First time I heard of the new latest staging at the El Sotano Theater: “Mi tio el exiliado” (My uncle, the exile) I couldn’t help but wondering if it had any relation with the novel “Mi tio, el empleado” (My uncle, the employee), written in the XIX century by Ramón Meza. The curious thing was that I wasn’t the only one to make that unwitting connection. However, when you finally decide to take your chances and go to El Sotano, fight for two hours to get a seat to enjoy the play, then you realize that the kinship begins and ends in the title.
My uncle, the exile is the story of the brother that returns to Cuba after living 30 years in the States. But this shouldn’t lead you to believe that this is just another story of sadness, dramas, longings and a so many other things that are recurring today in the Cuban movie industry. No. Maybe at the beginning, playwright Yerandy Fleites wanted to tell the true store of his uncle, but he ended up making a Cuban parody, despite some moving scenes.
I guess the play, narrator included, is told in a way you don’t have to guess, divine or make any mental effort. Or at least that we can guess that out of the solution seen on stage that prompted laughter in the packed hall. Again, let’s stick to the facts.
On the staged, typical characters will parade like the ill homosexual brother, the Party leader, the housewife and the sportsman son, the narrator, the gossip neighbour, the peasant, the teacher, and so many others that fill a long list. It is so long it cannot fail to amaze you: how many people? The playwright has used them to paint a fresco, well-nurtured, of the Cuban people, with their parties, their conflicts, their own way to understand reality, of expressing…he recreated Ranchuelo town.
The characterization of the characters understood through the dialogues, the costumes, the set design itself, everything points to the extensive use of hyperbole as main resource. Even the play structure shows a chaotic reality, senseless, where all is upside down; doble moral, decay, lack of values, frustration. But Cubans laugh at that. And Fleites, as a Cuban, knows it. That’s why he fills the scenes with sharp comments, social critics; ideas that are left in the air, true, that don’t reach their ebullition point, because the speech is always cut short by another character. But, what’s the point of finishing up a phrase we all know? He is there to make us remember or incite. The Cuban audience will fill the gap.
And that’s why we can reach a new formula. The play though seemingly simple, demands from the spectator continuous, active thought. And laughter is the key to achieve this, because it is the recognition that this stereotype, that exaggeration is a real reference that we all know exists.
Around the theme of exile is perhaps a postmodernist whim, why not joke or judge what hurts us? Why not deconsecrate if you have had the importance that we have given ourselves? And Yerandy Fleites succeeds … Check it, with My uncle the exile you will end up laughing, or not, even of the dead.
Although we’re clear, this is nothing new, and Manach and Ortiz had defined, Cuban is a joker by nature and doesn’t lose time or place to poke fun at what could cause fear, or better, to make fun of everything.
We can not let the foul mouthing, pungent dialogue, criticism, phrases to shock us and lead us to think that there is also a lack of values in the work itself, it’s all about playing with rules, with injures, and nothing more. In chaos there is order and always as ancient Greeks used to say laughter and seriousness go hand in hand. Hence, My uncle, the exile, not for being a parody will stop it from putting its finger on the wound in the abstract or multiple and accurate scenes along the play.
Evaristo, the sick brother, homosexual, exile is perhaps the best character which combines the duality of the serious and the comic, and perhaps precisely because of this, the type better built, more accomplished, even in terms of performance.
So now you know … if you decide on this proposal at El Sotano, you will have an hour of laughter, of encounter with reality, of manners, but do not take it so lightly, do not take it literally. Do get spread the spirit and joy of the Cubans.
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