Much Ado About Race, Class, Gender, and Cuba [Culturelicious]

I punted to the next panel, hoping that folks with far greater knowledge of Cuba than I could pull together the threads – and that they did. From the program:

“Changing Times: Much Ado in Cuba” will explore the placement of Shakespeare’s play in the fertile ground of Cuba with Ana Serra, author of The New Man in Cuba: Culture and Identity in the Revolution (American University), Ricardo Ortiz, author of Cultural Erotics in Cuban America (Georgetown University) and director Eleanor Holdridge, whose all-female production of Much Ado recently ran at Taffety Punk Theatre Company (Catholic University).

Ana Serra begins, explaining that the Cuban setting was a provocative choice, but not unexpected. She notes that the play is a comedy, it’s supposed to be farcical, and “that tells me I’m not meant to take it to seriously – but as someone who has been studying Cuba a while, I am a little bothered by this interpretation.”

Serra contextualizes the choice of setting:

“This play has been set in a rural setting before, but to put it in a place as far removed from the city as a plantation is daring. To have a plantation, and to not play with color (as in skin), is shocking. I think the director missed an opportunity to play with the hierarchy of color in the play.” Making Don Pedro black, rather than the ladies in waiting – on a plantation, they would absolutely have to be black. That was suprising to me.”

“They could have even played with the setting even more – Cuba is remembered as the playground of the US in the those days. Or it could have been set in the post-special period of Cuba, after the fall of the soviet black, so the whole setting could have been different. He could have played with the social inequality – so Dogberry and Friges could have been the underlings, and the red bourgeoisie could have been called other things. But my guess is that by setting in in 1930s Cuba, the director isn’t trying to get into those political Cuban stereotypes from the 1950s and from contemporary Cuba, so he went to the 1930s to find another mythical Cuba.”

Serra also pointed out some moments that missed key cultural context that would have enriched the show:

“If we were playing with expectations [and color as social commentary], he would have made Beatrice mulatta. We have different names for the colors of people, which would be considered racist here.

In Cuba, the mulatta has an iconic role as breaking social boundaries, being very sexy, – I would have expected Beatrice to be a mulatta, to take the stereotype to the full extent.”

Serra is making a tricky, but crucial argument. She notes that a little more basic knowledge would have deeply enriched the play more and that a lot of the gaps are due to applying an American (and Renaissance) lens to Cuban society. Eleanor Holdridge, the director of the all-female version, interjected to say that colorblind casting would have made portraying a planation with a light skin/dark skin divide difficult. I think what she also meant to say was that the politics of theater (and the long history of racial segregation and the marginalization of actors of color) also plays a role in why that idea may have been nixed. But indeed, the results was mixed. There were no brown-skinned people in the play outside of Don Pedro and Borachio, which was an interesting choice, and it speaks to the tension between depicting color-conciousness in on stage and on screen.

Ricardo Ortiz, the other panelist, came out swinging as well. While both he and Serra stressed they loved the play, Ortiz notes:

“If you are going to set it in Cuba, you should commit to it fully or not do it at all. You could have done something pan-Carribbean – but once you set it in Cuba, all this other stuff comes up, especially the color issues. I wrote a book about Cuban American lit, and one of the things Cuban writers are fascinated by is Cuba before the revolution. But that kind of dropped out of this production. I think it could have done so much more with the setting.

Ortiz explains:

“I can’t help but to approach this play personally – my grandma was Cuban born in rural area in 1912, so she would be in her 20s during this time. I was raised by someone who had these exact values in terms of racial politics, gender politics, and values.”

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