nothin “El Huracán” Unleashes A Storm Of Memory | New Haven Independent

El Huracán” Unleashes A Storm Of Memory

T. Charles Erickson Photos

Jennifer Paredes and Maria-Christina Oliveras.

About midway through El Huracán by Charise Castro Smith, the play’s two central characters, Miranda (Irene Sofia Lucio) and Ximena (Maria-Christina Oliveras), undergo a radical transformation even as they lay themselves bare.

As they both shed their costumes, Miranda takes us through almost three decades of guilt for a single hasty decision, and Ximena through the anger she can’t let go of. As they excoriate themselves, a small crew helps them change, first putting on pads that fill out their bodies, then clothes over those pads. What we might have thought was natural hair were wigs all along, that are changed.

At the end of their monologues, both Miranda and Ximena have aged, 27 years in the span of a few minutes, and we understand why.

Powerful acting and ingenious staging — the director here is Laurie Woolery — draw the most out of a dramatic script that combines family trauma, mental illness and the ravages of hurricanes to tell a multigenerational story about forgetting, forgiveness, and coming to terms with the past to move into the future. El Huracán, which is having its world premiere here at the Yale Repertory Theatre, runs through Oct. 20.

Natural disasters frame the play — first Hurricane Andrew, which devastated South Florida in 1992, and then the fictional, even larger Hurricane Penelope in 2019 — and create the chance for characters to be thrown together and kept there, whether it is to ride out those storms or pick up what’s left afterward. But in another sense, the storms are fixed chronological points that allow the play to swing back and forth through time and, in the play’s most poignant moments, collapse past and present into single moments. This allows Smith to tell her story about four generations of women with great economy: first, Valeria (Adriana Sevahn Nichols), a stage magician in her youth who leaves and then returns to Miami; then Ximena, who eschews her mother’s wandering ways to plant her feet firmly in family and friends in Miami for life; third, Miranda, who leaves Miami to pursue an Ivy League education and academic career but can’t quite put her tropical upbringing behind her; and finally, Val (Jennifer Paredes), who wants to reconnect with a past that her mother has severed. Hovering over all four women, like the hurricanes, is a hereditary dementia that each of them knows they will in time succumb to.

Irene Sofia Lucio and Adriana Sevahn Nichols.

The dementia sets up a poignant dynamic within the family. These are strong women who prize both independence and loyalty. They do things that hurt the other members of the family, even though they don’t want to hurt anyone. They’re just trying to pursue their own ambitions. And they find it hard to forget or forgive grievances and guilt. Connections are severed and are difficult to mend. This means they don’t tell each other the family history they all want to preserve — until the dementia sets in, and all is forgotten and forgiven, at the cost of possibly losing the history altogether. The hurricane of the title is a storm of the mind as well as a physical storm, and Smith draws a neat parallel between the way the hurricanes wreck the city and dementia wrecks the memory, throwing everything together into a sharp-edged, mangled pile and devastating lives in the process.

In some ways it might be a little too neat. Such parallels in a story told outside the theater might come across as a little too convenient; maybe it’s a little too easy to pull all the threads together as Smith does at the end. Similarly, there’s a tilt toward melodrama on the page that must be handled with care.

Here the Yale Rep shows its stripes, first, by leaning into the more stagy elements of the story, forgoing realistic sets for the suggestions of them, sometimes literally pulling back the curtain to show the strings, and making smart use of projections to convey both the terror of the storm and the horror of feeling memory — and with it, personal and family identity — float away from you. It works.

What works even more is the canny decision to marry these theatrical flourishes to some very powerfully understated acting. For all the tension in the family, these aren’t women who yell at each other. They take each other apart piece by piece like surgeons, and when it comes time to try to put thing back together, aren’t quite sure how to do it. Paredes nails the eager 20-something who knows she’s a little out of her depth (as well as a few secondary characters). Oliveras is utterly believable as a no-nonsense woman who wants the best for a daughter she doesn’t fully understand. As Miranda, Lucio deftly undergoes a dramatic transformation from a woman in her late 20s, both defiant and very much uncomfortable in her own skin, to a woman in her 50s who is much surer of herself and has learned to live with the fact that she didn’t much like the person she used to be. Supporting actor Jonathan Nichols embodies Alonso, the older grandfather, who seems so sure of himself yet his flaws of his own, and Arturo Soria has a lot of fun getting to play three different men with very different personalities, accents, and command of English.

But as Valeria, the oldest of the women, Nichols gets to steal the show as a woman constantly shifting between English and Spanish, between the keen intelligence of her youth and middle age and the doddering dementia at the end of her life. She does it sometimes from one moment to the next, so convincingly switching up voice and body language that very quickly it takes little more than a straightening of the back or a pursing of the lips to see whether we are in Valeria’s present of 1992 or her much more luminous past. She creates a heartbreaking trail of memories through her performance, and for all the gorgeous staging and imagery the play offers, the image of her walking offstage alone when she shouldn’t be is the one this reviewer can’t quite get out of his head now, and probably won’t for some time to come.

El Huracán runs at Yale Rep’s University Theatre, 222 York Street, through Oct. 20. Click here for tickets and more information.

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