Addressing a Cultural Chasm

After a photo session outside the Los Angeles Theatre Center, where his new play, “A Burning Beach,” is now in previews, Eduardo Machado let his guest know that he wasn’t going to assume the formal posture of an important man of the theater. As one of the most acclaimed Latino playwrights in the U.S., he had every right to.

But no. With a cigarette in one hand, Machado smiled softly, plunked down in a chair and loosened up his collar. “Posing for photos makes me tense,” he said. He just wanted to relax now.

Relaxed, though, hardly describes Machado’s work, which fervently echoes his Cuban origins and a broad influence of voices from Latin and North America.

Machado’s casually mild manner doesn’t begin to hint at his ferocious output: 10 plays, his translation of Venezuelan playwright Jose Ignacio Cabrujas’ “The Day You’ll Love Me” (ending Sunday at Taper, Too), and such in-the-works projects as the libretto for a new musical, “Cabaret Bambu,” and another musical for what Machado calls his favorite theater home in New York, Repertorio Espanol.

Machado, who is 35, said he has felt little encouragement from the Anglo-run regional theaters, which he claims have generally shunned his work. He understandably likes calling Los Angeles “a haven”--he is the first playwright ever to be represented simultaneously at both the Taper and LATC--yet, in addition to the two current shows, only “Fabiola” and a one-act have played here (“not even ‘Broken Eggs,’ and it’s all about L.A.!”).

So, like fellow Angeleno playwright David Henry Hwang, Machado had to go to New York to establish his reputation. For the Chinese-American or the Latino artist, it’s symptomatic, Machado believes, of a cultural chasm in America that intrigues and--in his own calm, cool way--angers him.

“This is perfectly embodied in ‘Burning Beach.’ Constance (Ofelia’s and Marta’s American friend) has a traditional through-line as a character because she’s a capitalist: She knows what she wants, and she gets it. Now every theater wants people with clear through-lines, but it’s an Anglo, capitalist conception. Latin people don’t necessarily fit that mold, and that’s why Latin-authored plays haven’t had a fair hearing in this country.”

Machado didn’t hesitate to state what made writing “A Burning Beach,” as he puts it, “a trip into dangerous territory.”

The play, set on a sugar plantation in 1895 during an abortive coup by poet/revolutionary and symbol of Cuban independence Jose Marti, pits traditional and modern attitudes against one another. The central rivalry is fueled by the familial worship of the dead father, of Marti--and by an American businesswoman’s interest in the plantation.

“I long to be a revolutionary,” said Machado, “and I know I can’t be one. This is my dilemma, which I share with Marta (a woman of progressive views vying with her conservative sister, Ofelia) in ‘Burning Beach.’ The characters have enslaved themselves with their yearnings. It’s a very Spanish, non-Anglo temperament.”

On “Burning Beach’s” premiere last November at New York’s American Place Theatre, some critics missed the laughs but liked the play. The Village Voice’s Alisa Solomon: “Though ‘A Burning Beach’ is not as funny as some of Machado’s earlier plays, it is more ambitious, more bold (sic), and more sensitive. . . .” The New York Times’ Mel Gussow noted that “with its devious method of storytelling, ‘A Burning Beach’ leaves unanswered questions, but it confronts possibilities with a provocative intensity.”

The title of his musical in gestation, “Aliens in Their Own Planet,” suggests a state of being that the playwright constantly harks back to when discussing what made him a writer.

After the aborted Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, which led to heightened state security measures inside Cuba and the targeting of bourgeois families like the Machados, Eduardo and his extended clan fled to the United States. Their route took them to Los Angeles, bypassing the Cuban community in Miami.

“Had we settled in Miami,” he speculated, “I might have assimilated into what is a very right-wing, self-righteous environment. We imagined that we were going to Hollywood, but we ended up in Canoga Park. My romantic dreams were instantly crushed: One of my fantasy figures was Marilyn Monroe, and she died the day (Aug. 5, 1962) we arrived in L.A.”

The family moved from one San Fernando Valley community to another, and this, plus being in exile and unpopular in school, generated deep alienation in Machado.

“We didn’t seem to belong. My family didn’t fit in with the Chicano community, and most Americans then tended to view all Cubans as Communists. At the same time, this feeling of not belonging was very liberating. It was great being away from Cuba. I wasn’t trapped, I could think for myself. These were just the right ingredients for turning me into a writer.”

But, like many playwrights in this country, Machado began as an actor and only later realized that he had stories to tell. “Besides,” he reflected, “nobody else had quite the experience I went through. No Cuban writer could write about Cuba the way I do, since I am polarized neither on the left nor the right. I have national allegiance, but not national prejudice--love for Cuba, but at a distance.”

Machado amusedly reports that Miami Cubans (at least the critics, and much of the audience) lash out at his plays.

“ ‘Vile’ is one printable word they’ve used. They’re seeing an uncomfortable reflection of themselves, of course, and I know that because I’m writing out of the most pained parts of myself.

“If I don’t feel that pain,” he said emphatically, “it’s bad writing.”

Even as Machado’s subject remains the Cuban family torn by passions for the past and the future, “A Burning Beach” represents a break with three previous serio-comic plays, “The Floating Islands Trilogy”--made up of “The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa,” “Fabiola” and “Broken Eggs”--about the mythic Marquez family’s journey from privilege to Los Angeles exile.

“I can easily make an audience laugh,” he said about the trilogy, “and hearing that laughter can be an opiate for a playwright. You’re in the trap of being in control. I had to get away from that.”

He doesn’t have kind words for that perennial of the regional theater’s play-development process: The Reading.

“You know when I realized that readings--even staged readings--of plays don’t work?” he asked. “It was a little while ago, when a reading of ‘Broken Eggs’ was arranged, with a first-rate cast. Now, I’ve seen this play work on stage, but this time, it was nonsensical. This reaffirmed for me that what playwrights need are productions, not readings.”

“The Day You’ll Love Me,” for example, would never have been translated by Machado without the promise of a production. It was discovered when Machado sat on the board of the Theatre Communication Group’s Hispanic Translation Project, and it attracted the attention of the Taper’s Gordon Davidson and Madeline Puzo (Taper, Too’s producer and the newly appointed associate artistic director of the Guthrie Theatre). The play’s director is Lillian Garrett, who starred in the New York production of “A Burning Beach.”

“Everyone says how much (‘Day’) recalls Chekhov,” Machado remarked, “but (Spanish playwright Federico Garcia) Lorca is the big influence. As in ‘Burning Beach,’ there’s the passion for the thing that will never be.”