Isla
"Isla," the new musical-theater piece from Hit the Lights! Company now at WP Theater, is one of those productions in which the eye is continually rewarded while the mind is left waiting for the story to catch up. It is an act of love, remembrance, and theatrical ingenuity, inspired by the family history of co-artistic director Samantha Blain, whose mother and two aunts fled Cuba in 1969, during the early years of Fidel Castro’s regime, in search of freedom and a new life in the United States. Co-directed by Blain’s colleagues Roman Sanchez and Mikayla Stanley, and assembled collaboratively from family stories, recorded interviews, music, projection, movement, and puppetry, Isla possesses an almost tactile sincerity. Yet sincerity is not the same thing as dramatic necessity. The production has been given an abundance of means for telling its story; what it lacks is a sufficiently compelling story to tell with them. [more]