machado
first gave him a copy of The Cook to read,
Garcs was calling the playwright,
asking to direct it, by the time Machado
got home.
Garcs has given the play the enhancements
of environmental theater, redecorating INTAR's
small space so that even the outer lobby
looks like a room in the mansion, having
actors circulate with trays of small Cuban
sandwiches and tapas before the show, with
potent dark rum to savor at intermission.
''I've never directed a play quite like
this,'' says Garcs, whose relatives
include Cubans, Colombians and Americans.
"It makes me think about my family
in Cuba. My grandfather had four siblings,
and one brother who came to Miami in 1960
or '61 didn't like it, so he went back.
I finally met my cousins in Cuba in the
1990s.''
Machado's purpose in writing The Cook was
not to inflame a group that is, at one point
in the play, called ''the Miami mafia.''
Having grown up in California after briefly
staying with relatives in Hialeah when he
came to the United States on a Pedro Pan
flight, Machado has always been wary of
Miami's more militant Cuban-Americans, though
he has many relatives in the area.
Instead, he wanted to look at Cuba through
different eyes.
''If you go to Cuba, and take all the politics
out, and deal with people as people, you
see they didn't have the means to leave
or that they decided they didn't want to
be foreigners,'' he says. "I love the
play, and I love the production of the play.''
Christine Dolen is The Herald's theater
critic.
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