Key West is a decidedly upscale place. Simple wooden homes sell for $1 million or more. Fancy boutiques outnumber bodegas.
But a new play written by a Key West native recaptures the rougher side of island history.
Michael Marrero started working on "Locura" 15 years ago.
"A lot of people forget how Key West used to be before all the tourists and the cruise ships," Marrero said. "As soon as tourism comes into a place and the place is gentrified, it tends to idolize what the past was and create it in a sanitary version."
The version in Marrero's play is decidedly different. It features cockfights, drinking, drugs, sex and physical violence.
"There was a lot of violence down here. There was a lot of drinking. There was a lot of fighting," Marrero said. "All those things associated with a place on the border, you know, a place on the edge."
The play has a simple set — just a couple of boxes — and two actors who mostly portray two characters. Octavio is a young Cuban Conch, or Key West native, like Marrero. Chumpi is Octavio's uncle — like Marrero's father, he was born in Cuba.
NOT SO QUAINT
Marrero said he wrote the play partly out of frustration with the versions of Key West history that appear during tours, in songs and on stage.
"They tend to make a very fluffy, bumbling idiots type of thing, 'back in the day,' and it was this quaint little place and everybody just getting by," he said. "During that time period, these were real men; they were dangerous men."
Key West has a history of smuggling, from rum running during Prohibition to drugs in the 1970s. During that decade, authorities were complicit to the extent that the governor stepped in and removed the Monroe County state attorney from office.
"They tend to make a very fluffy, bumbling idiots type of thing ..." - Playwright/director Michael Marrero on depictions of Key West
The Key West Theater, co-founded by Marrero last year, is hoping to reach a broader audience with the play. It will go to New York for several performances after the Key West run ends March 18. The co-director, Stefanie Sertich, is a theater professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens.
"I've worked on a lot of new plays in New York and this play is so different," Sertich said. "It's real storytelling. It's basic, simple, but it's effective theatrically."
HEADED TO CUBA
After the performances in New York, the Key West Theater plans to perform "Locura" in Havana, in Spanish. The theater is working on an exchange with a Cuban theater company.
Marrero has been to Cuba several times and said he's excited about bringing the stories of the Cuban diaspora back across the Straits.
His father, Jorge, helped supply some of the stories and worked with the cast on pronunciation of Cuban slang (especially the profanity). He's proud of his son's work — but he won't be going along for the Havana production.
"I'm from the old generation," Jorge Marrero said. "I know the embargo didn't work, or anything like that. But I will not go to Cuba as long as the Castros are there. As long as it's Communist, I won't go to Cuba."
"Locura" is at the Key West Theater through March 18.
