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“Skin of Honey” Blends Politics and Lesbian Romance

Out lesbian playwright Odalys Nanin is on the phone, telling me about the subject of one of her upcoming theater productions. Like so many of Nanin’s projects, it’s a woman-centered story. This one, she tells me, will be about a 17th-century nun who fought in the Spanish army disguised as a man, was blessed by the Pope, and, most miraculous achievement of all, stayed a virgin the entire time.

“How do you do that riding horses?” Nanin wonders aloud. She’ll figure it out. She’s writing the play herself.

Nanin has a resume almost as interesting as the nun she’s telling me about. In addition to writing plays, she acts, directs, produces and makes films, among other artistic endeavors.

Nanin currently calls Los Angeles home, and her latest play, Skin of Honey/Piel de Miel, is now enjoying a limited run at MACHA Theatre Company in West Hollywood. Skin of Honey traces the enduring romance between two Cuban women whose lives were disrupted by the Bay of Pigs invasion.

Prior to Skin of Honey/Piel de Miel, Nanin received critical acclaim for her play Garbo’s Cuban Lover, about notorious lesbian womanizer Mercedes de Acosta. Nanin also made a short film of Garbo’s Cuban Lover to promote her screenplay for a feature-length film. Though she has had the opportunity to turn one of her plays into a feature, she ultimately rejected the deal because of “the way it was going to go down.”

Nanin’s plays Love Struck, The Nun and the Countess and Beyond Love have also dealt with lesbian topics. Along with Garbo’s Cuban Lover, The Nun and the Countess was chosen as One of the Best Ten Plays by The Advocate. She is currently working on a new play, titled Strawberry Girl, about a lesbian mother dealing with addiction.

But the debut of Skin of Honey/Piel de Miel is more than just another play premiere for Nanin. She not only wrote, produced, directed and acts in the play, she also leased and renovated the theater it’s performed in. When the Globe Playhouse, a Los Angeles landmark, was facing an uncertain future, Nanin stepped in and revitalized the theater under a new name, MACHA Theater/Films. MACHA stands for Mujeres (Women) Advancing Culture, History and Art.

Nanin has turned MACHA into a cultural center showcasing the artistic endeavors of the Latina and Latino and lesbian and gay communities. The theater experience is intimate, with just 99 seats wrapped around the stage. Because the original Globe Playhouse was created for Shakespeare productions, its design included stage balconies and faux-Tudor accents. In her renovation, Nanin has preserved these features, turning the MACHA Theatre into a hybrid cultural space. It’s Stratford-on-Santa Monica Blvd., with a Latin twist.

Her latest play, Skin of Honey/Piel de Miel follows the romance between two Cuban women, Amelia and Isabel, over a 20-year period. “It’s my first political play that includes a love story,” Nanin explains.

As teenagers, the girls fall in love but find their loyalties diverging after the Bay of Pigs invasion. Tragically separated when Amelia’s family leaves for the United States, Amelia later returns to Cuba to reunite with her lost love. The women’s passion for each other is still strong, but their differing views of life under Castro threaten to drive them apart.

A Cuban native, Nanin came to the United States during the late ’60s, and she remembers what the early years under Castro were like.

Nanin wrote the first scene for Skin of Honey in 1995 after listening to a girlfriend reminisce about Cuba in the early ’60s. It started her thinking about “how you can love someone and yet have different ideals and political views.” This opposition of love and belief became the dramatic conflict at the center of Amelia and Isabel’s story.

Onstage, the young versions of Amelia and Isabel are captivatingly played by Lidiya Korotko and Andrea Rueda. Korotko’s young Amelia is gangly and shy and ardent, unsure of how to pursue her newborn desires.

Rueda is outstanding as the flirtatious and confident young Isabel, who knows what she wants from Amelia, and knows how to get it, too. Their performances capture the earnestness of young love and the rough-and-tumble physicality of schoolgirl sexuality.

As the girls’ love for each other grows, young Amelia’s anti-Castro father is labeled a counter-revolutionary, and the family begins to suffer material deprivations as a result. Meanwhile, young Isabel, the daughter of a loyal general in Castro’s army, embraces her role in the young people’s revolutionary corps as a symbol of the new Cuba.

“I wanted to show the upbringing and the brainwashing of a child,” Nanin says. “That was a big challenge in terms of their love.”

The story of the adult Amelia and Isabel, played by Odalys Nanin and Susan Artigas, is less compelling than that of their youthful counterparts. Their characters are naturally more static, more set in their ways than their teenage selves. They explain the actions of their younger selves rather than engaging in action — although they demonstrate a great deal of movement in one bedroom scene together. Still, their main dramatic function is to reconcile differences so that the women’s romance can be resumed.

The play has created controversy within the Cuban-American community for its relatively neutral portrayal of both pro- and anti-Castro sentiment. Nanin’s ability to elicit empathy for Isabel, both as a inexperienced girl and as an adult, is one of the unexpected strengths of the play. Castro’s regime is pointedly criticized in the play, especially in the subplot, which deals with the persecution of gays and lesbians under Castro.

The U.S., however, also receives heavy criticism in the play from Nanin for its history of imperialism. In this way, the play opens itself up to larger, timely concerns about the United States’ role on the world stage and the treatment of Latinos and Latinas within its borders. Nanin has created a complex and thought-provoking drama about power, assimilation and personal freedom that is capable of speaking to a broad audience.

Skin of Honey‘s drama of opposing political loyalties is in many ways specific to Cuba. However, it runs parallel to love stories told in lesbian literature in which a young lesbian marked as an outsider romances a more conventional (sometimes straight or bisexual) girlfriend. Examples of the genre include movies such as All of Me and Lost and Delirious. As a result, elements of the romance in Skin of Honey will strike a familiar chord in many lesbians.

Unlike more typical bad girl/good girl romances, Skin of Honey presents the audience with a happy ending for the two female lovers. “I wanted to show how love really is the essential force and energy,” Nanin says.

“I am very happy right now,” she continues. Nanin is in a long-term relationship registered under California’s domestic partnership law. “That’s probably why this play has a happy ending.”

You can order tickets for Skin of Honey/Piel de Miel online or watch scenes from Odalys Nanin’s plays and films here. The play runs Fridays and Saturdays at 8:00 p.m. and Sundays at 7:00 p.m. through Oct. 28, 2007.

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