On Tuesday, October 11, 2011, at 5pm, at CUNY’s Graduate Center, Room C-198, the cast of Cuban theatre troupe Teatro de la Luna, Linda Howe (Wake Forest University) and Ana María Hernández (La Guardia Community College) will discuss the musical Delirio Habanero /Havana Delirium by Alberto Pedro. The Troupe will be in New York to perform this piece at local theaters.

Delirio Habanero is set in 1990s Havana dur­ing the ‘Spe­cial Period in Times of Peace,’ marked by the col­lapse of the Soviet Union and Cuba’s freefall into eco­nomic, social, and moral near-chaos. Three tat­tered souls who believe they are Celia Cruz, the Queen of Salsa, Beny Moré, the King of Rhythm, and Var­illa, the famous bar­man of the Bode­guita del Medio, made famous by Hem­ing­way in the 1950s, sing, dance, and ban­ter about their lives and trou­bles to escape from the crum­bling world out­side.  Mem­o­ries and song help them to relive glo­ri­ous expe­ri­ences as they face an inevitable fate. These inter­ac­tions com­ment on polit­i­cal and racial divi­sions and frag­mented soci­eties yearn­ing for reconciliation.

Since the mid-1990s, the award-winning, inter­na­tion­ally acclaimed Teatro de la Luna has per­formed dynamic plays pre­sent­ing the iden­ti­ties, his­to­ries, mem­o­ries, and cur­rent prob­lems of Latin Amer­i­cans and their immi­grant pop­u­la­tions. The com­pany has trav­eled through­out the world, but in 2004, travel to the US was restricted. In 2010, those restric­tions were lifted, allow­ing one of the best the­ater com­pa­nies in Cuba to pre­miere the musi­cal Delirio Habanero by renowned Afro-Cuban play­wright Alberto Pedro in Winston-Salem. The Teatro de la Luna visit to the United States is sponsored by Wake Forest University and the Rockefeller Brothers Fund.

For detailed infor­ma­tion about the musi­cal and Teatro de la Luna, see Havana Delir­ium: Intro­duc­tion and Study Guides by Ana León Tavora and Patri­cia Swler.

To register, please send an e-mail to cubaproject@gc.cuny.edu