What a pleasure to see Alejandro Rodriguez’s Alba go from Dramaworks’ Perlberg Festival of New Plays to a fully staged production. It is a very personal and affecting drama, although it still feels like a work in progress. That, however, is how new plays develop, and being part of the process can be rewarding for playwrights and audiences alike.
Alba is set in unincorporated Miami in 2001 and was inspired by Federico García Lorca’s 1936 masterpiece, The House of Bernarda Alba. While the original features an all-female ensemble centered around five daughters, Rodriguez’s adaptation reduces the family to three sisters. He also makes a significant departure by adding a grandson, “the Poet,” who narrates the play, uncovers buried family secrets, and tries to see the women as more than their ostensible stereotypes, revealing them as layered, fully realized individuals.
The playwright wanted to take another look at Lorca. He has always loved Lorca’s plays but found their productions “all mood, very heavy and dense.” Rodriguez brings the story back home, from Spain to South Florida by way of Cuba.
Drawing on Lorca’s dramatic structure while establishing his own voice, Rodriguez infuses the adaptation with a visceral quality informed by personal experience and insight into the Cuban immigrant’s plight, particularly that of women. Rodriguez’s passion resonates personally with my wife and me. Some of the dialogue is in Spanish, but it is understandable in context and lends the play authenticity.
Rodriguez doesn't bring the play all the way up to the present. Instead, he sets it at the beginning of this century, a dramatically useful transitional moment when new technology was beginning to intrude on an older world but had not yet become the ubiquitous presence it is today.
At the play’s center is Alba, a fierce Cuban matriarch fighting to maintain control of her working-class household in the face of that technology, unpaid debts, and a suspicious suitor. Maggie Bofill makes her a compellingly controlling figure, while allowing glimpses of the humanity beneath her formidable exterior.
Maggie Bofill as Alba
The play opens in the aftermath of the funeral of Alba’s second husband. Alba lays down the law: her daughters will observe the proper decorum of mourning, receive guests, and remain in mourning until she releases them. Otherwise, what would the neighbors think? Alba is obsessed with protecting the family’s reputation, a recurring theme that governs much of what follows.
The family home is practically another character in the play. It is multigenerational, a repository of family history, and a prison as well. “It all begins with that pink house,” the Poet observes. Alba makes her position unmistakable when she tells her daughters, “This is my house!”
Her three daughters respond to their mother’s authority in different ways, sometimes finding common ground and sometimes driving one another apart. Their relationships with one another alternate between competition and affection.
Monica Quintero, Barbara Bonilla, Diana Garle, Dayana Morales, Maggie Bofill, Gianna DiGregorio
The youngest, Adela, is the rebel, flaunting the traditions that bind her family. She is the modern woman, played by Diana Garle with defiant passion. Garle is the only member of the cast who has appeared at Dramaworks before; the other actors are making their PBD debuts. Adela feels trapped while her classmates travel and go to concerts. She, meanwhile, is stuck listening to “Father Morales’ homilies.”
The middle sister, Amelia, is the smart one, and what else, she’s in therapy. Played by Gianna DiGregorio Rivera, Amelia brings a more reflective voice to the family conflict. She articulates a central dilemma of the immigrant experience: “You think Mom chose to be here? You don't think she’d prefer to be back in Cuba with her cousins and aunts?” Is Amelia simply making excuses for her mother, or does she understand something her sisters don’t? Her perspective adds another dimension to the family struggle, even as she gets caught up in the competition among the sisters.
Gianna DiGregorio, Barbara Bonilla, Dayana Morales
The eldest, Angie, is 29 and played by Dayana Morales. Her deep religious convictions and fear of becoming an old maid have left her vulnerable. She is engaged to Roman, the son of a neighbor, who turns out to be interested in more than her affections. He has his eye on her eventual inheritance from her biological father, Alba’s first husband, which is a source of tension in its own right. The stage is set for a family struggle in which each daughter tries, in her own way, to resist Alba’s controlling personality.
Beyond the four central women, three other characters help fill in the picture.
Barbara Bonilla plays Yolanda, Alba’s childhood friend. Bonilla brings considerable humor to the role, including some memorable physical comedy. Yolanda also serves as a voice of reason and a buffer between Alba and her daughters, though she too remains under Alba’s spell. Recalling Alba as a young woman, she says affectionately, “Alba was one of the best salseras in all of La Habana.”
Yolanda offers a glimpse of a different Alba, allowing us to see the matriarch as something more than the tyrant she has become. The play also hints that the two women shared more than friendship, although that possibility is never fully explored. Yolanda is one of the production’s most engaging characters, thanks in large part to Bonilla’s sparkling performance
Then there is Josefina, Alba’s mother and the girls’ grandmother, or “abuela.” Suffering from dementia, she is a link to the past and its buried secrets, a kind of truth teller who reveals what the family would rather leave unspoken. Mary Lou Simo brings considerable pathos to the role, although I found the character’s function in the larger drama less clear. Perhaps this is something to consider as the play develops further.
Gladys, played by Monica Quintero, is a healthcare worker from Honduras to whom Alba always seems to owe money. Although hers is a smaller role, she delivers one of the play’s bluntest lines: “We [in Honduras] did not know the type of unhappiness that I have seen in this house.” Her portrayal of a beleaguered caretaker made us keenly feel her exasperation.
Finally, there is the unnamed Poet, the playwright’s stand-in, who breaks the fourth wall and frames the story as a memory play. He is Adela’s son, conceived during her affair with Roman, and his presence allows the family history to be examined from a distance, even as he remains emotionally implicated in it. Matthew Ferro has the challenging task of making this personal journey believable, giving voice to Rodriguez’s perspective while also conveying the pain, regret, and tragedy of the story’s conclusion.
At the heart of the conflict is Adela’s love for Roman, who is engaged to her older half-sister, Angie. Along the way, however, the play sometimes falls back on familiar, even stereotypical, observations. “It’s such a cruel joke being born a woman,” Amelia observes, a sentiment that speaks to the limitations imposed on the daughters by their mother, their culture, and their circumstances.
Matthew Ferro as The Poet
The play also offers a glimpse of the digital world as it was emerging at the turn of the millennium. When Alba learns that naked pictures of a neighbor’s daughter have appeared online, her incredulous response is, “On the computer?” Computer pornography was hardly new even then, but the exchange seems almost quaint today, when artificial intelligence can generate images that never existed in the first place. The Poet also reveals that his grandmother had an older brother who committed suicide because he was gay, another family secret that exposes the destructive power of shame.
For all its familiar elements, Alba has much to offer. Its examination of family, cultural identity, repression, and the immigrant experience gives the story contemporary resonance, even as it remains rooted in an earlier time. The acting throughout is another of the production's strengths.
Director KJ Sanchez keeps the play moving at a good clip, maintaining the audience’s interest. As the denouement approaches, however, a couple of choices left me wondering whether the staging or the script might benefit from further consideration.
In a confrontation between Adela and Amelia, the middle sister threatens to expose Adela’s affair with Roman to Angie. The exchange takes place almost entirely offstage, in the laundry room at stage left, making it difficult for a substantial portion of the audience to see and, at times, hear an important confrontation. The concluding scene, too, did not have the emotional impact I had anticipated. Given the weight of what has preceded it, I had hoped for a stronger response.
As a fully staged production, though, Alba has much to recommend it, including some effective technical work. Brian O’Keefe’s costume design establishes the characters and the period while providing considerable variety. Alba’s deepest black mourning ensemble, militaristic and starched in the opening scene, exposes her personality before she speaks a word.
Robert Aguilar makes his PBD debut as lighting designer. Interestingly, the program identifies him as a specialist in working with new plays, which made me think about the particular challenges of lighting a production without a road map provided by previous stagings. Aguilar also views lighting as a narrative tool. At several crucial moments, the stage shifts abruptly from full illumination to partial darkness, reflecting the changing nature of the conflict. The effect is striking, if occasionally unexpected.
Roger Arnold’s sound design also makes its presence felt, with outside sounds entering at key moments, including when doors open and when shots are fired. I have deliberately avoided discussing the latter in detail to avoid spoilers.
Tanya Orellana, also making her PBD debut, has created a serviceable and visually attractive set. For me, however, the design did not fully convey the cultural environment or the strained economic circumstances of the family.
So, if you want to experience the development of a new play and immerse yourself in a cultural world that is perhaps different from your own, Alba offers an engaging opportunity, even if not every element is fully realized. There is much to learn from the world Rodriguez has created, and the production offers plenty to discuss afterward.
As Angie says, “We either love each other or we don’t.” That question may linger in your mind, too.
All photographs except for the stage and program by Coastal Click Photography
