Theatre in Review: Las Borinqueñas (Ensemble Studio Theatre)

	Ashley Marie Ortiz. Photo: Valerie Terranova

Las Borinqueñas is one of the most ambitious plays we've seen this season, which is why it is among the more disappointing. Playwright Nelson Diaz-Marcano has seized upon a fascinating, complex, and sometimes shameful slice of contemporary history - the controversial trial of the birth control pill using women in Puerto Rico -- but he overloads his script with so many characters and ideas that they collectively struggle to breathe. A running time of an hour and forty minutes isn't nearly enough to do justice to this subject as the playwright envisions it. (The show at EST is a co-production with Latinx Playwrights Circle/Boundless Theatre Company).

The trials were conducted in the mid-1950s by Gregory Pincus, the co-inventor, with John Rock, of the original birth control pill. Their reasons for choosing the island were real: Poverty was rampant, women had little control over their lives, and, despite a robust Roman-Catholic culture, the concept of family planning was already deeply rooted. However, the participants weren't advised of possible side effects. The early version of the pill, which featured a much higher dosage than eventually reached the marketplace, frequently caused dizziness, abdominal pains, and other unpleasant symptoms. Three women died; because no autopsies were performed, the role of the pill, if any, remains unknown.

Even making the charitable assumption that Pincus was a head-in-the-clouds idealist interested only in a felicitous outcome, the decision to use the women of Puerto Rico was, at best, questionable. Worse, he kept some damning company: Margaret Sanger, the family planning pioneer and prominent eugenicist, who wanted to weed the weak and infirm out of the population, was a major supporter, as was Clarence Gamble, of Proctor & Gamble, who was deeply involved in a program of sterilizing Puerto Rican women, sometimes without their consent. (Neither character appears in the play.) It is a terrible irony that a product now seen as a global agent of liberation, freeing women from the constant threat of unwanted pregnancy, was developed using some of their poorest and most ill-educated sisters as lab rats.

It's a banquet of themes and Diaz-Marcano fills his plate, serving up scenes of bureaucratic infighting, five female protagonists with multiple personal problems, the Puerto Rican independence movement, and several sequences of forced satire delivered by a radio broadcaster whose narration fills in gaps in the plot. The scenes focusing on Pincus, his wife Lizzie, and Edris Rice-Wray, a physician who helps facilitate the program, are thin and repetitious, constantly relitigating the same arguments without advancing them. Pincus is almost obsessively optimistic, Rice-Wray has qualms, and Lizzie quietly insists you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs. At the same time, one wonders why characters like Rock and Sanger never appear, and certain points are confusingly presented: At one point, Lizzie ironically refers to her husband as "a disgraced doctor who was fired from his job at Harvard for doing illegal experiments with rabbits." She adds that his research in this area was stolen by Rock, who used it to steal credit for vitro fertilization -- all of which begs the question of why Pincus and Rock have become collaborators.

Similarly, the five protagonists make up quite a crowd. Much of the action centers on Maria and Fernanda, ex-lovers broken up by their families in a very public scandal. (But if they were exposed, subjected to beatings, and railroaded into marriages, how can they now meet socially without risk?) Maria and Fernanda take a lot of flak from Yolanda, Fernanda's sister, who harps on being "a woman of God." She should talk since she is "married" to Pablo, who has another wife, and who, in her role as a nurse, is distributing birth control pills, activities that suggest she isn't much of a stickler for the rules of the Catholic Church. (Pablo is the only male partner we see; nobody's marriage sounds happy, which, the author implies, is par for the course in that time and place.)

As if all this weren't enough, the play unfolds against a background of Puerto Rican nationalism, a movement that reached such a boiling point in 1954, when a gang of rebels shot up the US House, wounding five representatives. We learn that Maria has lost her university scholarship thanks to her beliefs and Yolanda nervously wants to quash talk of all things political. But if you aren't up on this historical episode -- the House shooting isn't mentioned -- it will remain mysterious while watching Las Borinqueñas. Overall, I'd guess, Diaz-Marcano could have written a persuasive drama about the idealism, embedded racism, and scientific hubris that launched Pincus' drug trials. Or he could have come up with a nuanced comedy-drama about five women who enroll in the program, exploring its effects on them during a time of social upheaval and personal questioning. But -- at least not yet -- he doesn't have the wherewithal to combine both into a single compelling dramatic work.

Some of these problems are exacerbated by Rebecca Aparicio's staging, which doesn't always get the best out of the actors. Maricelis Galanes plays Rosa, another of the ladies' circle, in a broad sitcom fashion out of sync with the others; it also leaves us unprepared for a revelation about her forced sterilization. (Rose and her sister, Chavela, could conceivably be eliminated, leaving more space to focus on Fernanda, Maria, and Yolanda.) As Pincus and Rice-Wray, Paul Niebanck and Hanna Cheek can't get past the one-dimensionality of their roles; Ashley Marie Ortiz and Maribel Martinez don't strike many sparks as Rosa and Fernanda. Mike Smith Rivera is solid as the faithless Pablo and as that oily broadcaster. Guadalís Del Carmen does the best work as Yolanda, who starts as a supporter of the status quo but learns to question her so-called superiors.

Gerardo Díaz Sánchez's set, depicting the interior of a Puerto Rican house with cement walls and louvered windows, is suitably atmospheric; it also provides a solid surface for Milton M. Cordero's projections, which uses period footage to evoke Massachusetts, New York, and Puerto Rico; it's an extremely well-researched piece of work. (In one clever touch, a montage of family planning images is delivered to lines of laundry hung across the stage.) Tina McCartney's costumes nicely catch the silhouettes of the period and make a strong contrast between the North American and Caribbean characters. (The men's tailoring is especially well done.) A cramped space with a low ceiling, EST is hell on lighting designers but María-Cristina Fusté's work is solid. The sound design, by Daniela Hart, Bailey Trierweiler, Noel Nichols, and Uptown Works, blends Puerto Rican pop hits of the period, as well as country music, "God Bless America," and "Mr. Sandman."

You probably know the rest of the story: The birth-control pill went on to transform the world, helping to set the stage for cultural battles still raging today but also easing the lives of millions. And, in most cases, the side effects during the trial were sufficiently mild that, given a little upfront honesty from Pincus and his team, the denouement might not have been nearly as dispiriting. (It wasn't the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, for example, but still.) There's quite a story here, one that might require a mini-series to be fully dramatized; this play only gives us a tantalizing taste of it.--David Barbour