Review: Isla, a Shadow Puppet Play About Cuba

Sometimes it is possible to sit in awe of the artistry behind a show without necessarily loving that show. That was my experience of Isla, a play with music now making its world premiere at WP Theater. Collaboratively written by Hit the Lights! Company, it tells the story of co-artistic director Samantha Blain’s family during the early years of Castro’s Cuba, and their daring escape to the United States—much of the action conveyed not through words, but intricate, delicate, remarkably well-executed shadow puppetry.

Blain stars, first as herself during a brief introduction of the show and the oral history that became its script. Eventually she transforms into her aunt Lulu, the middle child of three sisters. Overachiever Carmen (Daniela Delahuerta) is the eldest, and social butterfly Alina (Tiffany Iris) is the youngest. We hear the actual voices of the three sisters on tapes that Blain recorded in 2018, and this becomes the springboard for the stage action.

As Lulu discusses the strength and beauty of her mother, we see Mami in silhouette on an upstage screen. We also see the silhouette of their home in rural Cuba, a place surrounded by wildlife and magic. Later, as the onstage Lulu recounts a strange dream, two solenodon puppets conspire to steal her notebook, leading to a wild chase through the jungle and ending in the jaws of a crocodile enveloping the entire screen.

On a trip into the city, we see the shadows of people dancing, drinking, and enjoying their lives. But then Fidel’s goons, a phalanx of Che Guevara lookalikes in silhouette, show up to carry the girls off to re-education camp and hard labor in the fields. The three sisters know they have no other choice but to escape, not to Moscow, but Miami.

Casey Scott Leach’s puppets are the most astounding element of Isla, whether they are downstage (I loved the chickens with wobbly heads) or behind three upstage screens, where puppeteers Erica Knight and Jessie March join Leach in the deft manipulation of an extraordinary number of shadow puppets to create a stage show that feels like a high-concept animated epic.

Not only do these cutouts provide a clear, cost-effective representation of events that would be expensive to re-create onstage (a boat ride across the Straits of Florida), but they are gorgeously dynamic, like one that depicts the chopping of a carrot as the sisters reminisce about Mami’s food. In an age when computer generated projections have become the norm, it feels refreshingly old-school, a reminder that we don’t need Final Cut Pro or generative AI to create stage pictures that will forever linger in our minds.

“Mami, Mami! / A whisper flying in the breeze. / You mean everything to me,” the sisters sing sweetly, if not memorably. The original songs, also collaboratively written, suffer from uninspired lyrics (“La la la la la la la la la,” goes the sisters’ theme) and serviceable melodies. The show noncommittally reaches toward book musical, resulting in a play that has too many songs, most of which wash over the audience with little impact. Buena Vista Social Club this is not.

Music pervades Isla, most pleasantly between songs. Seated stage left, Claron Hayden jams on his electric guitar, producing psychedelic riffs as shadow bombs fall from shadow planes. The overall effect is both disturbing and entrancing, conveying the contrast of tranquil island life and violent revolution in a way we can unsettlingly feel in our bones. If only the script could do that too!

Co-directors Roman Sanchez and Mikayla Stanley could have done more to punctuate Isla with narrative peaks and valleys, but I suspect the underlying problem derives from the collaboratively written script, which floats along from scene to scene without much to say that isn’t obvious, relying on the puppets to row the boat forward.

Like Communism, collaboratively devised theater is a noble concept that mostly disappoints in practice (when it doesn’t actively horrify). Even in the most successful examples, like the work of the Brooklyn-based collective the TEAM, one can always feel the hand of the director as dictator, ruthlessly editing and shaping the story into something with drive and bite (Rachel Chavkin is the Fidel Castro of this style of theater). By contrast, Isla feels rudderless, offering scenes of 1960s island life until it washes up on the shore of its conclusion.

It’s not an unpleasant journey. Isla is buoyed by the talent of the artists that have created it, and seeing Leach’s incredible puppets makes the trip worth it. But as Hayden lulled me into a haze with his trippy incidental music, I found myself daydreaming about what this show could have been with a truly excellent script.