De Niro, Drugs and a Bold Debut Cuba and His Teddy Bear by Reinaldo Povod

By WILLIAM A. HENRY III

When Joseph Papp, the nation's leading impresario of serious drama, decided to produce Cuba and His Teddy Bear at New York City's Public Theater, stage veterans gaped at the good fortune of Playwright Reinaldo Povod, 26. A product of Manhattan's turbulent Lower East Side, Povod had never before even written a full-length play. Envy turned to astonishment when Papp announced the show would star Oscar Winner Robert De Niro in his first stage effort since 1970's One Night Stands of a Noisy Passenger. The seven-week off-Broadway run sold out in three hours. After Cuba began previews last month, the Public started selling tickets to overflow crowds to watch the play on closed-circuit TV.

For Povod, this splashy arrival puts unreasonable pressure on the current production and, even more, on whatever he writes next. Early success is followed, almost metronomically, by harsh reappraisal; and in the process, many promising writers are intimidated, disillusioned or silenced. Still, every playwright dreams of seeing his work designed with authenticity, directed with vigor and grace, and acted with menace, tenderness and humor. That is what has happened to Cuba.

The title refers not to Castro's island but to an illiterate Hispanic drug dealer (De Niro) and his much cuddled, much cuffed adolescent son Teddy (Ralph Macchio, star of the movie The Karate Kid). Also on the scene are the father's oafish partner in crime (Burt Young, an Oscar nominee for Rocky) and assorted street-corner toughs, including a junkie playwright who has befriended and apparently seduced the boy, a would-be writer. For De Niro fans, the role of Cuba evokes what he does best in film: veering unnervingly between caressing affection and blind rage. Small wonder that as the son, Macchio looks so skittish that his feet are almost never flat on the floor: he is forever on his toes, primed for flight. Early in the play De Niro makes the boy squirm by pledging to be his best friend, a pal so close he would pick his son's nose for him. Later, when he learns the boy has sampled heroin, he aims a loaded gun at his offspring, then at himself. Cuba is less angry about drug use--he snorts cocaine all the time--than at his son's turning to anyone but him for life's experiences. An eerie, subliminally sexual bond of dominance pervades this womanless household, with the boy serving as a submissive valet, an Edith Bunkerish wife. Macchio, in a brilliant stage debut, sustains that disquieting relationship. Yet he renders Teddy as a talented and basically normal kid, reconciled to the fact that his father may love him but will never understand him.

Povod's story has much incident but not a lot of plot. He relies on arbitrary action more than character development and takes too long reaching an ending. Moments might be cathartic except that these people, with the exception of the son, are not the sort to learn from their mistakes. But Povod knows his terrain, his dialogue is sharp and colorful yet fits the characters, he never bogs down in exposition, and he sentimentalizes nothing. Bill Hart's direction matches the scuffed-linoleum and religious-kitsch realism of Donald Eastman's set and ensures that low-life pathos never overwhelms the play's bawdy, feisty humor.