Cruz Control

Crack open a playwright whose career has just gotten under way and you'll more than likely find a dreamer wrestling with the ghost of Anton Chekhov. American theater festivals are littered with reworkings of The Three Sisters, the Chekhov classic in which characters saddled with longing speak of the day they'll leave their provincial drawing rooms and reinvent themselves in Moscow. Perhaps only a Cuban-American playwright raised in the shadow of the Soviet Union could devise as charming a reversal of Chekhov's dilemma as the one presented in A Park in Our House. In his intriguing new play, now receiving its South Florida premiere at Manalapan's Florida Stage, Cuban-born, Miami-schooled Nilo Cruz puts his characters in a sitting room from which they know there's no route to Moscow. And yet he gives them a ticket to transcendence. When this particular Cuban family can't go to Russia, Cruz brings Moscow to them.

Specifically, he delivers one Dimitri Yefimovich Khrushchov, a botanist from the Soviet Union who comes to stay with the Bustamante family as part of a government-sponsored cultural exchange. Dimitri actually lives in a small village outside Moscow, but as far as the Bustamantes are concerned, he may as well be Nikita Khruschev's first cousin. Cruz's version of the Chekhov prototype is charming; even more so is the evocative staging the play gets by guest director Benny Sato Ambush. Less satisfying, however, is the playwright's attempt to nail down the situation's dramatic possibilities. In this case, the tale of the Communist Who Came to Dinner leaves us hungering for more.

Set in Havana in 1970 (the year the playwright, then age ten, left the island with his family and landed in Miami), A Park in Our House centers on an extended family group that includes Hilario and Ofelina, a middle-aged couple who have taken in their teenage niece Pilar and nephew Camilo, who is mute. The youngsters' cousin Fifo, an amateur photographer who cuts sugar cane for a living, also lives with them.

Like most families, this one struggles against the boredom of daily life, a life that is particularly harsh in Castro's Cuba, where necessities like soap are in short supply. The title refers, on one level, to the lap-size model of a city park that Hilario has constructed as a diversion. A tiny symbol of civic utopia and an emblem of the hopes and dreams of each family member (one gives it a rather salacious connotation), the notion of the park also underscores the power of Dimitri's arrival, as though he were providing the spiritual regeneration the family desperately craves.

At one point Dimitri brings armfuls of herbs and medicinal flowers into the house, the better to help Ofelina repair the dry bed of her marriage. She seduces the distracted Hilario with jasmine, but not before Dimitri is bedded by Pilar. (The issue of Pilar's age is somewhat confusing here. Actress Greta Sanchez Ramirez appears to be about thirteen years old, making her advances toward the older man a tad unsettling.) As for Dimitri, he can't conceive of the importance the family places on his visit. He confesses that he had originally wanted to go to Brazil to study tropical plants; he's in Cuba only because, after years of waiting for a visa, he was assigned to Havana.

Much like Dimitri, I couldn't quite grasp what Cruz had in mind for his characters in A Park in Our House. On one hand, some of the play's power lies in the notion that their struggles aren't completely spelled out. Working with an impressionistic palette, Cruz offers a landscape of unfettered human emotions, ranging from Camilo's muteness to Ofelina's dream of growing huge quantities of hair. At times, these folks don't just want to go to the fabled Moscow; they want to leave their bodies. But for the most part, the symbols in the play never make a statement; they are simply vague and unconnected. The effect is like watching someone else's dream.

As dramatic characters go, the Bustamantes are a strange bunch. Cruz dilutes our ability to get close to them by making them all quite distant from each other. Husband and wife Hilario and Ofelina have the best-defined connection and thus the most recognizable conflict as ill-matched partners. The kids are orphans, and their emotional relationships with aunt and uncle are attenuated. As for cousin Fifo, he seems more like a convenient plot device than someone dramatically necessary to the story. He's well used by the director, however, who stages a spunky pantomime in which Fifo mournfully pores over a photo album. As he holds up each snapshot, the other characters strike poses that illustrate indelible moments of family history that remain otherwise unexplored.