As a Shakespearean scholar and a native of western Massachusetts, I’m embarrassed to say that until the other night, I never made the short and pretty journey to Shakespeare & Co., that landmark of Lenox, just an hour and 24 minutes from Greenfield.
The facility itself consists of two modern indoor stages and an outdoor stage, and through the summer renowned actors and directors render about 10 plays — several by Shakespeare — as well as contemporary works on topical themes.
Amongst the latter is “Sotto Voce” by Nilo Cruz, a Cuban-born naturalized American whose play “Anna in the Tropics” won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003.
Cruz has also collaborated as a lyricist and librettist with composers such as Gabriela Lena Frank and Jimmy Lopez.
“Sotto Voce” is a two-act drama revolving around two romances. The first, a doomed love affair from the past, the lingering power of which infuses a second, and equally doomed romance, developing through the action of the play in the present.
Bemadette Kahn, masterfully played by Annette Miller, is an aging writer, a German emigré reclusively inhabiting a luxurious New York City apartment with her Colombian housekeeper Lucila Pulpo, played by Evelyn Howe.
When Bemadette is contacted by Cuban student Saquiel Rafaelli, played by Jaime Carrillo, painful memories of her lost lover Ariel Strauss are awakened.
Cruz’s work as a librettist is apparent in “Sotto Voce” in a couple different ways. The title comes from a musical cue for singers, meaning “soft or quiet voice,” and watching this performance directed by Daniel Gidron, one might wonder who it is who speaks quietly, because it’s seldom the characters, all of whom contend with large passions mostly in voices that match throughout the play.
Yet, as they speak — to themselves, to one another, and sometimes, over one another — their moods and words begin to wash over the audience with an orchestral quality.
The names of each of the three main characters are associated with the sea. The German surname, Kahn, means “small boat.” Saquiel tells us that his name means, “angel of the water,” and Lucila’s last name is the Spanish word for octopus, a fitting metaphor for this clever, resourceful character.
As a symbol of our tempestuous emotional lives, the sea in this play might represent what separates the peoples of the world from one another, as well as what unites them — the depth of these forces fully felt in Cruz’s poetic script.
Initially, Saquiel’s persistence in seeking Bemadette’s memories is as mysterious as her resistance to unearthing them. Gradually, we learn that the two are bound together by the tragic 1939 voyage of the MS St. Louis, which bore 908 Jewish refugees to Cuba, Canada and the United States, before being turned back to Europe, where approximately a quarter of them died in Nazi concentration camps.
In the play, one of these was Bemadette’s Jewish lover, Ariel. Saquiel’s grandfather, however, was one of the 22 refugees allowed to disembark in Cuba, and in the unbuttoned neckline of Saquiel’s black shirt, where some Latino men wear a crucifix, dangles instead a Star of David.
With his doubly angelic name, black clothes and kohl-lined eyes, Saquiel, as portrayed by Carillo, is almost menacing, a spectral presence mostly felt through his passionately pleading emails and phone calls to Bemadette and loitering outside under Lucila’s beguiled gaze.
Appropriately for this Byronic figure, he manages to seduce both women, merged into Ariel in Bemadette’s imagination, promisingly loyal in Lucila’s.
There is much subtlety and grace in the way Carillo carries off his shifts between knowledge-seeking student and passionate suitor, romantic visionary and sexy dance partner, Cuban-Jewish Saquiel and German-Jewish Ariel. Carillo is a nuanced actor, a touch of threat in his courtship, a touch of tenderness in his stalking.
While Bemadette is seduced out of denial into memories of her past, Lucila, played by Howe with sensitivity and charm, sees in Saquiel a desirable solution to her present loneliness.
A Colombian unable to leave the United States for fear of being denied re-entry, she fears growing old as a minority in an adopted country and fears invisibility, unseen by strangers incapable of fully perceiving her humanity.
She does get Saquiel to look, but not for long, the impermeability of the physical borders lying between people once again interrupting the natural course of human love.
“I can’t believe this is happening again,” wails Bemadette in the face of Lucila’s desperate grief.
This, however, is a strange response from Bemadette, who has spent a lifetime repressing her memories of the tragic past. She admits that in her imagination, Ariel Strauss never disembarked from that ship of hope, never died by Nazi hands.
“Memories are very inefficient and very impolite,” she says, admitting that in her own way she has been a denier of history, and so her anguished cry that history repeats itself has a tinny sound.
A self-diagnosed agoraphobic ensconced in American comforts and lovely imaginings, she has seen great injustice and has chosen to hide from the world inside her own various fictions.
Yet we cannot merely condemn her. Miller as Bemadette exudes the radiance of a dying star, a woman who has lived a long time without love, yet is able to return to the lightness and joy of that feeling after a few moments conversation with a stranger.
As rigidly as she tamped down the whispers of the past, of her lost love, they nonetheless remained with her, irrepressible, sotto voce, reminding her of all that might have been, all the happiness, the true life that accompanies love.
Once she crossed that border that lies between people — in this case between German gentile and Jew — she could never cross back, and in embracing the humanity of another, Bemadette has stepped into the fullness of her own humanity to the extent that she can no longer exist in a world that has so brutally failed to respond humanely to the needs of others.
I asked myself, “why all the angelic names in this play?” … Ariel, Saquiel, Rafael.
In Biblical apocrypha, angels often disguised themselves as strangers — as did the Greek gods of those myths — to test the purported humanity of mortals. Those who greeted perfect strangers with hospitality were rewarded, and those who did not, were punished. It’s an ancient theme that bears repeating.
This is a play that compels us to examine our own responses to borders, the people who can cross them, and the people who cannot. A ship of refugees traversing dangerous waters in search of new homes, new chances at life and happiness — the MS St. Louis rises up out of history as a cautionary tale to inform our present-day ethical choices. We can turn our eyes from the strangers at our gates — again.
We can do that. But doing that, as Cruz demonstrates in his gorgeously-scripted play, guarantees a tragic ending not just for refugees, but for us all.
This is the final weekend of summer performances at Shakespeare and Co., and amongst other offerings, this wonderful production of “Sotto Voce” will be playing all 3 days: Friday, Sept. 9, at 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 10, at 8:30 p.m.; and Sunday, Sept. 11, at 3 p.m.
For more information or tickets, call 413-637-3353 or visit:
www.shakespeare.org
Jenny Abeles is a writer and educator living in Greenfield. You can search her work online by including her middle name, Terpsichore.