A Passage through exile life Play unique to Cuban American experience

It is also Passage, a new theater-of-testimony play by former Miamian Loretta Greco, a window on the Cuban-American experience unlike any other. For South Florida's English-language theater, it may well become a rite of passage: A serious meditation on the exiles who have transformed their new homeland, as well as those left behind.

Passage is having its world premiere this week at Miami Beach's intimate Area Stage, with its first two previews Tuesday for invited audiences from the American Theatre Critics' Association's national convention on the Beach. It is significant for several reasons, not the least of which is how rarely anything but comic treatments of the Cuban exile community are staged here.

Yes, there are mythic, moving, often difficult plays by such Cuban-American writers as Nilo Cruz, Eduardo Machado and María Irene Fornés. But the long-lingering after-effects of the fierce 1986 protests against plans to produce Coser y cantar by Dolores Prida, a Cuban exile who, some argued, was sympathetic to Fidel Castro, have made many South Florida producers skittish about staging such plays -- even though artistic directors like Area's John Rodaz and New Theater's Rafael de Acha are themselves Cuban-American, as are many of the actors and designers who work at these artistically admirable small companies.

Passage had its roots in a Tropic Magazine cover story about Cuban rafters that Greco happened to see on a trip home nearly three years ago.

A 1978 Herald Silver Knight winner in drama, the 35-year-old Greco went to Southwest Miami High School (and later taught drama there), Loyola University, and then earned a master's degree in directing at Catholic University. Currently staging A Park in Our House by Nilo Cruz (another ex-Miamian) for the New York Theatre Workshop (as the company's followup to the red-hot, Pulitzer Prize-winning Rent), Greco has been associate artistic director of both New Jersey's McCarter Theatre (where she worked with such documentary-style playwrights as Emily Mann and Anna Deavere Smith) and the Cleveland Play House.

Struck by Tropic

When she read that Tropic piece, Greco said, ``the story under my nose struck me: what people were doing to get here, and how dangerous it was. . .I realized there was something very dramatic about this. And that we'd come anesthetized to refugees, eliminating the realization that we almost all came from boat people.'' And so began her journey into a community ``that had an enormous amount to do with shaping who I am.''

Greco took a tape recorder, and sometimes a translator, and began talking. And talking and talking. Since beginning the project that became Passage, she taped more than 80 interviews and talked to twice that many people. Her conversations took place in Miami, Miami Beach, on Stock Island, in Key West, in New Jersey and New York -- and in Cuba itself.

Thanks to a $10,000 fellowship from the Princess Grace Foundation, Greco went to Havana, Cojímar and Caibarién for two weeks in December 1994 and January 1995.

``Cuban friends said I was a traitor for setting foot on the island,'' she said, but she felt it was vital to ``see what the situation is, where these people came from and why some stay. I wanted to try to get around the propaganda on both sides.''

Through workshops at the McCarter and the New York Theatre Workshop, Greco honed her material, editing conversations, sometimes combining characters or changing names to protect those who spoke to her. She chose her form and her venue for the premiere, she said, ``Because I want people who aren't Spanish-speaking to know these people. And it's inevitable that it should premiere in Miami. It belongs to Miami. It's a piece of Miami.''

Back to roots

Rodaz, who took over direction of Passage when the Park in Our House opening was changed due to the hasty departure of Rent for Broadway, is a 37-year-old Cuban-American theater artist who has found ``the testimonials I've heard since I was two years old'' taking on new meaning as he works on the play.

``This is the first play about Cuba I've directed, and it's taken me back to my roots,'' said Rodaz, whose birth name is Juan Carlos Rodríguez. He was renamed ``John'' by the nun who was his third-grade teacher, and he took the name ``Rodaz'' after high school when a friend told him his last name would stereotype him as a Hispanic actor.

``The duality [of being Cuban and American] never leaves you. This has touched a lot of emotion, acutely. I feel more of a responsibility. This is one of the first plays I know of to reach out to the English-speaking audience. It's a very important play. Like all good theater, it has a universal quality: People in crisis, how they survive, how the spirit can rise above it all.''

The cast of Passage is predominantly Cuban-American: Carlos Orizondo, Emiliano Diez, Erik Fabregat, Nattacha Amador, Iris Delgado, plus non-Cubans Scott Genn and Luz Marabel. Orizondo, born 30 years ago in Chicago to Cuban parents, has already felt profoundly changed by Passage.

``I spent most of my career trying not to be stereotyped as a Hispanic actor,'' he said. ``Now, I feel the spirits calling me, as if this were meant to be. There are a lot of unheard playwrights who should be done here, and there's such a wide audience for them. This could be another significant step in the incredible growth of the theater community over the past five years.''