Discover The Cuban Swimmer, a Play by Milcha Sanchez-Scott

The Cuban Swimmer is a one-act family drama with spiritual and surrealistic overtones by the American playwright  Milcha  Sanchez-Scott. This experimental play can be a creative challenge to stage because of its unusual setting and bilingual script. But it also presents actors and directors with an opportunity to explore identity and relationships in modern California culture. Synopsis As the play begins, 19-year-old Margarita Suarez is swimming from Long Beach to Catalina Island. Her Cuban-American family follows along in a boat. Throughout the competition (the Wrigley Invitational Women’s Swim), her father coaches, her brother cracks jokes to hide his jealousy, her mother frets, and her grandmother yells at the news helicopters. All the while, Margarita pushes herself onward. She battles the currents, the oil slicks, the exhaustion, and the family’s constant distractions. Most of all, she battles herself. Theme Most of the dialogue within â€Å"The Cuban Swimmer† is written in English. Some of the lines, however, are delivered in Spanish. The grandmother, in particular, speaks mostly in her native tongue. The switching back and forth between the two languages exemplifies the two worlds which Margarita belongs to, the Latino and the American. As she struggles to win the competition, Margarita tries to fulfill the expectations of her father as well as the crass American media (the news anchormen and the television viewers). However, by the play’s end, when she drifts beneath the surface when her family and the newscasters believe that she has drowned, Margarita separates herself from all outside influences. She discovers who she is, and she saves her life (and wins the race) independently. By almost losing herself in the ocean, she discovers who she truly is. The themes of cultural identity, especially Latino culture in Southern California, are common in all of Sanchez-Scotts works. As she told an interviewer in 1989: My parents came to California to settle, and the Chicano culture there was so different to me, very, very different from Mexico or where I came from [in Colombia]. Yet there were similarities: we spoke the same language; we had the same skin color; we had the same interaction with culture. Staging  Challenges As mentioned in the overview, there are many complicated, almost cinematic elements within  Sanchez-Scott’s The Cuban Swimmer. The main character is â€Å"swimming† the entire time. How would you, as a director, portray this action on stage?Margarita’s family puts along on a boat. How would you convey this? With a set? Pantomime?Helicopters and news commentators â€Å"interfere† with the characters. In what ways could sound effects enhance or sully the play? The Playwright Milcha  Sanchez-Scott was born in Bali, Indonesia, in 1953, to a Colombian-Mexican father and an Indonesian-Chinese mother. Her father, a botanist, later took the family to Mexico and Great Britain before settling in San Diego when  Sanchez-Scott was 14. After attending the University of California-San Diego, where she majored in drama, Sanchez-Scott moved to Los Angeles to pursue an acting career. Frustrated by a dearth of roles for Hispanic and Chicano actors, she turned to playwriting, and in 1980 she published her first play, Latina. Sanchez-Scott followed the success of Latina with several other plays in the 1980s. The Cuban Swimmer was first performed in 1984 with another one-act play of hers, Dog Lady. Roosters followed in 1987 and Stone Wedding in 1988. In the 1990s,  Milcha  Sanchez-Scott largely withdrew from the public eye, and little is known of her in recent years. Sources Bouknight, Jon. Language as a Cure: An Interview with Milcha Sanchez-Scott. Latin American Theatre Review, Spring 1990.Mitgang, Herbert. Theater: Dog Lady and Swimmer. The New York Times, 10 May 1984.