Two Sisters and a Piano


Two Sisters and a Piano
From Dramatists Play Service: "Set in 1991 [in Castro's Cuba] this play portrays two sisters, Maria Celia, a novelist, and Sofia, a pianist, serving time under house arrest. Passion infiltrates politics when a lieutenant assigned to their case becomes infatuated with Maria Celia, whose literature he has been reading."
A review in Variety of a production of Two Sisters and a Piano at the Public Theater in New York City in the year 2000 contains this line, “The play’s overall impact is ultimately slender.” I saw the final performance of Theater Schmeater’s version tonight and my response to Variety is: What?
How about the death of hope? That’s not slender! And what about: in the midst of and despite that death, the two sisters’ love endures? Also not slender!
The playwright, Nilo Cruz has said his intention was to provide a “many-layered” experience including “humor, familial bonding, love through adversity and how desire is affected by restrictive governments that exist within the play.” It was all there.
If you want to get political, among the many layers, the play is a counterpoint to socialist realism (if anyone is still talking about that) and manages to do it without being reactionary. The human toll the state exacts on the targets, the pawns and the bystanders is what you feel the most.
This is the second play I’ve seen recently where high-profile publications have dismissed the shows as fluff. The other was Seven Homeless Mammoths Wander New England, which the New York Times skewered for being not “deep.” What the two plays have in common is that the leads – two in Sisters and three in Mammoths – are all women.
Of course, the productions reviewed by Variety and the NYT are not the ones I saw. But still it’s weird.
Sisters ended its run at the Schmee tonight, so you can’t go see it. But it was good!
Pictured: the duly claustrophobic set.

Originally published in slightly different form on my Facebook page on October 7, 2018

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