New Haven Register (Sunday) (New Haven, CT)
‘El Huracan’ forms via Yale, Latinx talents
Rep play shines Sol Project light on storms, forgiveness
Yale Repertory Theatre has long benefited from co-producing shows with top-rate regional theaters. The Sol Project, first-time partners with The Rep for its current world premiere of Charise Castro Smith’s “El Huracan,” is very different from previous collaborators.
Jacob G. Padron, artistic director and co-founder of The Sol Project, described it as a theater initiative seeking to amplify the voices of Latinx writers (“Latinx” is a gender-neutral form denoting Latin American).
“We identify a writer we’d both like to champion, and then we create the production together,” Padron said, referring to The Sol Project and its partnering producing theater. “We really try to be artistic partners.
“The hope is that we’re planting seeds to radically shift the frequency with which Latinx playwrights are produced on a number of visible stages.
“El Huracan,” which officially opens Thursday at University Theatre after less than a week of previews, explores a family dynamic in crisis. Set in Miami, Fla., a conflicted, immigrant family wrestles with revenge and forgiveness amid devastating hurricanes in August of 1992 (Andrew) and 2019 (Penelope). Magic and puppetry are integral to the storytelling.
Smith, who developed her play these past two years with The Sol Project, said that her idea for “El Huracan” first surfaced in her imagination five years ago while watching Shakespeare’s “The Tempest” at American Repertory Theatre in
Cambridge, Mass.
“I started thinking about that play in a way that I hadn’t before,” said Castro Smith, whose husband, Joby Earle, performed in the production. “And I got really interested in the idea of writing a play about forgiveness, specifically forgiveness for something that felt unforgivable. And my grandmother was swirling around in there somewhere. It was mostly those two things together that inspired this play.”
The playwright’s beloved maternal grandmother, who moved her family to Miami from Cuba on the heels of Castro’s revolution, died of Alzheimer’s-related complications while Castro Smith was at Yale School of Drama as an MFA candidate in acting.
“The toll it took on our family was just huge — it was really hard,” she said.
“El Huracan,” directed by Sol co-founder Laurie Woolery and slated to close Oct. 20, employs Christopher Rose (magic design) and James Ortiz (puppet design) on its design team to “re-awaken one’s sense of wonder,” as Castro Smith said.
“I’ve been interested in stage magic for a long time,” said Castro Smith. “I felt that sort of going off of the metaphor (of) Alzheimer’s taking things away and things disappearing, then reappearing in strange ways.
“My grandmother, when she was very sick in the last few weeks of her life, kind of wasn’t talking to any of us, but was having conversations with her sister who had died when my grandmother was a teenager.
“And so, this idea that hidden things come back with this disease, magic felt like a strong metaphor for that,” Castro Smith said.
James Bundy, artist director of Yale Rep and dean of YSD, explained how Yale Rep benefits from the partnership.
“First we get to be a participant in the mission of the Sol Project, which is to bring the work of Latinx writers to wider audiences in the field, which is a wonderful mission,” he said.
“Second of all, we get the benefit of their partnership in the actual production of the play, which gives us access to their expertise and production support.”
“El Huracan,” Bundy said, “is like ‘The Tempest’ in that it’s set in a world of natural turmoil and magic and loss. To some extent, ‘The Tempest’ is a play about revenge and forgiveness, and so is this play. And the question of what do we do about family members who have let us down? And also how do we cope with loss?
“One of the things that’s so timely about the play,” Bundy continued, “is we’re in a period in which the ravages that the natural world can visit upon individuals and families are very much in our face. And who pays the price of natural disasters is an increasingly important question.
“So there is both a family story and a political story in the play,” he said. “And that it’s encoded in a magical and playful theatrical environment is, I think, a real strength of the piece.”
By the time Bundy and his colleagues had the script in hand, Woolery’s fingerprints were in evidence. Since Woolery directed “Imogen Says Nothing” at Yale Rep last year, that was just fine with all concerned. “El Huracan” is like a homecoming for Padron, Castro Smith, Bundy and most of the cast and design team, many of whom are Yalies present and past (even Castro Smith’s husband is a YSD grad).
“So this is one of the joys of working in our environment,” said Bundy, “is that some of the brightest young talents in the field are here as professional students at the same time that they are in training, and we forge these incredibly exciting lasting relationships with them that sometimes pay off in someone like Charise sending us her play.
Bundy said that the production could well mean theatergoers “will get to see things you rarely get to see when you go to the American theater.
“What makes theater exciting is when you see a story arguably about family and forgiveness, but it’s told from a uniquely inventive and evocative perspective that is both culturally specific and theatrically inventive,” Bundy said. “So it isn’t, ‘Oh! This is another play about families!’ It’s a play that is truly unique and surprising and delightful.”