MIAMI BEACH - If anyone has stories to tell, it's the so-called Cuban boat people. Thousands made a mass exodus from Cuba in 1994 on crudely built rafts, braving shark-infested waters, storms, sun and hunger to emigrate to the USA. They were called balseros, after the Spanish word for raft.
Inspired by their heroism, Cuban-born playwright Maria Irene Fornes taped interviews with more than two dozen survivors. The interviews were set to music by American composer Robert Ashley in a bilingual opera titled Balseros . The Florida Grand Opera premiered it May 16 at the Colony Theater, prior to visits to New York and the European music festival circuit.
Audiences expecting a conventional story line and melody-driven score will be baffled by this loosely structured, 90-minute, intermissionless work, which organizes the balseros' stories in four groupings: the building of the raft, the departure, the ordeal at sea and the rescue.
Ashley's trance-inducing, synthesizer-produced music conveys the hallucinatory quality of being adrift on the ocean. Evocatively punctuating these synthesized sounds are live Afro-Cuban rhythms provided by percussionists Oscar Salas and Oseiku DanEl Diaz. But the emotional impact of the stories sometimes is blunted by an innovative but confusing impressionist storytelling style: Sung in English by five traditional opera singers, the text sometimes is repeated, slowed down and styled eccentrically by individual members of a vocal quartet featuring Joan La Barbara. Within this texture, there is an island of clarity and emotional authenticity in Cuban-American actors Mario Salas-Lanz and Nattacha Amador, who speak the text in expressive Spanish.
Theatrically, the opera is deathly static in the first half; Michael Montel's stage direction conveys little sense of the fear, danger and risk the balseros must have felt leaving their homeland. Matters improve greatly once on the open seas: Jorge Alberto Fernandez's stark scenic design simulates a shifting raft with an enormous moving platform. A chilly though intellectually stimulating event.