‘AZUL’ A POETIC MYSTERY ABOUT LOVE, MIGRATION
There’s a reason the scenery for C. Quintana’s play “Azul,” which opened in its West Coast premiere Saturday at Diversionary Theatre in San Diego, has a pastel-colored dreamscape look.
The romanticized beach cottage and pretty painted sea waves designed by Samantha Rojales represents an idealized version of the Cuba that the character Yadra left behind when she immigrated to New York in the 1960s. Now, Yadra sees Cuba only in snatches of happy memories as she slips into the fog of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. The idyllic scenery also represents the happy ending that Yadra’s lesbian daughter, Zelia, wants to imagine about what happened to her great aunt Nena, who chose to stay behind in Cuba to be with her married inamorata, Antonia.
In the aftermath of the Cuban revolution, Fidel Castro’s regime ruthlessly persecuted its LGBTQ population. People were imprisoned, lost their livelihoods and some were sent to re-education camps. Nena’s love for Antonia, despite the dangers it posed for them both, was worth the risk of staying in Cuba.
“Azul” is a mystery play where Nena’s story is never fully resolved. One scene near the end of the play takes place in modern-day Cuba and much of the dialogue is in Spanish — a language Zelia does not speak — so she is left, along with the non-Spanish-speaking audience, to decide for herself what happened to Nena in Cuba. Zelia creates her own version of that love story and the audience can decide for themselves what is real and what’s imagined.
Maria Patrice Amon poetically directs the wellcast production, which features a lovely, original Latin music score performed
by singer-guitarist Diana Cervera.
Zuleyma Guevara gives a moving and standout performance as Yadra, a psychiatrist who has secretly closed her medical practice as her disease advances without telling anyone. Sofia Sassone plays her American-born daughter Zelia as high-strung and prone to flights of hope, anger and melancholy. Olivia Espinosa is warm and grounded as Loré, Zelia’s wife, who provides her partner with stability and balance. In the Cuba scenes, Sassone and Espinosa play lovers Nena and Antonia, respectively, and Guevara plays an elderly Cuban woman named Ester.
The production features costumes by Faith A. James, tropically colored lighting by Winston G. Limauge and sound by Andrew Gutierrez. While some audience members may feel lost in the one scene where two characters speak in Spanish, that was the playwright’s intentional choice. Yadra’s memories are veiled by Alzheimer’s and Zelia’s discoveries are obscured by language and the passage of time. This creative use of storytelling gives audience members the same challenge as the characters — to find their own happy ending.