STAGE REVIEW : ‘Burning Beach’: An Allegory About Cuba’s Political History

Playwright Eduardo Machado’s family came to the United States after the Castro revolution, when he was only 8 years old. Naturally, Cuba is a magical island to Machado and his characters. The aunt in his “Broken Eggs” (1984) even imagines that her “second self” is still living down there.

Machado’s new play at the Los Angeles Theatre Center, “A Burning Beach,” is set in the twice-mythical Cuba of the past. The time is 1895. Two well-brought-up sisters have just lost their sinful Papa, and who is to take charge of the plantation now?

Also figuring in the story are their black maid, with whom their father sinned; their half brother, the result of the sin; a beautiful and seductive American girl who claims to be related to Teddy Roosevelt; and the young leader of the first Cuban independence movement, Jose Marti.

Actor E. J. Castillo makes Marti a dream presence, more than an actual one, perhaps reminding us of the godlike, young singing star in the play that Machado has just translated, beautifully, for the Mark Taper Forum, Jose Ignacio Cabrujas’ “The Day You’ll Love Me.” There, too, we had a tribe of sisters wondering what to do next.

“A Burning Beach,” however, has a much more political agenda than the Cabrujas play. It is an allegory. The young American woman (Jennifer Joan Taylor) stands for seductive American imperialism. The black maid (Jonelle Allen) stands for voodoo and heat. The half-brother is Cuba (Robert Beltran), realizing that its mixed-blood is its strength.

The two sisters? The frilly one (Christine Avila) is the patrician class, beautiful but ineffectual. The angular one (Ellen Barber) is harder to read. She shows considerable spirit, up to a point, but ultimately accepts being defined as an onlooker rather than a maker of history. Maybe we need to know more of the actual history here, or maybe Machado hasn’t made his statement clearly enough.

How does it work as a play? Not particularly well. Certain scenes go nicely: the business where the Yankee girl tries to seduce the sisters by turn, the meeting between the son and the mythical Marti.

But the overall effect reminds one of the play’s front curtain, presumably painted by designer John Iacovelli. It’s a mural of heroic figures with a white space in the middle, as though the mural (the revolution?) hadn’t been completed. We admire the scale of the work, we enjoy the freshness of the colors and we can make a general guess as to the strategy of the composition. But it doesn’t truly fall into place, as a good mural and a good play ought to do.

To marry the allegorical and the personal is a tough trick. “A Burning Beach” doesn’t quite give us characters in whom we can believe, yet doesn’t quite give us a clear and compelling social parable either. We may need to have more about the son’s journey, the only one that has a real arrival. But something’s keeping the story at bay.

The production, co-directed by Bill Bushnell and Jose Luis Valenzuela, emphasizes visuals so strongly that one suspects a certain lack of confidence in the text. There are some striking stage pictures here--a room full of cane-bottom chairs knocked askew by the fighting sisters, a row of doors opening onto a ghostly green void, a “beach” that is planks. (Douglas D. Smith’s hot lights and Jon Gottlieb’s surging ocean sounds supply the rest of the picture.)

But when everything has to stop at a crucial point until the next scenic effect is ready behind the curtain--this involving lots of candles--the trappings of the production get in the way.

This is a play that needs momentum, not pageantry.

The acting, throughout, is lively and idiomatic, with Barber particularly affecting as the angular sister who doesn’t know exactly what she wants, but knows that it’s more than this. The cast understands the play in its blood, and that’s a big help to the spectator who doesn’t. Even then, “A Burning Beach” stays just out of reach.

Plays Tuesdays-Sundays at 8 p.m., with Saturday-Sunday matinees at2 p.m. Closes March 19. Tickets $22-$25. 514 S. Spring St. (213) 627-5599. ‘A BURNING BEACH’

Eduardo Machado’s play, at the Los Angeles Theatre Center. Directors Bill Bushnell and Jose Luis Valenzuela. Producer Diane White. Set John Iacovelli. Lighting design Douglas D. Smith. Costumes David Navarro Velasquez. Sound Jon Gottlieb. Original composition/music direction Francisco Gonzalez. Hair design Jeffrey Sacino. Stage manager Jill Johnson. With Jonella Allen, Christine Avila, Ellen Barber, Robert Beltran, E.J. Castillo, Jennifer Joan Taylor.