All Eyes and Ears

HITTING HER MARX Matthews, second from left, is a revolutionary social climber.

Photograph: Carol Rosegg

“For us to have something, someone else had to lose it,” warns Emilio (Martin Sola), a Cuban who remained in his homeland after the revolution but feels as displaced as if he’d emigrated. In Cuban-born playwright Rogelio Martinez’s penetrating if disjointed All Eyes and Ears, Emilio is the only member of his family not enjoying the spoils of war. It’s 1961, and thanks to wife Carmen (Terumi Matthews), they’ve moved from a two-room abode to a grand house with five toilets. Daughter Yolanda (Christina Pumariega) has inherited a closet full of clothes left behind by her room’s former occupant. (Costume designer Michael Bevins gives the performers an array of gorgeous dresses to model.) All Carmen has to do to keep the place is narc on her neighbors.

Not only does filing reports on suspected counterrevolutionary activity earn her favor with officials, it gives the former seamstress money, prestige and power, allowing Martinez to touch on gender and class conflict. The playwright packs in so much that his play veers toward the episodic. Intriguing situations—such as Yolanda’s correspondence with a Soviet boy—don’t reach fruition, and the appearance of a ghost (a former resident of the house) is more decorative than evocative. INTAR artistic director Eduardo Machado’s production skims over the familial relationships, and tentative performances keep the characters’ struggles on simmer instead of boil.