Sisterly squabbles, family tragedy and political history share the stage with three actresses in A Bearded Lover, a play getting a worthy world premiere at The Promethean Theater in South Florida.
The setting is specific: 3 a.m. in a house in a small town in Cuba on July 26, 1953. Autocrat Fulgencio Batista is back in power, the dashing Fidel Castro is on the move, and three grown sisters apparently aren't hanging around. They're putting their things in order an annual event in recent years as they prepare to leave the home they've shared most of their lives. Two sisters want to stop by a Catholic street festival; the other has a different idea.
The house fire that killed their parents when they were young left the sisters scarred and maimed. Delores, the eldest and most badly scarred by the fire, needs a cane to get around. Lucia (Gladys Ramirez), the youngest, uses a pair of too-short crutches to deal with a mangled leg. The middle sister, Ines (Ursula Cataan), occasionally complains of arthritis, sometimes uses a cane and almost always assesses the sisters' lives and prospects with unleavened cruelty. Clearly they're getting on each other's nerves. As Delores defends hiding a treasured baby blanket from the others: "Threads become worn under too much handling."
This is a very good play by Juan C. Sanchez, Promethean's playwright in residence.
It's spiked with secrets uncovered, a touch of melodrama and with many laughs especially in the first act.
Under the direction of Margaret M. Ledford, the satisfying result is one of contrasts and subtleties. The sisters are clothed in ankle-length black dresses, but the setting is a room painted in vibrant colors: a saturated turquoise on the back wall and a heathered red on a side wall. The red wall has three wall hangings, a crucifix flanked by two seeming tchotchkes: on the audience's right, a horseshoe, as if for luck; on the left, a nonspecific, wrought iron sculpture, basically a tall rectangle with an arched top and a swirl inside. But the wrought iron suggests the Greek letter alpha and the horseshoe approximates the Greek omega in Christian gospel, the beginning and the end. That may not be the intention of the set design, but it reflects A Bearded Lover as a tale of beginnings and endings. And if the wall hangings aren't intended to be Greek letters, viewing them that way nevertheless underscores an important plot point: Ines dreams of making a connection with Poseidon, the bearded Greek god of the sea.
As middle sister Ines, Ursula Cataan has an almost thankless job, freighted with a bossy, humorless, Poseidon-obsessed character. Big sister Delores, played by Deborah
L. Sherman, is a self-described poetess, and Sherman gets laughs throughout as Delores interrupts conversations to jot down a phrase or worry over a preposition.
As Lucia, the youngest, Gladys Ramirez has a taxing physical task -- having to bend for the short crutches whenever Lucia has to pull her bad leg across the stage -- and earns the longest laugh of the play when Lucia likens Delores' new best friend, the unseen Rosario, to a snorting pig. This isn't a few one-liners, this is a comedic gem, a full-on assault delivered from a chair.
The production manages a fine line between comedy and tragedy. The ending has real power, but the second-act seriousness includes an appropriately awkward wrestle -- with laugh line tossed in that doesn't detract a bit from what's to come.
