Blogcritics The critical lens on today's culture & entertainment
Center stage, a lone woman watches a slide show of old family photos. Off to one side, a man with a guitar sits silently, keeping so still that one wonders if he’s just a dummy prop. From this spare beginning, ISLA explodes into a captivating visual-musical memoir.
Island of Colors
Starring co-creator Samantha Blain, co-artistic director of Hit the Lights! Company, the show illuminates the story of her uprooted family. In so doing, it composes a theatrical ode to the love that keeps people going when confronted by wrenching change.
ISLA depicts the young lives of Blain’s aunt Lulu (Blain) and Lulu’s sisters Carmen (Daniela Delahuerta) and Alina, Blain’s mother (Tiffany Iris) as they grow up in Cuba, undergo the Communist revolution, and finally emigrate to the U.S. in 1969. Recorded interviews and old photos supplement shadow puppetry, song, dance, and narrative to gather us in.
Island of Shadows
The shadow puppets and projected drawings help conjure it all. There are the small wonders of family life, like chopping a carrot into a cooking pot. There are the shocks of the Castro regime: bombings; youngsters wrenched away from family and forced into farm work; a nightclub full of exuberant dancing, raided and shut down.
And there are Lulu’s fantastical dreams, most strikingly one involving a surprising interaction with a huge beast.
One of the best things about ISLA is how well it argues for the continuing vitality and importance of old-school storytelling in a world of screen addiction and TikTok attention spans. This all-ages show combines what we would now consider low-tech techniques with inspired artistry to immerse us in the experiences of someone we’ve never met, raised in a culture we may never have experienced.
The Old Ways Are the Best Ways
The puppetry (mostly shadow but also physical), the backdrops of drawings and photos, and the live action communicate more viscerally than anything digital can. The live musical accompaniment from guitarist Claron Hayden – granted, with assists from looping and sampling, but then, that’s pretty old-school now too – adds depth to the live pantomime, the puppetry, the narration, the ancestral interviews, and the overall magical realism. Hayden and Blain co-composed the music, which includes several charming songs sung by the three sisters in production numbers that incorporate glowing harmonies.
The recorded interviews can be hard to understand at times, and there’s Spanish sprinkled throughout the mostly-English script. But those (like me) who aren’t bilingual have nothing to fear. The show’s dominant vocabulary isn’t language per se. It’s emotion and action, expressed physically by the actors in front of the screens and by the puppeteers behind them.
ISLA is presented by Hit the Lights! Company as part of WP Theater’s Space Program residency. It’s at WP Theater through August 29, 2026. Tickets are available at the Hit the Lights! website.
