Nilo Cruz — the newest member of the playwrights ensemble at the Victory Gardens Theater — won the Pulitzer Prize for his luminous “Anna in the Tropics” in 2003. The current Cruz drama at Victory Gardens, “A Park in Our House,” was penned in 1996. One can experience a nascent version of the gorgeously poetic language that later contributed to this Cuban-American writer’s fame. But this is an overly earnest early play in which the basic familial framework can’t fully house all that Cruz wants to feel and convey.
The main interest in this piece, directed by Dennis Zacek, is the probing of the relationship between Cuba and Russia. A great many plays have been written about the ideological and cultural gulf between the tiny island and the American colossus to the north — one of them, Eduardo Machado’s “The Cook” is currently up at the Goodman Theatre — but relatively little has been penned about how the post-Castro Cubans interacted with the USSR. during the 1960s and 1970s, when the Eastern bloc functioned as part benevolent parent and part rapist.
Herein, Cruz imagines the arrival of a Russian man (played in brooding fashion by Lance Baker) taking part in a scientific exchange visit with a bourgeois Cuban family. Despite his laconic personality (and Baker’s overly asexual performance), the Russian awakens the erotic imagination of the family’s budding daughter (played, in the best performance of the night, by Marcela Munoz), who wants to dream of Tolstoy and Dostoevski and visit the Kremlin. For this young woman, Russians are the natural erotic dance partners for Cuban romanticism, and the visitor’s body is as good to touch as a map of Moscow.
Equally entranced is a small boy who lives in the household. Even though this little fellow (played by Bubba Weiler) is mute, he still becomes entranced with the Russian, finding his voice in time to dream that he might one day get to kiss him. It is an aspiration intended to disturb and a likely reflection of Cruz’s much-articulated personal sense of being caught between contradictory worlds.
And the Russian also stirs things up among the adults in a family whose energetic matriarch (Charin Alvarez) tries to keep her faith despite an alcoholic husband (played by Gustavo Mellado) and a troubled relative (Joe Minoso) whose creative talents have been squelched by Castro.
That’s the main theme of the play, really — everybody has been trampled and abused by the socialist revolution, including the dissident Soviet visitor who hates it all just as much as the Cubans.
As he often does in his plays, the symbolist, sensualist Cruz draws strong parallels between nationhood and sexuality, cultural identity and gender. His Cuba is soft and feminine and easily seduced by Soviet machismo. And his Cuban characters carry around with them gaping holes in their needy souls that Castro can’t plug.
Working in collaboration with the theater company Teatro Vista, Zacek’s honorable and largely well-acted production mostly does right by Cruz’s poetry. Gentle, measured and thoughtful, the production has some quite moving moments, even if there’s little to surprise you, sear the soul, or lift you out of your seat.
But at other times, the spirit of the piece also feels rather strangled — the smaller stage at Victory Gardens’ old home is filled with unnecessary clutter. The show feels too much in debt to simple domestic realism. Unfortunately, that compounds the central problem with the script.
In his later works — but not so much in this one — Cruz found a way to root his poetry and give his earnest, passionate Cuban characters a freer world in which to roam.
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cjones5@tribune.com
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“A Park in Our House”
When: Through Dec. 9
Where: Victory Gardens Greenhouse, 2257 N. Lincoln Ave.
Running time: 2 hours, 10 minutes
Tickets: $20-45 at 773-871-3000
