Theater: Repertorio Español / 138 E 27th St, New York, NY, 10016
Synopsis:
A timely story about compromising moral values for the sake of getting rich quick. A Cuban man keeps his promise to bring a friend’s son to the United States. After the young immigrant gets a real taste of hard labor, he decides to accept a job offer as a director of a medical clinic conscious of the job’s dubious nature. He begins to enjoy the benefits of quick earned cash, but his world is turned upside down when he is arrested by the FBI accusing him of Medicaid fraud. After being released on probation, he realizes that he must make a difficult decision, whether to stay in the country and face prosecution or return to his former life in Cuba. Generational, political, and moral differences collide in this modern day drama written and directed by Yoshvani Medina.
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July 24, 2012: The playwright and director Yoshvani Medina was born in Cuba, and judging from “Probation,” his engaging work presented by Repertorio Español at the Gramercy Arts Theater, he is consumed with ambivalence about that country. Throughout the play, essentially a dialectic between pro-Cuban and pro-American sentiments, Mr. Medina resists taking sides, wisely preferring to explore gray areas in each perspective.
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July 18, 2012: The use of foreign language in a play presents many obstacles that the medium of film doesn’t have to face, as the use of captioning in theater can be a difficult option to utilize. Repertorio Español, a theater that features works entirely in Spanish, has found an innovative way to assist their audiences who aren't fluent in Spanish by utilizing a new caption system in which each seat has its own screen of simultaneous translations in English. The system isn’t perfect, but being able to hear a play in its intended language adds an appealing authenticity to Probation, a play centered around the plight of an ambitious Cuban immigrant.
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July 14, 2012: "Probation" is best viewed as playwright and director Yoshvani Medina's even-handed look at the conflicting worldviews of a Cuban exile living in Miami, Fla., and a native born and raised Cuban. The three-character play is presented in Spanish at Repertorio Español, but the theater has a new captioning system, a little screen in front of every seat that offers the option of a simultaneous written English translation.
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July 24, 2012: Greed and duplicity derail a Cuban man's dream of a better life in the U.S. for himself, girlfriend, and unborn child in Yoshvani Medina's Probation at Repertorio Español, which has the potential to both tap the hearts and minds of theatergoers. But despite a trio of fine performances, and the kinetic staging the playwright has given his work, thin plotting and reliance on narration through monologue undermine the promise of the play, performed in Spanish, with simultaneous translation available via individualized screens at each seat.
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