Teatro En Miami Studio: El Celador Del Desierto (1 review)

Teatro En Miami Studio produces a large number of original plays in Spanish. El Celador Del Desierto (The Guardian of the Desert) marks the beginning of the company's second year in their Little Havana blackbox space, and is supertitled in English.

Playwright Ernesto García directs a cast that includes AnniaMaria Martínez, Sandra García, Leandro Peraza, Carlos Bueno, and Marcia Stadler.

Mia Leonin reviewed for the Miami Herald:

It's no mistake that Teatro en Miami Studio (Spanish-language theater's Little Engine That Could), chose Ernesto García's El Celador del Desierto (The Guardian of the Desert) to commemorate the company's second year in its cozy Little Havana black box. Teatro has produced more than 15 plays in only two years -- eight of them penned by García -- and El Celador underscores the Cuban-born playwright's stylistic proclivity to high lyricism.

A tightly choreographed dance and movement series at the beginning of the play and toward the end is energetically executed by Martínez, Leandro Peraza, Carlos Bueno and Marcia Stadler. Their macabre costumes and masks set the scene of a desolate, almost haunted desert, but the driving force of El Celador is the dialogue between the two women.

Martínez convincingly vacillates from desperation to fierceness as she struggles to overpower the grip Lengüita seems to hold over the desert wasteland and its mysteries. García delivers her lines with characteristic thunder, but she also brings an added humor to the role. This gives Lengüita a touching vulnerability by the play's end.

El Celador's English supertitles render a poetic translation that corresponds well with the original text in Spanish, making it accessible to English-speaking audiences. Moreover, it's a vivid window into a vein of theater from a Latin American tradition where the absurd and fantastic reign.

El Celador Del Desierto plays at Teatro En Miami Studio through August 22. (Spanish, with english supertitles)