Hubert de Blanck Company Revives the Play Witches of Salem
«Since Carlos Díaz’s staging with Teatro El Público, in 2000, I have no news that the play has returned to the stage… until these days,» said Esther Suárez Durán in November 2022, when she shared a letter on the Cubaescena portal, where she also specified that Witches of Salem would continue to be staged during the eleventh month of the year.
The original play by Arthur Miller, versioned on this occasion by Fabricio Hernández and represented by the Hubert de Blanck company, had its premiere in October 2022 and returns on weekends in January to the group’s headquarters, located at Calzada 657 entre A y B, Vedado, Plaza de la Revolución, Havana.
«The Witches of Salem is a very classic, famous, very much represented play and taken to the movies. It tells the story of a witch hunt that happened in Salem, Massachusetts, United States, in the 17th century that serves as a pretext for Arthur Miller, a great contemporary American author, to denounce those events…» Fabricio Hernández, artistic director of this version, recently told the press.
«A play that has a dense, forceful, solid, and strong theme, but is written and staged by us in a very dynamic, very contemporary, an attractive way, and that has a message, a very current and timely approach for these times and all eras,» he added.
Yudith Carreño, Faustino Pérez, and Hansel Lestegás are some of the actors involved, and Laura Delgado said that her character is one of the most difficult in the theater and, at the same time, «I have tremendous luck and a tremendous challenge. I am facing it with all my heart, with a lot of studies and effort.»
Arthur Miller’s text was finished in 1952, premiered a year later, and performed on Cuban stages in 1956 and 1960 under the direction of Andrés Castro with his group Las Máscaras.
According to Suárez Durán, in 1961, the play returned to the stage, directed by Abelardo Estorino and Rolando Ferrer, as a show sponsored by the National Theater, and later, in 1968, it was presented by the Taller Dramático, directed by Gilda Hernández.
