During his writing workshop at INTAR—first started by María Irene Fornés—Cuban playwright Eduardo Machado could often be heard saying, “corn doesn’t bleed.” Corn bleeding on stage is not magical, but impractical. (This second part I’ve added, call it experience.) In Matthew Barbot’s buoyant new play, The Beautiful Land I Seek, there is no corn and no stage blood. Instead, there is a place that is both magical and where violence is impractical: a train car, where the heroes of this play are found and where they will meet their audience for the duration of the play. Inspired by multiple historical events (specifically: the unsuccessful murder-plot to assassinate the U.S. President Harry Truman by Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola, the Jayuya Uprising in 1950, Hurricane Maria and what we call “the pandemic”) lies the story of the play but also the story of how to even begin to talk about it.
It could refer to Puerto Rico’s colonial condition, perhaps; or maybe, our inability to create meaningful, impactful art at a time when…(let’s not)? Or is it our desire to take matters into our own hands? Could it be the challenge to create a piece that is personal but also reaches beyond a tale of Puerto Rican identity? The task may feel insurmountable: how do you explain: a country that isn’t a country, a language that is both a remnant of the previous empire but also a weapon of resistance, a people’s urgent pull to walk away from, arguably, a “hand that feeds you.”
“There is an expectation that every Latin story represent the plurality of Latin people, and that is never going to be the case,” Barbot mused to me in a lively conversation over Zoom, a couple of days after a preview performance I attended.
Audiences acquainted with Puerto Rican lore will be in amusing (forgive me) territory, as the author weaves into the dialogue, like a checklist wrought in purgatory, some of the major crimes committed against the Puerto Rican people, among them: las carpetas, the Navy base in Vieques, the lack of infrastructure resulting in the devastation after Hurricane Maria, and the Merchant Marine Act of 1920. Other audiences may find themselves connected to a story that is less a history lesson and more a careful examination of the impotence and power of art in the face of political turmoil, even when in doubt of deed and strategy.
The set up of the play is phenomenal: two men, Oscar (Alejandro Hernández) and Griselio (Bobby Román), are on their way to Washington, D.C by train with two Lugers and one common dream: to assassinate President Truman. Their cabin lock is broken, which I suppose is needed for dream characters to be conjured up into the train car—there is Maria from West Side Story (the original film, and I won’t tell you how that is made evident), Lolita Lebrón, a singing Alexander Hamilton/Lin-Manuel, and Truman himself, an eerie, temperature-raising presence. The world quickly turns into a spiral of ghosts from a colonial past in a story more about loss, intent, and loss of intent than about brutal fucking murder. (When Christopher Columbus appears, he chews on more than the scenery—a reminder that even in the afterworld, monsters will be so.)
The text makes no secret of what we already know: the colonial subject has plenty of reason to rise up against their oppressor; in invoking with passionate joy the historical figures of Oscar and Griselio the play seems to almost ask not why but how. “Anything that winds up in the play is ultimately a reflection of my own perspective, my own point of view… So maybe every play is an identity play. …The show is about this long, sort of centuries sweep of history but also it is very personal to me… Do our contributions matter in the long stretch of history? That question shows up in this play.” In a smart turn of the pen, the author brings his own personage onstage (a perfectly cast Nate Betancourt). “Whatever you write, will have more to do with you than with us,” says a battered Oscar to the playwright, who’s been fishing for the most effective backstory. The real Barbot shared, “I think all you can do is handle your own perspective. Ultimately what we need is more [Latin] stories and perspectives onstage.”
The production, directed by José Zayas, opens in the land of the Lenape after a workshop production last year with the same cast (which also includes Ashely Marie Ortiz and Daniel Colón), which as Matthew remarks allows for a shorthand with the team, “as good actors are like dramaturgs.” He adds, “The fruit of this extended process?… The development has truly been development.”
Román and Hernandez as Griselio and Oscar make an impressive duo, alternating with ease between the more sincere bits with the broader stuff: it’s a game of doubt and certainty, of solitude and companionship in the face of a murder plot but also of imminent death, and they navigate it like pirates without a Jones Act. Ortiz and Colón deliver standout performances, embodying larger-than-life clichés with grit and gusto, a gift to the production. As a whole, the ensemble adds cohesion to a tale that does lose some steam after it has been established that no one is actually in danger and the visitations become repetitive. While the play makes a true, deliberate case to problematize the territory’s relationship with the U.S., at times it almost seems to apologize for its own ambition. I wonder if the magic conjured up here ends up blurring the tale of Griselio and Oscar by not arriving to a sense of inexplicable revelation, never departing the realm of insightful diorama.
While the set (by Tristan Jeffers) provides the intended claustrophobic effect of a train cabin, I wish the potential of it being in motion had inspired a less literal staging. It could be a matter of taste, but SITI Company Artistic Director Anne Bogart’s “limitation of space equals expansion of energy” principle might be due for a revision lest our eyes never learn how to leave the center-center of the stage.
In real life, after receiving a pardon from Jimmy Carter, Oscar Collazo traveled Latin America and the States speaking for Puerto Rican independence. The end of his life was spent in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, where the FBI kept busy monitoring the actions of many, including my High School theater teacher and other family friends, my mother among them. “Do our contributions matter in the long stretch of history?” I better believe it.
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The Beautiful Land I Seek (La Linda Tierra que Busco Yo) is running now at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.
