From Cuba A Play Arrives In New York: 10 Million

2024 Author: Steven Freeman | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 08:15

I entered the small Black Box room of the Miami Dade Auditorium, in Miami, without knowing exactly what I was going to face. He knew that 10 million, Carlos Celdrán's debut film, a director recognized with the National Theater Prize in Cuba, was a kind of social phenomenon on the island of Raúl Castro. He knew that the Havana public had filled the room of the Argos group, and that many were leaving sobbing, and that the censorship in Cuba had not known how to respond to Celdrán's text, to his political discourse.

But 10 million is not just another staging that comes from a self-located island, detained in time: 10 million is a catharsis of a theater group, the Argos, on stage, and a director-become author, Carlos Celdrán. 10 million is the speech of a lost generation. 10 million is, above all, a masterpiece.

In Havana I had also risked attending another theatrical phenomenon, Harry Potter, the magic is over, directed by Carlos Díaz, with his popular Teatro El Público. A grandiose, exuberant, brightly colored staging, strident speeches, with the usual drag queens, where social and political criticism is limited to the day-to-day, to the shortcomings, to the lack of freedom, to the habit of being watched and questioned, where the sentences made of an stagnant and increasingly vulnerable power are criticized. Censorship reluctantly let it pass once again. There the viewer also cries, but his crying is still local.

Unlike Harry Potter, at 10 million crying is universal.

The story is simple: a young man growing up between divorced parents. Divorce, in this case, is also an ideological divorce in which the child-adolescent-adult lacks options. The mother is the power, the father is the scum, the worm that goes away. The son, who is actually the author, the mass and the people, sadly ends up on the side of power.

10 million is a newspaper. The author's diary. Celdrán rebuilds a revolutionary Cuba in black and white, without shrillness or slogans. It moves between 1960 and 2012 as if time had not passed. Yesterday and today are blurred.

We are facing a minimalist staging, where the characters move in front of a gray slate, on which the keys to the text are written: "Dream", "10 million", "The last summer", "Mass and power". If an alternative title defined this work, it would be the latter. An intelligent and organic appropriation of the book by Elias Canetti, a German-born author born in Bulgaria and a British citizen who marked the literature of the 1960s: Masse und Macht, Crowds and Power, Mass and Power. For Canetti, as for Celdrán, "the mass destroys houses and things." Boundaries are lost and "doors and windows smashed, the house loses its individuality."

At 10 million, Celdrán rejects the crowd and turns the viewer into an individual. Each one of us, sitting on the lunettes, feel that the characters speak to us as if we were part of a story that we had forgotten or that we set ourselves to forget. There comes a time after the "last summer" when the son visits the father and the world falls apart around him. It is time to choose, to turn around, not to want to see what happens to the other. It is the moment when you become, without realizing it, an accomplice to the crime.

When the crime is perpetrated, Celdrán lights up the audience and, at that moment, the viewer stops being an individual and becomes a mass, one more. If there was a universal title that identified 10 million, beyond Mass and Power, it would be The Last Summer. It is the moment in which everything changes and nothing returns to be like before, where there is no longer an after.

The father, the man that the mother has rejected as a petty bourgeois, for not joining the process of change, for not being a revolutionary, takes refuge in an embassy, taken by assault along with tens of thousands of others fleeing the country. By work and grace of the dynamics of mass and power, the father goes from being a weak and honest man, to being a scum, a lumpen, a worm. This man, with whom the son identifies and in which he takes refuge every summer, is besieged in the house of relatives, deprived of light, water and food. Then he is kicked out, humiliated, beaten, spit, by the mass and by the power, who boast of the act of repudiation to the weak, to those who leave, to those who do not believe, to others.

And what does the son do? Like the mother, she is now one more caught up in the game, another who listens to what she wants to hear, another who looks the other way. Another who, like us, becomes an accomplice. And here lies the universality of Celdrán's proposal. His success consists in making us feel guilty: he alone is not going to carry the burden of crime. It is impossible. Weight goes beyond its generation. Carlos questions us both as individuals and as a nation.

The staging of 10 million is for the sole purpose of displaying the text. Unlike the theater where the director interprets the author's creation and recreates the dialogues in images and actions in complex dramaturgical solutions, Celdrán, in his debut as a writer, uses provocation. It provokes each viewer to create his own montage. The mise-en-scène is the text, and vice versa. It is Pirandello to the nth degree. It's Brecht without a mask. It is to return to the Greek theater as a tribune. The spectators are the choir.

For me, 10 million is the most important Cuban play after José Triana's La noche de los asesinos (1965). The play began its American journey, with English subtitles in that other Cuba that is Miami, where Carlos Celdrán's parents live today, those parents who were once ideological enemies. The reading, from Miami, was, then, completely different. The spectators were part of the dramatic speech.

I left the theater ashamed as a human being, as an individual. Celdrán made me a victim. It made me cry with the father, with the author, with the mother and the son. And Celdrán went out on stage, to receive applause from the public, as a spectator. So we were all actors.

I went to sleep thinking of 10 million. Thinking of Celdrán's parents, whom the director himself did not allow to go see the play. I couldn't have masked them as spectators. I took my plane back to my reality, to my bubble, with a persistent idea: history repeats itself in the infinite variations of mass and power, whether it's called populism, nationalism, communism, or fascism.

10 Millions, directed and written by Carlos Celdrán, and starring Caleb Casas, Daniel Romero, Maridelmis Marín and Waldo Franco, will be presented on March 29 and 30 at Repertorio Español, 138 E 27th Street, New York, NY. In October, the work will arrive in Chicago and in November in Los Angeles.