The absence of something can be a heavy burden, and eventually not knowing the details of her parents’ early lives became unbearable for Marissa Chibas. In Daughter of a Cuban Revolutionary, which CalArts recently provided in a short-run, evocative production at its REDCAT space in Disney Hall, writer-performer Chibas dramatizes her one-woman journey into a family's extraordinary past.
Like Dan Evans' simple set – a raked, sand-covered square beneath a narrow, wing-spanning projection screen of pegboard – Chibas' story incorporates powerful symbols. Broken radios, spectacles, a microphone, a blind man and some massive parade ground loudspeakers advance her personal story of discovery as they resonate an underlying theme of communication.
In a muscular staging by Mira Kinsley, Chibas kneels, at curtain's rise, inches before the first row of the audience. She rises in a pool of light and turns to address a house full of her contemporaries, relating her near-death experience in the Venezuelan Amazon, which she then enters by stepping onto the platform and into the past. An effect by lighting designer Rebecca M.K. Makus sends ripples from her bare foot across the sand as if she were reactivating the spilt contents of a ruptured hourglass. Colbert S. Davis IV weaves a fabric of frequencies that blend ocean waves, radio static and political speeches into a beautiful sound cue as she wades up stage through lost time. (Adam Flemming's remarkable video creation – which must wrestle with an impossible aspect ratio twenty times as wide as it is tall – is constantly filled with supplemental visuals that complement without distracting, like the fuzzy image that may combine a low line of breaking waves with a sound wave.)
Chibas takes us across the water to Cuba, across the years to the 1950s, and through fading photographs to meet her extended family – ancestors as well as current Cuban cousins. Her mother was a captivating beauty whom Miss Cuba judges in 1959 awarded duplicate top prizes despite her second place finish. Her father was so much the conscience of Cuban injustice that after articulating what would become the revolution's written architecture, he saw problems ahead and had concerns, which in turn caused Castro to drop him from the circle of founding fathers. And her uncle, Eddie Chibas, Cuba's most popular and influential radio personality, raised rabble-rousing to the level of oratory before ending one broadcast with his suicide in a disquieting call to action.
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