Machado, Eduardo: 1953—: Playwright

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Eduardo Machado: 1953—: Playwright

Critics have deemed Cuban-born playwright Eduardo Machado one of the leading dramatic voices in his generation of Latino writers. Machado's English-language works, nearly all of them autobiographical or based on his family's experiences as Cuban émigrés to the United States, have earned him a reputation as a trenchant observer of the social, cultural, and political experiences of a generation of Cuban Americans. As New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley noted, Machado explores not just "the paradoxes of his autobiographical hero's cultural identity. He is also delving, with equal parts wistfulness and anger, into the knotty confusions of the political relations between Cuba and the United States; Communism and capitalism as bedfellows in Cuban ideology; and the tortured ties between those who fled that island country and those who stayed behind."

Machado was born in 1953 into a well-to-do Cuban family. For his first eight years, he lived in his grandparents' palatial Havana home, along with a number of aunts, uncles, and cousins. His paternal grandfather had founded a bus company, and his father was an accountant by profession. The years of Machado's childhood, however, also coincided with political turmoil in the island nation: in 1952, Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar seized power, and a guerrilla war ensued for the next six years between Batista's Cuban military forces and those led by Fidel Castro, a Communist leader.

Machado's family was divided on the matter of political loyalties for a time, but—like most of Cuba's middle class—became ardent foes of Communism and Castro. Machado recalled finding machine guns once in a closet, stashed there by his grandfather, and he witnessed other family members burying money on their Havana estate. "I started having these hallucinations," he told the New York Times Magazine, "where vampires and men with canes were coming to get me, and then I would pass out." Worried, his parents sent him to a psychiatrist at the age of five. In the end Castro was victorious, and on New Year's Day of 1959, Cuba became the only Communist state in Latin America.

Forced to Leave Parents Behind

The Castro government soon nationalized private companies, and the buses belonging to the family's transport company were driven away by soldiers. But when the government eliminated the patria potestad (legal right of parents to serve as guardians of their children), and enacted an emigration law along with it, Machado's parents decided to send him to the United States. The eight-year-old became part of Operation Pedro Pan, which allowed Cuban children to emigrate to the United States, where they were taken in by relatives or charitable families. Leaving his parents behind with his little brother to become one of Operation Pedro Pan's 14,000 young émigrés was a wrenching experience. "They were teaching us Marxism in school," he explained to New York Times writer Mireya Navarro. "But my parents treated it like they were gassing us."

In Hialeah, Florida, Machado and his brother lived with an aunt, uncle, and cousins. On their second day in America, the boys were given costumes, told that it was a holiday called Halloween, and instructed to go trick-or-treating in the neighborhood. "I thought we had become beggars," Machado told Navarro, adding, "I hated that holiday ever since." Within a short time, however, Machado's parents were able to emigrate to the United States as well, and his father found work as an accountant in the Los Angeles area. The family relocated to California, and Machado grew up in increasing affluence as his father's fortunes rose. They lived in a succession of increasingly large homes in the San Fernando Valley, but Machado was a maverick who battled with his father and found solace in acting. By the age of 17 he was performing professionally on Los Angeles-area stages. When he signed with an agent, however, he encountered his first taste of career racism. "I was told to get a mustache and a tan and call myself Ed Machado," he told the New York Times Magazine. He won bit parts in television sitcoms, usually as a waiter.

At a Glance . . .

Born Eduardo Oscar Machado in Havana, Cuba, in 1953; son of Othon (an accountant) and Hilda (Hernandez) Machado; married Harriett Bradlin (divorced, early 1980s); emigrated to the United States, 1961.

Career: Began career as a stage actor in Los Angeles, late 1960s; playwright, 1982–; School of the Arts, Columbia University, director of graduate playwriting program.

Address: Agent— William Craver, The Writers and Artists Agency, 19 West 44th St., Suite 1000, New York, NY 10036.

Machado, though he later became openly gay, was married at age 18 to a woman twenty years his senior who had eight daughters. He acted in plays for the Padua Playwrights Festival—where Pulitzer Prizewinning playwright Sam Shepard served as an occasional instructor—and discovered the experimental work of Maria Irene Fornés. He attended some of Fornés's workshops, and some of his first attempts at playwriting, Burning Beach and Stevie Sings the Blues, were produced at the Los Angeles Theater Center. In 1980 Machado moved to New York City and began concentrating on writing full-time.

After a succession of plays such as Rosario and the Gypsies and Wishing You Well, Machado was tagged as one of a new generation of Latino dramatists. In 1988 Time writer William A. Henry III declared him "perhaps the most gifted" among that new generation, but Machado still faced problems in finding venues for his work. "I was the first Hispanic playwright in America to write about upper-class people," he told Henry. "I don't get performed much by Hispanic theaters. I find that odd—they still believe in the stereotype." At other times, critics savaged his plays.

In 1992 Machado's drama about the plight of Cuban immigrants in Florida in the early 1960s premiered in New York City. Once Removed follows the fortunes of Fernando and his wife, who have left their homeland. Once an accountant, Fernando is now a manual laborer. His wife, Olga, stays inside, afraid to answer the telephone for fear that operatives from the Federal Bureau of Investigation or Central Intelligence Agency are calling. She longs to return home, and her husband has promised her they will do so, but she realizes that he has no intention of going back when he accepts a job offer in his professional field and plans to move them to Texas. "Subtly, Machado makes the distant place meaningful to us through her, for she remembers accessible details like the smell of her mother's hands after Christmas cooking," observed Robert L. King in the North American Review. "She defines country as a place where you wake up, not as a land of opportunity."

By this time, several other plays based on Machado's family saga had been staged in New York. The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa was based on photograph he found of his mother with the notation, "The day we cut our hair," and centers around a paternalistic family in Cuba in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Conflicted relationships … between husband and wife and between father and sons … are its focus, as the younger women in the traditional Catholic family become fascinated by the liberating freedoms of the Jazz Age in America. Meanwhile, the father founds a transportation company. In the Eye of the Hurricane fast-forwards the action to 1960, a year after Castro has seized power. The government begins a nationalization of all private businesses, including the father's bus company. Fabiola, which Machado rewrote extensively, centers on the actual Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1961, in which the U.S. government provided military help to a force comprised of anti-Castro exiles in an attempt to invade Cuba. The final play in the group, Broken Eggs, is set at a wedding in California in 1980, when three generations of a Cuban-American family gather at a country club to reminisce and argue. New York Times writer Margo Jefferson saw it in 1994 when it was originally titled Revotillo, and found it "a rich play, with an undertow of sorrow and rushes of anger and humor."

Opus Given Development Grant

Such accolades were not forthcoming, however, when Machado attempted to bring the entire quartet of plays to fruition at the Mark Taper Forum in Los Angeles. He had won a Theatre Communications Group/Pew Charitable Trust grant of $100,000, and was made a playwright in residence at the Taper. Its highly regarded director, Oskar Eustis, had commissioned Tony Kushner's Angels in America, a similarly lengthy stage trilogy, a few years earlier, and the opportunity to produce his plays at the Taper was heralded as the path to mainstream success for Machado. The time at the Taper, however, was fraught with difficulties. Out for a walk one day, Machado was assaulted at gunpoint, and gave up his watch and wallet, but the thief wanted the computer disks he was carrying, which contained the plays and their most recent revisions. Machado refused to give up the disks. In fluent Spanish, he explained to the mugger just what the disks were. "He put the gun against my head, and he very slowly ran the gun down my back from the top of my head to my buttocks," Machado told American Theatre writer Richard Stay-ton. "He asked me what part of my body wanted the bullet." Machado argued for his life for another 15 minutes, and finally the mugger gave up and walked away.

Other problems plagued The Floating Island Plays, as the quartet came to be called. Some at the Taper wanted an all-Latino cast, to which Machado and Eustis objected, but the more politically correct casting won out. It was deemed too lengthy a work, and Machado re-wrote and cut scenes for weeks. The actual production brought worries, for it called for buses onstage, as well as rain and fire. But it was the endless hours of revisiting his family conflicts that decimated the playwright, who sometimes abruptly left rehearsals muttering, "I can't spend any more time with my family," as he was quoted as saying in the New York Times Magazine. Reviews were mostly lukewarm after the production's debut in October of 1994, partly due to the fact that the four plays lasted nearly six hours. "Floating Islands wanted to be a Cuban Gone with the Wind," opined Stayton, "with Havana portraying the mythical homeland of Tara; instead, under the stress of an opening deadline, it was crumbling into a delirious Spanish language telenovela soap that might have been titled Desi Arnaz Waiting for Fidel to Read Paradise Lost."

Saw Parallel in "Elián" Saga

In late 1999 Machado was able to return to Cuba for the first time in 38 years. The journey helped him come to terms with his feelings of living a life in exile, which had been such a pervasive part of his identity. "I felt sometimes at home and sometimes a total alien," he explained to Navarro, describing the experience of being back in Cuba. "I realized I was really American and I couldn't survive there." Based on that experience, Machado wrote Havana Is Waiting, which premiered at the renowned Humana Festival of New American Plays in Louisville.

Havana Is Waiting centers around Federico, who left Cuba and his parents at the age of nine, and is openly gay. A New York writer, Federico accepts an invitation to return to Cuba as a part of a cultural exchange program. He brings his Italian-American photographer friend along, and they discover that Cubans are demonstrating for the return of Elián González, the real-life youngster who became a massive media story and political symbol. In 1999 Elián had survived a disastrous boat trip made by a group of Cubans, including his mother, who navigated treacherous waters between Cuba and Florida in an attempt to enter the United States.

The youngster's relatives in Florida wanted him to stay, but his father in Cuba demanded Elián's return. Federico, witnessing the street demonstrations in support of the father in Havana, thinks out loud: "I wish you would have fought to get me back." The rest of the political frisson in Havana Is Waiting is provided by Ernesto, the taxi driver that Federico hires to take him to visit his family's home. An ardent socialist, Ernesto argues vehemently in support of Castro, but sometimes contradicts himself; indeed, conflicts over political ideologies and even sexual preferences provide the emotional backdrop for the play's action.

Havana Is Waiting went into rehearsals on the same day that the World Trade Center collapsed in September of 2001. There were some sharp anti-American statements in the play, and in the heated atmosphere of the days following the attack, Machado was asked if he had considered excising any of them. He rejected such self-censorship. "The United States has been an imperialist power and I have the right to say that. We can't, at this point, make ourselves victims and blind ourselves," Machado told Navarro. "It's important to see how other people feel about you and try to understand why they feel that way about you."

Selected writings

Rosario and the Gypsies, music by Rick Vartorella, produced in New York, 1982.

Broken Eggs, produced in New York, 1984, published in On New Ground, edited by Betty Osborne, Theatre Communications Group, 1986; revised work produced in New York as Revotillo, 1998.

When It's Over, with Geraldine Sher, produced in New Haven, CT, 1986.

Wishing You Well, produced in New York, 1987.

Why to Refuse, produced in New York, 1987.

A Burning Beach, produced in New York, 1988.

Don Juan in New York City, produced in New York, 1988.

Garded (opera libretto), produced in Philadelphia, PA, 1988.

Once Removed, produced in New Haven, CT, 1992, published in Plays in Process, vol. 9, no. 3, 1988.

The Day You'll Love Me, adaptation of the play by José Ignacio Cabrujas, produced in Los Angeles, 1989; produced in London, 1990.

Cabaret Bambu, produced in New York, 1989.

Related Retreats, also director; produced in New York, 1990.

Pericones, produced in New York, 1990.

Stevie Wants to Play the Blues, music by Fredric Myrow, lyrics by Machado and Myrow, produced in Los Angeles, 1990.

The Floating Island Plays (includes The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, Broken Eggs, and In the Eye of the Hurricane ), Theatre Communications Group, New York, 1991.

Havana Is Waiting, first produced as When the Sea Drowns in Sand, Actors Theatre of Louisville, 2000, produced in New York, 2001.