Review: 'Two Sisters and a Piano' at Writers Theatre

Nilo Cruz had already found his voice before he won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 for “Anna in the Tropics.” The evidence sits in “Two Sisters and a Piano,” a play Cruz wrote in the late 1990s that shares the later work’s lyrical density and its preoccupation with beauty under siege. Writers Theatre in suburban Glencoe is currently staging this earlier piece, and the production lands somewhere between admirable and frustrating, hitting genuine peaks while failing to sustain them.

Cruz, a Cuban-American playwright, sets the action in 1991 Havana, during the final months of the Soviet Union’s collapse. The timing matters. Cuba’s dependence on Soviet subsidies made that particular moment one of profound uncertainty, and Cruz uses the political atmosphere not as backdrop but as a character in itself. The totalitarian state seeps into every corner of the play.

The central contradiction Cruz builds his drama around is elegant and unsettling. The two sisters of the title live in their family home, a space Cruz specifically instructed designers to render as open and airy rather than cramped. He wanted the audience to feel the home’s warmth, its history, its sense of belonging. Then the play makes clear that this warm, spacious home is also a prison. The sisters are under house arrest.

That compression of comfort and captivity is where Cruz’s writing does its most powerful work. A home becomes a cell without changing its furniture. Freedom becomes something you negotiate in small increments, if at all. The play understands that totalitarian control doesn’t always announce itself with concrete walls. Sometimes it shows up looking like your living room.

The Writers Theatre production captures some of that thematic richness, and there are moments when Cruz’s prose, which operates closer to poetry than conventional dramatic dialogue, lands with genuine force. The play’s lyricism rewards patience. Cruz builds meaning slowly, through accumulation and repetition, through the weight of things left unsaid between two women who know each other completely and are still, in certain ways, strangers to each other.

Those high notes are real. But the production struggles to maintain the tension between them. The pacing wobbles in ways that allow the play’s more elliptical passages to drift rather than resonate. Cruz’s style demands that every silence feel loaded, every digression purposeful. When the production’s rhythm falters, those silences start to feel like gaps rather than choices.

It’s a difficult play to stage well. Cruz wrote it before “Anna in the Tropics” refined some of the same impulses, and the seams show in places. The dramaturgical structure is looser, the emotional arc less cleanly resolved. A strong production can carry the audience through those rough patches on sheer atmospheric momentum. This one manages it sometimes.

What keeps the evening worth attending is the writing itself, even when the production can’t fully honor it. Cruz’s 1991 Havana feels lived-in and specific. The Soviet collapse happening offstage creates a sense that the ground beneath everything is shifting, that the rules of the sisters’ captivity might change before anyone understands how. That historical specificity gives the play’s more abstract passages an anchor.

Writers Theatre has built its reputation on intimate, text-forward productions, and the space serves Cruz’s chamber drama well. The physical proximity to the performers helps during the stronger stretches. You feel the claustrophobia the sisters feel even in their deliberately open home.

The production earns a qualified recommendation, emphasis on qualified. Audiences who know Cruz’s later work will find it genuinely interesting to watch those themes in earlier form. Audiences new to him might leave wondering what the fuss is about. The answer is in the writing, present here even when the staging doesn’t fully excavate it.

“Two Sisters and a Piano” runs at Writers Theatre in Glencoe. For two women caught between a dissolving world and an uncertain future, Cruz builds something worth sitting with, even if this particular production doesn’t always give you enough lift to stay airborne.