STAGE REVIEW : ‘FABIOLA’ OPENS AT ENSEMBLE

Whatever else Eduardo Machado has tried to do in “Fabiola,” the middle play of an ambitious trilogy on Cuban life and revolution, he has attempted to dramatize a nation’s upheavals through the prism of a family’s personal cost and turmoil.

It’s the right way to tackle politics through theater, as is quite clear in the production that Thursday launched the Ensemble Studio Theatre’s first season in its new Hollywood quarters (the facility left vacant by the Los Angeles Actors’ Theatre when it became the Los Angeles Theatre Center).

So much of “Fabiola” is on the right track that one wishes stronger direction and a more evenly gifted company could have delivered the punch Machado wrote into the play. It almost does, but more by inference than full realization.

Machado’s “Floating Islands” trilogy has the earmarks of a life work, with “The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa,” the play that precedes “Fabiola,” detailing upper-middle-class life in Cuba, 1928-31--and “Broken Eggs,” the piece that follows it, dwelling on maladjustment in Los Angeles in 1979.

It is also important work, not just because it is written well, but also because few plays, if any, have dealt with the immigrant experience of the mid-20th Century and none--to my knowledge--with the culture shock of pampered, often arrogant upper-middle-class Latinos suddenly plunged into an American environment that sees them all as laborers and domestics.

Of the three plays, “Fabiola” is the one that most directly deals with turning points in Cuban politics, such as the fall of Batista, Castro’s accession to power, the disillusionment and the persecutions that followed the ill-fated events of the Bay of Pigs.

Tracing this through the eyes of members of the Marquez family, their servants, their bickering, lends “Fabiola” the true coin of paradox. Nothing here is entirely logical, any more than it is in families or in life. It makes for a funny, sometimes absurd, often melodramatic, but always interesting veracity.

To their credit, co-directors Linda Callahan and Guy Giarrizzo have not flinched at Machado’s built-in contradictions or backed away from the purplish flamboyance of the incestuous homosexual relationship (between brothers) at the core of this play.

The opening image is a startling one, beautifully rendered here (more than a little thanks to Ilya Mindlin’s lighting, Chuck O’Connor’s excellent multilevel set, at once complex and simple, and Claudia Brown’s costumes, apt in terms of both period and place).

It is a family seance trying to reach out to Fabiola, dead wife of one of the boys. Her body has disappeared from the family vault, but her presence is in the house. When the body’s finally found, it refuses (for a while) to decompose. She remains, as they say, intact, leading to all sorts of metaphysical ironies and conjecture.

There’s a reason why Fabiola is the play’s title: She’s a symbol of cosmic reproach--the eye of the hurricane, the specter of sin, anguish, innocence, revolt, of the ailing, trampled Cuba itself. And she won’t leave this family alone.

That much is clear in this staging. Where it stumbles is in its surprising lack of urgency, some dubious casting and such plain old technical misjudgments as poorly engineered bridges between scenes. (How much more vigorous it would be, for instance, if the political speech at the start of Scene 2, were delivered during the scene change instead of after it.)

While some of the acting is good (notably Kathleen Garrett as daughter-in-law Sonia; Kay Tornborg as the mother Cusa; Connie Ramirez as daughter Miriam and Michael Sandoval as the crucial son Pedro, Fabiola’s widower), too much of it is weak or self-conscious, which undermines the rest. And the casting of a black man as one of the milicianos would not necessarily be wrong if only robert Dino Shorte would not insist on playing it like an American GI instead of a Cuban revolutionary.

That sort of lapse spoils the goods, and splitting the direction may have had plenty to do with too many things falling through the cracks. The concept is accurately in place, the level of energy is not.

Except for a bit of gratuitous homosexual byplay between Pedro and a miliciano that borders on the ludicrous and has got to go, “Fabiola” is a powerful piece. It should play strong, buoyant and vivid, not tame--not as a play you read or guess at between the lines of the production.

Performances at 1089 N. Oxford Ave. run Thursdays through Sundays at 8 p.m., until Nov. 10. (466-2916).