The Princeton world premiere of Nilo Cruz's "Bathing in Moonlight" — one of the fall's most anticipated new plays — doesn't fully deliver. Watch video
Nilo Cruz's world-premiere play "Bathing in Moonlight" marks the playwright's first return to the McCarter Theatre Center since staging his Pulitzer-winning "Anna in the Tropics" at the Princeton theater in 2003. Fittingly, this play shares the warmth and lyricism of its predecessor.
"Bathing in Moonlight," directed by the McCarter's artistic director Emily Mann, is about love and its persistence in the face of seemingly insurmountable hurdles. Cruz treats his characters with compassion and fills them with a drive for introspection that makes for a contemplative, often philosophical play.
Although the play denies us the opportunity to see its characters develop, or to explore its conflicts to their fullest, Cruz nonetheless weaves a touching human story, helmed delicately by Mann.
Catholic priest Father Monroe (Raul Mendez) has been offering financial help to a struggling family in his congregation, but in the process he has developed romantic feelings for the family's leader, Marcela (Hannia Guillen), who cares for her teenage daughter Trini (Katty Velasquez) and ailing mother Martina (Priscilla Lopez). Father Monroe is not shy about sharing his feelings with Marcela, herself admittedly enamored with the priest but wracked with the guilt of tempting him away from his vows.
As the mutual attraction strengthens, Guillen and Mendez do fine work to show us how the torment weighs on both Marcela and Father Monroe. The duties of household matriarch and parish pastor do not simply dissolve because love is in the air, and neither is able to reconcile their attraction with their religious devotion.
Mendez is at his best when that conflict becomes most arduous. Marcela struggles to remain the steadying force for her family and the voice of reason to her priest, and Guillen shows unmistakably how this burden weighs increasingly on her character.
There's also a moving subplot focused on Martina's failing mental health. When the family's prodigal son Taviano (Frankie J. Alvarez, from TV's "Looking") returns and Martina mistakes him for the younger version of her husband, we recognize not simply a slipping mind, but one that yearns for the love and companionship lost when her husband died. Cruz composes several wistful dream sequences that allow Lopez to show us Martina as a smitten young lover, underscoring the heart of a romantic that refuses to wane. Cruz calls on Lopez to make the most sweeping shifts of character, and she responds with impressive deft.
Also impressive is the show's whimsical use of Edward Pierce's evocative set.The family's Miami home and the walls of Father Monroe's church float in and out gracefully, as Mann moves her cast around the spaces in ways that suggest a rhythmic accumulation of emotion and conflict.
Ultimately, this is a play more about love than it is about people -- Cruz's lyricism pulls the play away from the individuals toward a focus on the powerful emotions driving them. "Bathing in Moonlight" asks big questions about the power and conflicts of love. Character development does suffer -- the play is a perhaps too brisk 100 minutes -- but Cruz's meditation on the need for human connection against great odds remains poignant.
Bathing in Moonlight
The McCarter Theatre Center, 91 University Place, Princeton, through October 9
Tickets available online or by phone, 609-258-2787
Patrick Maley may be reached at patrickjmaley@gmail.com. Find him on Twitter @PatrickJMaley. Find NJ.com/Entertainment on Facebook.