Sartre Returns to Havana

Cuban theater director Carlos Diaz gathers people around a cage to understand what is happening within as part of his production of Jean Paul Sartre´s The Respectable Prostitute.

The importance of groups with common goals, as opposed to series of independent individuals, is an important quality of Sartre´s later oeuvre.One is drawn into Havana´s Trianon theater by a team of sado-masochist garbed men dancing around iron bars on the stage, inside of which a drama will be played that addresses the collapse of freedom when choice is controlled by others.

The 1946 play was written three years before the French author ever paid Cuba a visit, which he did again in 1960, immediately after the people of this country had decided to take liberty into their own hands.

The stunning prostitute Lizzie, played by Yailene Sierra, trades her body for leverage in the world, but that is not enough to stave off the power elite.

That oppression comes to her in the form of a Senator and his nephew successfully use their power to make the sex worker betray her values.

As the story goes, she had previously witnessed a white man kill a black, but the ruling class duo manage to bribe, threaten and ultimately convince her that it´s better to let the man of color fall guilty, because that´s what people expect anyway.

The power wielders use police as their right hand men and Diaz introduces the most brutish, cruel and horniest gang of law enforcement officers I have ever seen on a stage, in leather and chains and fucking anything that moves.

Sound familiar?

Evidence of bonding in the audience was very clear. Those who didn"t want to be part of the group simply left. And there were plenty.

But those of us who stayed were rewarded with a reminder of oppression and choice.Which sometimes is not so traumatic, and Diaz injects the Cuban response into the last seconds of the piece: a massive conga line that included the entire audience dancing on stage with the actors as a collective light bulb lit above our heads