Posted by Margaret on March 31, 192003 at 01:18:02:
Night of the Assassins
The short acting notes at the beginning of the play first draw our attention to Triana’s innovations:
“While these characters play other characters, they must do so with the utmost simplicity and spontaneity. They must not use characterising devices. They are capable of representing the world without any artifice. Bear this in mind for the production’s staging and set. These characters are adults, but exhibit a fading adolescent grace. They are figures in a ruined museum.”
The absence of “characterising devices” and “artifice” and the desire for “utmost simplicity and spontaneity” signal Triana’s break with the conventional dramas deplored by Enrique Buenaventura in “Theatre and Culture.” Among many other issues, the question of “What is performance?”also seems to be at stake in this play. Three characters, a brother and two sisters, inhabit a dramatic space with minimal stage furniture and props. As the notes indicate, the siblings represent themselves and a world of other characters. They act out a multitude of voices and roles in fluid transitions and transformations. (How, though, did the audience capture these shifts in voice if these characters “must not use characterising devices” -- is he saying that there should be no perceptible change in demeanor or gestures or intonation when the actor has shifted into another character? What is he advising against? Could these roles be played by conventionally-trained actors?).
The lyrical and Tennessee Williamesque touch of the “figures in a ruined museum” suggests to me the downfall of the traditional family, that bastion of conventions and conformist values that revolutionary artist sets out to subvert. Perhaps it is also post-revolutionary Cuba looking back triumphantly on pre-revolutionary datedness and decadence. The dramatic space, the attic or the cellar of a family house, is as Cuca says, “a pit. Cockroaches, rats, moths, caterpillars, the whole bloody lot.” It is dark, dirty and dusty and there are cobwebs. It is like the dungeon in a Gothic story. The family home is a place of decay and stagnation and the parents squash any attempt to change the way things are. One reading of the play (several coexist) is that the parents represent the State’s entrenched order and the children (particularly Lalo) represent revolution. The house is a confining prison the children want to break out of. As Lalo says,
“I want to do what I want and feel what I want. But my hands are tied. My feet are tied. My eyes are blinkered. This house is my world. And this house is getting old and dirty and smelly. Mum and Dad are to blame. I’m sorry but that’s how it is. And the worst thing is that they don’t stop a moment to consider whether things shouldn’t be different.”
In this reading, the rebellious Lalo must “kill” his parents or the established system in order to escape this home-as-prison. It is an Oedipal theme which in the context of the Cuban revolution takes on wider meanings.