For award-winning playwright Nilo Cruz, book bannings in Republican Florida and censorship in communist Cuba have much in common.
The state has been wracked by Gov. Ron DeSantis’ war against “wokeness,” which has led to books about Black and LGBTQ+ history and culture being taken off school library shelves – and elicited protests from parents and students in response.
(Miami New Drama)
Cruz even felt the heat when Miami-Dade County Public Schools nearly prevented students from taking field trips to see him direct his own play, “Anna in the Tropics,” at the Colony Theatre in Miami Beach.
“They didn’t want their students to come see the play because there were some sexually graphic scenes,” he said.
The 2002 play about Cuban cigar workers in Tampa reading Tolstoy’s “Anna Karenina” earned Cruz the Pulitzer Prize for drama, making him the first Latino to win the prestigious award.
Although the school board relented, allowing students to see the play after a backlash from the community, Cruz and Michel Hausmann, artistic director and co-founder of Miami New Drama, didn’t forget the incident. When it came time to follow up the play, they decided to double down on politics with a play from earlier in Cruz’s career, 1998’s “Two Sisters and a Piano.”
“There’s this climate right now in the state of Florida with the banning of books. And ‘Two Sisters and a Piano’ is all about censorship,” Cruz said. “So Michel thought that we should revisit this play, which I wrote before ‘Anna in the Tropics.’”
(Camilo Buitrago Gil)
Nilo Cruz
“Two Sisters and a Piano” tells the story of titular sisters Maria Celia (Thais Menendez) and Sofia (Stephanie Machado), who are under house arrest after the former’s dissident writings earn the ire of authorities. Harassed constantly by police, especially the imperious Lt. Portuondo (Maurice Compte), their only comfort is the music they play on their piano, one of the last family heirlooms the communists haven’t confiscated.
Set in 1991, just after the fall of the Soviet Union cast Cuba’s economy into ruin, the play was last staged in Miami in 2019, in a Spanish-language production at the Miami-Dade County Auditorium’s On.Stage Black Box Theatre. In real life, Cruz was in Morocco during the Soviet collapse, and the trickle of information he could access partially inspired the play’s premise.
“The first thing that came to my mind was, ‘What is going to happen to Cuba now?’ And so that that sort of moment in time sort of made its way to the play as well,” he recalled. “Because I was in the middle of the desert, I had no news. [And] these women are under house arrest, they have no news whatsoever.”
Cruz also based the Maria Celia character on real-life author Maria Elena Cruz Varela, who had been part of a group of dissident writers called Criterio Alternativo. After they circulated an open letter to Fidel Castro demanding Perestroika-style economic liberalization, the authorities reacted violently.
“A group of brigadiers came to her house, dragged her out into the middle of the street, and forced her to eat her manifesto. And then she was in prison for two years, and then was under house arrest,” he said. “So, when I read that story, it stayed with me and I was very intrigued by it. And I sort of wanted to write my own version of the story.”
The authorities in the play are personified in the lieutenant, who visits the apartment to read Maria Celia the letters they’ve confiscated from her exiled husband. He soon finds himself sympathizing with the caged author, and the dynamic between the two soon blooms into a dangerous romance.
“It’s interesting, his relationship with Maria Celia,” said Maurice Compte, who plays the lieutenant. “It’s almost like she offers a different view to the world that he really wants to understand, but he can’t quite seem to wrap his head around because he’s been indoctrinated in a certain way.”
Compte, known for roles in “Breaking Bad” and “End of Watch,” was born in New Orleans and raised in Miami. His father is Roman Compte, who served as general manager of the infamous Mutiny Hotel in Coconut Grove, a major meeting point for cocaine traffickers during the drug wars of the 1970s and ’80s. The elder Compte’s experience at the Mutiny will be dramatized next year in “Hotel Cocaine,” a TV drama premiering on the MGM+ cable network, to which his son is attached as co-executive producer.
As someone with deep roots in the Cuban community, Compte says he hopes to draw from his own experience growing up among exiles in playing the part of the lieutenant.
“I wanted to be able to take a fresh look based on my own experience growing up in the Cuban community, [the] exile community, and understanding what the feeling is of a person like the lieutenant who lives on that island,” he said.
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(Arca Images)
A scene from the 2019 Spanish-language production of “Two Sisters and a Piano” in the On.Stage Black Box Theatre at Miami-Dade County Auditorium.
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(Courtesy of Morgan Sophia Photography)
Playwright Nilo Cruz gives direction to actors Gabriell Salgado and Stephanie Machado (at piano), Thais Mendendez and Maurice Compte in Miami New Drama’s “Two Sisters and a Piano.”