“The Cook”
Written by Eduardo Machado
Showing: Goodman Theatre, 170 N. Dearborn, through Nov. 18
Tickets: $15-$38
Contact: (312) 443-3800; goodman-theatre.org

By Lawrence Bommer

CFP theater editor

Whatever else changes, a cookbook is constant to its recipes. In Eduardo Machado’s all-embracing look at 40 years of life in Cuba, this nurturing norm remains true when everything else is fraught with flux. We first meet the title “Cook” in 1958: Gladys has already served 12 years in the Santana hacienda in Havana. It’s New Year’s Eve and Adria, Gladys’ mistress, is about to flee the island, as is the dictator Batista (soon to be replaced by Castro and a different kind of tyranny). When Adria tells Gladys she wishes they could have been friends instead of employer and servant, Adria vows to keep the mansion intact until Adria can return. Adria gives Gladys a mere $700 to maintain a lost lifestyle.

The next two acts take us to 1973 and finally to 1997 as they detail Gladys’ dogged fulfillment of her trust. She must stand up to her unfaithful husband Carlos, a Castro flunky who blames all the regime’s deprivations on “the blockade.” Tragically, Gladys fails to protect her gay cousin Julio from transportation to a prison camp for homosexuals. (“A society that can’t be weak,” Cuba is a basket case where machismo turns phobic.)

Now an old lady who has turned her acquisition into a successful restaurant, Gladys finally meets Lourdes, Adria’s Americanized daughter. Only then does she finally realize the ugly truth about who she worked for all her faithful life.

The dialogue is a tad expository and the plot schematic in its carefully balanced criticism of both Batista and Castro. (The whole issue of racism in Cuba is too neatly unleashed in the final scene). If Machado covers a lot of ground as he proves how the political is always the personal, most of it is convincing and much of it moving.

“The Cook” is equally well served in Henry Godinez’ well-cast Chicago premiere. This time trip seems soaked in authenticity of character and situation and as solid as set designer Todd Rosenthal’s mammoth kitchen with its ranks of ceramic plates and jugs. At its heart—in every way—is Karen Aldridge’s unflagging Gladys, a pillar of patience amid the uproar, public and private, that surrounds her. Aldridge resists the temptation to play Gladys like a Caribbean earth mother: This cook is human, even when her idealistic commitment to her selfish “owners” seems too noble to be true. Equally strong work comes from Edward Torres as her maddening, then mellowing husband, Maricela Ochoa as both the ungrateful mistress and the unknowing daughter and Phillip James Brannon as the would-be hair-dresser whose craving to dress in bell bottoms and a midriff spells his doom.