Eduardo Machado February 1996

PETER: So…who was at Sardi’s last night?

EDUARDO: …Dmitri, Tim. You met Tim. He’s the one with the cigars, the Cuban cigars. Paul. Rod, who works at New Dramatists, and me. And then, later on, really later, Colette came with a friend. So that’s who was at Sardi’s.

PETER: You go there every Friday night?

EDUARDO: Most of the time.

PETER: And who are all these people that you go with?

EDUARDO: Well, sometimes it’s actors that I know. A lot of them have been my students. You know, we have that little theater on Varick and Canal – The Playwrights Collective – of which I’m a member now.

PETER: What does that mean?

EDUARDO: Well, I got to do the door yesterday.

PETER: Oh really? You worked?

EDUARDO: Yeah, I got to do the door and charge people for money. I really enjoyed it. Because I like the way people treat you when they don’t know who you are.

PETER: When they don’t know who you are?

EDUARDO: I mean, they think you’re just the doorman, getting the money. Their whole attitude about you is so different. I find that fascinating, how a job can immediately make people make an assumption about the person. I answer the phone at New Dramatists all the time, and I’m really shocked at how nasty some people are…people who would be so nice you me, you know…

PETER: What do you think that’s about? Class? Status?

EDUARDO: It’s about class. It’s about making an assumption that people will set themselves apart when maybe they don’t, you know? Actually making a big assumption.

PETER: I think the treatment of class in “The Floating Islands” plays is so interesting. They’re very class-aware plays.

EDUARDO: Right. That makes them political plays I think.

PETER: But your observations on class are very subtle. They’re not doctrinaire. I mean, is it mostly gleaned from observation? Or a4re there certain points that you want to make beforehand that you then fit into the play?

EDUARDO: God, you know, those plays were all written at such different times in my life. I would think that in “Modern Ladies” there was a point that I wanted to make because it starts out, the head of the household is Basque, right? And he comes to Cuba because he’s a criminal. And then, the mother is a Catholic. And so, it’s a combination of the two things that make up your family. And then they throw it away for capitalism.

PETER: So, there it is.

EDUARDO: They all sell it. And they sell their lives and end up being refugees themselves later on, … I think that one, I knew that that’s what I was saying. I think “Faviola,” which was actually the first play I ever wrote…

PETER: Oh, really? That’s such a great play.

EDUARDO: I think I didn’t know what I was saying.

PETER: It’s about a ghost.

EDUARDO: (laughs) Yeah, it’s about being haunted. I think its about being haunted about the mistakes of your youth. And letting guilt destroy your life.

PETER: Like, with which characters?

EDUARDO: Pedro. The brother, you know…

PETER: Oh, and also the widower of the…

EDUARDO: …of the ghost…

PETER: …of the young woman who’s died.

EDUARDO: Yeah.

PETER: Actually, to me, Pedro was overwhelming. He seemed to have completely lost it. During most of the play he was just completely out of it.

EDUARDO: Yeah. Someone who took the walk. So that one, I didn’t know what I was doing. In “The Eye of the Hurricane” I certainly knew the political point that I was making.

PETER: It’s all about the Cuban Revolution. But you really don’t take sides.

EDUARDO: No.

PETER: I mean, you say that Batista was a creep. And then, Fidel turned out to be a creep.

EDUARDO: Right.

PETER: That’s pretty much what you think?

EDUARDO: Yeah, I think that’s what I think. Yeah. My favorite line in the play is when he’s lying down in front of the bus and the bus goes backwards. And he says – “We didn’t think about the reverse.” (laughter) Which to me, is the Cuban Revolution, you know?

PETER: Actually, reading the plays, it’s hard to tell how funny they are. So, the audiences, they’re usually…

EDUARDO: They laugh a lot.

PETER: And the other thing I thought was really amazing is – the language is really austere. It almost sounds like Spanish.

EDUARDO: That’s what I wanted. I wanted English to sound like Spanish.

PETER: How do you do that?

EDUARDO: You don’t, you think about the melody of their speech that somehow has to do with the melody of their language, they're interconnected. And if you stay true to that, then it’s not hard work. It’s just the way that you hear it.

PETER: Were the plays ever translated into Spanish?

EDUARDO: Yeah. By me and Rene Buch, who runs Repertorio Espanol.

PETER: Oh, so you translated your own work?

EDUARDO: Yeah. They were done in Spanish. It was hard because Spanish is so romantic, that you work very hard not to make it romantic.

PETER: By romantic you mean…

EDUARDO: It’s so melodic…that it sounds poetic…

PETER: Right.

EDUARDO: …in a way that I don’t really like. So I worked very hard to have it not sound poetic. In the translation, I actually worked to have it sound colloquial…It was hard. And Rene was really helpful – and the actors, because most of them are Cubans in this group. I think they’re going to do “Eye of the Hurricane” now. And I think they’re going to take it to Cuba.

PETER: Oh, really?

EDUARDO: As soon as they can. Because there’s a cultural exchange now.

PETER: Do you have a political identity in the Cuban-American community?

EDUARDO: Yeah, as a leftist – and as a Communist.

PETER: But you’re pretty critical of Castro.

EDUARDO: They don’t think so. Just the fact that I stay neutral …and because the plays are also a criticism of them – of Cuban society.

PETER: Do you think so? I mean, I find the depiction so tender.

EDUARDO: They think so. They think it’s a harsh criticism of them, because anyone who is a minority wants, in a way, to be sugar-coated in everything that’s written about them. So anything that isn’t, they take it as a very harsh indictment. I’ve said in the papers that I think the embargo should be dropped. So that immediately makes you a Communist. But I think that I was perceived as a Communist before that. There’s this other play of mine about Cuba called “Once Removed.” It’s a comedy about this family that moves to Hialeah. They hate it there. They eventually go to Dallas, Texas. And a lot of the times, people say really nasty things about Americans, which I remmember my parents saying. And they wanted to do it in Miami, and they wrote me a letter about all the lines they would cut out.

PETER: Wow!

EDUARDO: And I wrote them a letter saying – I really haven’t started wrtiging plays to appease rightwing extremists. And they wrote me a letter saying – it seems to us, you’re the other kind of extremist. And from then on, I was branded a Communist. That was around 1985.

PETER: Is there…

EDUARDO: People booed when the did “Broken Eggs” in Miami.

PETER: Is there any kind of progressive political group in the Cuban-American community?

EDUARDO: Yes…

PETER: But they’re a minority?

EDUARDO: But they’re scattered and in a minority.

PETER: And are the younger people as right wing as the older ones?

EDUARDO: For the most part, if they live in Miami. If they don’t live in Miami, no.

PETER: And so, what do you think will happen when Fidel dies? Or do you have any ideas about what’s going on there right now?

EDUARDO: Oh, I think something is going to happen before. I mean, he’s making so many concessions already. You know, I don’t think it will ever be what anybody thinks it’s going to be. I don’t think that the Cubans here will go back…I would imagine what will happen is, the Cubans here will go and buy it back. It seems the most logical thing, to me. I think it’s still lik,e a decade away, which is very sad.

PETER: In “The Eye of the Hurricane”, you describe the quick changes that took place in the Cuban Revolution; and there was a brief moment when Fidel was perceived as a sort of national hero?

EDUARDO: Right.

PETER: What do you think pushed him into that kind of Stalinist dictatorship?

EDUARDO: He got rid of the Americans in a very brutal way – by taking their property. And he was never going to be forgiven after that. And I think he had socialist inclinations. And I think the only people that heolped him were the USSR and then that sort of set his fate. But I think he had socialist inclinations. When the country thought he had democratic inclinations…so, I think that that was the big surprise for the country.

PETER: Those plays were written when you were still quite young and yet have an epic dimension. Did you set out to write an epic, or did it just develop that way?

EDUARDO: It developed that way very early on. I set out to save myself by writing. Then very quickly I realized where things were going.

PETER: And how does one save oneself by writing?

EDUARDO: One is able to look at oneself very harshly and that makes it possible for you to really find yourself, and who you are. In a way, you can’t do it in acting, bcause in acting you’re always losing yourself. You’re using yourself to lose yourself. I used to be an actor. With writing, you’re using yourself to define yourself.

PETER: Most of the characters have something to do with your family?

EDUARDO: Yeah, yeah. My great grandfather was a Basque…

PETER: Oh, really?

EDUARDO: Almost seven feet tall and blond. He married my grandmother. They were butchers. And my grandfather was an orphan, and he started a bus business with them. And my great grandfather was shot – nobody knows by who. It was also a way of trying to understand politics. Because when you’re the son or grandson of very powerful people that you’ve seen collapse and whom the world condemns for something that they don’t condemn themselves for, you know, and you love them – you have to figure out a way to justify them.

PETER: From an American point of view, it’s rare the way politics and psychology and ideology are intertwined in the plays. I mean, the psychology of the family, the power politics of the family, the beliefs of each member of the family, whether they’re Catholics or political types.

EDUARDO: Right.

PETER: It’s not something generally depicted in American literature.

EDUARDO: Because Americans don’t think that way because they’ve never had to live it, really. I think maybe in the next ten years they will. But they’ve never really been confronted with it. They had the Civil War, and Gone With the Wind comes out of that.

PETER: There are certain American authors that your world really makes me think of. One of htem is Faulkner.

EDUARDO: A lot of people have told me that.

PETER: And I thought the austerity of the plays had something to do with O’Neill. Is that somebody you ever think about?

EDUARDO: yeah, I do. I think he’s a great playwright.

PETER: Your plays don’t strike me as very European plays.

EDUARDO: No, they’re American plays. They’re about becoming American, actually.

PETER: So, you have tell us about your new movie.

EDUARDO: It’s called Exiles in New York. it takes places during the Halloween parade. And it’s three interconnected stories. One is about a woman in Pennsylvania who finds out that her brother has died. She has been estranged fromhim for ten years because he wanted to be a musician and came to New York. And her mother is a very religious woman. And when she finds out that he died, she thinks she sees him playing the piano in different places. And she decides to come to New York, and she comes the day of the Halloween parade.

All she knows is the name of the piano bar that he worked at, called The Monster. She makes her way down to the piano bar. Someone recognizes her as his sister; he says he knows who has his ashes. They go downstairs and a lot of people are doing cocaine.

And a guy dressed like the devil offers her some, which is something she’s always wanted to try. She sniffs it and she sniffs more and more. But it’s heroin and she starts vomiting and she runs out to the street and passes out.

And this guy in a leather hood on a motorcycle, stops, picks her up and takes her. He’s the guy who has her brother’s ashes, her brother’s lover. And he tells her he won’t let her have them until she knows who he was, because she only knew the boy. He plays her tapes of him as an entertainer and he was happy as an entertainer. He was a very mild success. At the end of it, he gives her his ashes and she says – no, let’s spread him all over the city; it was his home; let’s spread him at Barney’s, their Armani suit counter. And then, she goes home and has a fight with her mother.

The next story is about this English guy who comes to New York to lose himself. He doesn’t have working papers, he doesn’t have any money because he ran away from home. A very tyrannical father. And he meets this woman who helps young English guys; that’s one of the things she likes to do. And they really hit it off and have sex. She thinks that he’s about nineteen. And the next day, she looks for his wallet and finds this picture and realizes that it’s her son. Because she had been married to a guy when she was very young, and left him. And so she tells him and he starts becoming psychologically blind.

PETER: Wow.

EDUARDO: And she starts drinking again. And she ends up at an AA meeting saying that she had been on the wagon for ten years, but that she fucked her son and she’s become an alcoholic, and they all start yelling bravo. And he gets lost in the city.

And the third story is about this fancy Italian restaurant where there’s this bus boy from Ecuador that everybody has the hots for. But the guy says he’s straight. Then one day this girl named Lola comes to visit and he’s just crazy about her and they say – well, it’s Haslloween night, we’re going to go see her sing.

And they take him to this show – it’s a drag queen show. But he won’t believe it, because he gets a hard-on when he’s watching her sing. So they bet him his wages that she’s really a guy. And he takes her off to her apartment. And her place is full of stuffed animals – lions and stuff, and parrots and jungle noises; and she watches “King Kong” all the time. And he tries to seduce her and she’s playing coy and he says – “See, you’re not a guy because a guy would just give it to you right away.” And that gets her really pissed off. And she takes off all her clothes and she says – “Come here and take a look.” And he sees it’s a guy and beats the shit out of her. And the other guy comes and stops him, and he says – “OK, I am a fag – you can fuck me, you’re right.” And the other guy says I wanted you to love me – and he says nothing is what it seems in America.

At the end, the sister comes back to New York because she really can’t live with her mother anymore. And she runs into the guy who’s blind. He’s like at the corner, begging for money and he’s going – “I’m Oedipus the King. I’m from Thebes. I fucked my mother. Give me a quarter.”

She says – “I want to help you cross the street.” He says, “You don’t understand. Don’t touch me. I fucked my mother.” And she says, “but I still like you.” And that’s how the movie ends, because I think that’s sort of New York. All the chance circumstances.

You can’t put this in the story, but do you want to hear something really funny?

PETER: Only if I can put it in.

EDUARDO: Oh…

PETER: Otherwise, we’ll get off track.

EDUARDO: It’s about other people, I can’t tell you…

PETER: OK…

[Break in tape]

PETER: That’s a really great story.

EDUARDO: Right.

PETER: Have you started shooting?

EDUARDO: No.

PETER: Have you started casting?

EDUARDO: Yeah.

PETER: And you’re directing it?

EDUARDO: Yeah.

PETER: The movie has so many locations and parts of town and stuff. It’s like…

EDUARDO: Its like Nashville (laughing).

PETER: But I mean, it will be a challenge.

EDUARDO: It’s going to be a challenge because we don’t have a lot of money.

PETER: And who’s producing it?

EDUARDO: The Shooting Gallery.

PETER: Who are they?

EDUARDO: They’re this group of people who produce low-budget movies in New yOrk. Anywhere from $500 to $8 million.

PETER: Peanuts.

EDUARDO: Yeah.

PETER: And what’s the difference between writing for theater and film?

EDUARDO: Theater is all about what is said. And film is all about what is not said. So, film is actually making scenes out of what in theater would be stage directions. And stage direction is what in theater would be dialogue. And its very hard to learn. It took me a long time to learn it.

PETER: In “The Floating Islands” one realizes that one goes through this entire history of the twentieth century…this saga of these families – but it’s almost all sitting around a dining room table.

EDUARDO: That’s theater. That’s what O’Neill is about. For me, if I want to go lots of different places, I’ll make a movie. Why bastardize the medium? But that’s my own prejudice. A lot of people would disagree with me.

PETER: About theater?

EDUARDO: A lot of people think theater can go anywhere. For me in theater you have to deal with its limitations to make it something – not try to make it something else. It can never be slick. No matter what they do, how much money they spend on sets, it’s never going to be slick, it’s never going to compete with movies that way. It can’t.

PETER: Right.

EDUARDO: No matter what, it’s real people every night.