Posted on 12/15/2003 1:20:30 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
Living in New York, actress Carmen Peláez overdoses on Che Chic. They're everywhere, the hip-hoppers and hippies and post-grungers who go around with Che on their T-shirts like he's Biggie or John or Kurt or somebody cool like that.
One day, tired of the cliché parade, Peláez took out some felt and some glue and made her own T-shirt. It features what you might call a counter counter-culture message: ''F*-- Che.'' She stuck Che's star where the letter u would go.
''I walked around in it and you would think I was throwing babies into a meat grinder,'' says Peláez, a would-be poster child for So-Uncool-She's-Cool, except few are cool enough to get that about her. ``The guy was an assassin. Treating him like a rock star is the epitome of trendy ignorance.''
Peláez, starring in Rum & Coke at the Coconut Grove Playhouse's Encore Room through the end of January, has had plenty of run-ins with what she would call trendy ignorance.
The one-woman play she wrote at 24, at the height of a typical Cuban-American identity crisis, had a sizzling run at a tiny Lincoln Road theater six years ago. Rum & Coke was sold out for weeks and graced by the roster of hometown celebs. Gloria and Emilio, Jon Secada and Albita not only came, but each was so taken by Carmen's writing and acting they separately called her to collaborate on projects. (She recently worked on a treatment for a screenplay Emilio Estefan wants to produce.)
PLAYING IN PEORIA
Rum & Coke caught the attention of everybody from Ted Koppel, who featured her family's story on Nightline, to feminist icon Betty Friedan, who saw the show and raved, to NBC and Fox Theatricals, which both came calling with development deals.
But the theater world couldn't get beyond its own narrow perspectives on narrowness -- and Rum & Coke was stopped cold. ''Nobody in New York wanted me to do it,'' Peláez says over guava-glazed chops at Havana Harry's. 'Everybody said it was too right wing. They basically said if we put a communist character in it, they would take it. In the end, `Viva Fidel' was all they wanted to hear.''
In 2000, Peláez spent eight weeks in Chicago performing and tweaking Rum & Coke with Fox Theatricals (its Broadway productions include Thoroughly Modern Millie and Death of a Salesman). And for a minute there, Rum & Coke got watered down. But she doesn't blame Fox. She blames herself.
'The play did have some holes in it and I knew it, but I didn't know how to fix them. Fox really helped. But in the process of trying to develop in for mainstream America, I lost my voice. It turned into more of a travelogue. They were like, `What do you mean by apagon (power outage)?' And I would have to stop and explain everything.''
In the spring, Coconut Grove Playhouse director Arnold Mittelman offered Peláez another run in a city where she doesn't have to explain.
''I'm not sure why anybody would think the show should have any character in it that didn't belong to Carmen,'' Mittelman says. ``It's about her organic, artistic experience.''
Playwright Charles Busch, whose The Tale of the Allergist's Wife just completed a run at the Playhouse, caught Rum & Coke while he was in Miami. His first question: Why hasn't it run in New York?
``I would have thought, in my ignorance I guess, that it would have run in one of New York's avant-garde performance theaters. Or, whatever the word for avant-garde is these days. I think they're totally insane for not wanting it. I found her an enormously likable and sympathetic performer and was particularly struck by the writing, which is touching and smart. I would have thought the American left stopped being sympathetic to Castro when they figured out Stalin wasn't Santa Claus.''
FINAL RUN? Rum & Coke is political, but it is hardly humorless. It's an edgy, funny and (yeah, so what?) sentimental take on identity. In it, Peláez offers the voices of six Cuban women: Among them Camilla, Peláez's alter ego, a chunky Cuban-American girl in search of self-worth and a supermodel's strut; her grandmother, who has learned to live with her unrootedness and doesn't apologize for doing hunger strikes in shifts; a jinetera who suffers the indignity of prostituting herself along Havana's Malécon for pocket change but draws the line when she gets a half-eaten candy bar by way of pay; a Tropicana star demoted to bathroom attendant for attempting to escape the island on a raft; and Ninita, a woman Peláez can't talk about without breaking down.
Ninita was Peláez's great aunt and the sister of one of Cuba's greatest painters, the late Amelia Peláez. Carmen met her in 1995, on her first of four trips to the island. In her late '80s, Ninita was the sole caretaker of the Peláez family home, rattling around among Amelia's paintbrushes and easels and the memories of a pre-Castro Cuba, when the family was still together.
She died last year at 91.
''When she died I lost my only porthole into my history over there,'' Carmen says.
Yes, Rum & Coke makes a political statement. But it's less about politics and more about honoring elders. Carmen, 31, is the typical Cuban-American kid who grew up in Kendall, feeding on second-hand nostalgia.
Her play is her grown-up thanks to her parents. Even if her perspectives tend to be more moderate that theirs, their loss is not lost on her.
''You don't get a revolution by mistake,'' Peláez says. ``And if we can't acknowledge the mistakes that were made in Cuba before Castro, we'll never get out of it. Our generation, both here and in Cuba, we're basically getting back this Ming vase that has been shattered into pieces. We're going to have to try to put it back together, without even knowing each other.''
Peláez's quest through Rum & Coke has been to understand both side of Cuba. So don't go telling her the play is not authentic enough.
'I have gotten, `Oh, you're one of those exiles. Why don't you tell the real story?' As if buying a Buena Vista Club CD makes you an expert. They say I'm too nostalgic. To which I say, when I go to Cuba, I shower out of a bucket. When you go, you take pictures in front of a 1950s Cadillac. Who is more nostalgic, me or you?''
She's thinking after the Playhouse run, she's shelving Rum & Coke.
``If this is where it ends, that's great. Because I won't change it so it gets to run somewhere like New York. Now I'm focused on finishing my next play, Abuela. It's about my grandmother. She's a huge inspiration. Her strength is outstanding, and she doesn't advertise it. And she has barely ever talked to me about Cuba. She doesn't dwell.''
That would be the other hero of the trendy ignorant...
The ACLU would also say that this shirt is obscene because while the FCC has now "cleared" the Fwurd, they have only done so for instances where it is the insult and not a sexual act. The libs at the ACLU would contend that the shirt's message actually embraces Che's "rock star" like status and that persons who wear F*-- Che shirts are really CheGroupies who want to have sex with this dead man (like the Jim Morrison groupies of today).
< /sarcasm >
Along with a Fry Mumia
I bet she hears complaints from American-born socialists all the time who claim her work is not "authentic" because it depicts the lives of ordinary Cubans rather than proclaiming, "viva Fidel, viva Che!" Now that she has openly mocked a communist icon, the "tolerant" leftists who believe in "criticism" will redouble their efforts to suppress her works.
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