Perfumed words of 'Park' waft us to Cuba

Playwright Nilo Cruz is the perfume merchant of contemporary theater. His dramas are about dreamers, artists, lovers and all those who either are true exiles or who just feel like exiles in their own skin -- or their own country. And they leave a trail of scent rather than a solid memory. Think of them as poems, visitations, dramatic floaters.

The latest bottle of Cruz's perfume to be uncorked can be found bearing the label "A Park in Our House," now in a joint production by Victory Gardens Theater and Teatro Vista. It is being staged in a fittingly intimate Victory Gardens Greenhouse space, where director Dennis Zacek and his ideally chosen cast allow the contents to waft our way with just the right amount of delicacy, despair, eroticism and sense of heightened expectation.
'A Park in our House'
When: Through Dec. 9

As he did in his 2003 Pulitzer Prize-winning play "Anna in the Tropics," the Cuban-American Cruz has mixed romantic essences, blending the predominant Cuban notes with a strong hint of all things Chekhovian and "romantic revolutionary" Russian.

The time is 1970 -- a good decade into the Cuban Revolution, when the Soviet Union was still heavily invested in its island outpost and shortages, corruption and disillusionment already were facts of life. We are in the home of a once middle-class and now middle-aged couple (the atmospheric set is by Samuel Ball, with lighting by Patrick Chan). Ofelina (Charin Alvarez, who masterfully twines the prim and sensual) and Hilario (Gustavo Mellado, just right as a man who lives in his head). Ofelina still holds fast to her brand of religious faith and is in a panic about the first signs of menopause. Her husband works in the Interior Ministry, where his design for a lovely little city park clearly holds no interest for officials focused on cigar manufacturing.

The couple has reared a niece and nephew -- the hormonally active adolescent Pilar (a most beguiling Marcela Munoz) and her smart, sensitive younger brother Camilo (Bubba Weiner, a remarkably gifted and sophisticated young actor). Camilo apparently became traumatized into muteness when his parents fled the country (though this is never fully spelled out). Also sharing the house is Ofelina's spirit-broken younger brother Fifo (the sweetly bearlike Joe Minoso), who got into political trouble for his photography exhibition and is now forced to labor in the sugar cane fields.

Into their midst, for one life-altering summer month, comes a Russian -- Dimitri Krushchev (Lance Baker in just the latest of his invariably pitch-perfect, understated performances). A scientist from the far eastern city of Almata, he has somehow managed to get a foreign exchange study visa. But he is no apparatchik. He, too, has become disillusioned with the revolution, though the heated Pilar welcomes him as if he were the emperor of the snow-covered Kremlin. His visit alters all their lives. And before he leaves, an old electric fan sends the aroma of herbs and coffee and the sea into the theater, if only in the form of words.