Review: ‘Two Sisters and a Piano’ hits some high notes but they’re not enough to lift uneven production

Nilo Cruz, a Cuban-American playwright who won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 for “Anna in the Tropics,” wrote a work with many similarities before that play. “Two Sisters and a Piano,” now receiving a semi-fulfilling production at Writers Theatre in suburban Glencoe, first premiered in the late 1990s, and its thematic and lyrical richness helped build Cruz’s formidable reputation.

Set in 1991 Havana, as the Soviet Union was dissolving, the play is laced with the types of purposeful, even disorienting contradictions that define living in a totalitarian state. The best example of that? The two sisters of the title live in their spacious and lovingly detailed family home — Cruz even wrote a note to designers to make sure it feels open as opposed to claustrophobic — which we quickly discover is also their literal prison.

They’re under house arrest.

Maria Celia (Andrea San Miguel) and her younger sister Sofia (Neysha Mendoza Castro) both love and resent their home, cherishing family memories but also desperate to escape it. They crave human interaction and yet harbor justifiable paranoia that their neighbors may be eyeing them suspiciously. They’re hopeful for social change but also aware that it was just a mild, even careful expression of such hope — written by Maria Celia, endorsed by Sofia — that landed them in jail cells in the first place. They are both artists — Maria Celia is a well-known writer of fiction, and Sofia, a pianist — whose imaginations and sensuality constantly chafe with the need to repress or control them.

Cruz creates quality conflict out of these underlying tensions when Lieutenant Portuando (Adam Poss), the man responsible for keeping a close eye on Maria Celia, offers to read her the letters he has confiscated from her exiled husband in return for hearing new stories she is working on. He’s an oppressor by profession, but with a love for creative fiction, or at least for Maria Celia’s fiction, or at least for Maria Celia.

He encourages her to trust him. She knows she shouldn’t, but she’s desperate to hear from her husband, whose letters can be highly sexual but also contain coded descriptions about his efforts to find her asylum elsewhere.

In the meantime, the much younger Sofia falls instantly for piano tuner Victor Manuel (Arash Fakhrabadi), who has a telling monologue discussing how blatant government overreach can emerge from idealism when he suggests that the state should make sure pianos are only in the hands of those who care for them.

I’m an admirer of Cruz’s work. His style reminds me so much of Spanish playwright Federico Garcia Lorca, who wrote similarly lyrical plays (“House of Bernarda Alba,” “Blood Wedding”) filled with burning female sexual desire amid social conditions that demanded control.

But also like Lorca’s plays, Cruz’s can be extremely challenging to bring to life effectively. There’s so much subtext, often related to sexual desire, and yet so much poetry in the dialogue that scenes can seem delicately pretty when they’re part of an intense slow burn.

Director Lisa Portes’ production simply hadn’t fully come together by opening to light the essential fuses. Neither the relationship between Maria Celia and Lieutenant Portuondo, nor that between the two sisters, has the intricate, complex dynamics needed — you might call it chemistry — to make the story fully involving.

Because there’s so much quality talent involved here, the problem doesn’t become obvious until midway through the second act, when each sister makes a fateful choice. As long as the play feels more about presence and atmosphere than forward narrative, the performances seem individually effective. But when all that setup comes to highly dramatic fruition and the play changes from a slow rhythm to a quick one, we can feel all that’s been missing.

San Miguel’s Maria Celia is great as the grounded intellectual artist but also overly guarded, Mendoza Castro’s Sofia comes off as irrepressible vivaciousness personified but also too obviously naive, and Poss’ Lieutenant Portuondo is convincingly smitten but too nonchalant to lay the foundations for what ultimately occurs. In one instance, it feels like a character transforms into someone completely different; in another the supposedly dramatic choice a character makes feels so obvious that I wondered why the others seemed surprised.

Still, Cruz’s work isn’t produced enough and it is too intriguing to ignore. And this is a fascinating time to see a play about Cubans’ feeling like everything is about to change once and for all. The play suggests we shouldn’t be so sure.