'Butterflies' a lyrical ode to sisters' legacy

Impressionistic but involving Rep show tells of real-life courage, sacrifice

Backstage: In the Time of the Butterflies

Last summer, San Diego Rep had a hit with “In the Heights,” the Broadway musical about a Dominican immigrant trying to make a go of it in a Manhattan barrio.

Squint a bit and the Rep’s latest play, the English-language world premiere of “In the Time of the Butterflies,” could serve as that ebullient show’s flip side ­— a sobering (yet lyrical) look at the struggles and sacrifices endured by some of those back in the home country.

If the Dominican Republic is now the “greatest little place in the Caribbean” (as the “Heights” title song goes), it was bought partly on the backs of people like the real-life Mirabal sisters, the central characters in UCSD grad and OBIE Award-winner Caridad Svich’s saga (based on the Julia Alvarez book).

The Mirabals make music, too: One of the most arresting moments in “Butterflies” comes when two of them, Minerva (Jacqueline Grace Lopez) and Maria Teresa (Maritxell Carrero), sing a haunting, discordant duet while languishing in a Dominican jail.

Those two have been imprisoned for resisting the regime of Rafael Trujillo, the dictator who ruled the island nation for 31 years until his assassination in 1961, and was responsible for thousands of killings.

The Rep’s expertly acted production, which makes up in atmosphere what it sometimes lacks in story detail, explores how Minerva, Maria Teresa and their sister Patria (Elisa Gonzales) found their own tortuous paths to eventual martyrdom.

And like the novel by Alvarez, the play explores their story from the perspective of a fourth sister, Dede, who ultimately backed away from joining the resistance. (She’s portrayed in the play’s 1938-1960 scenes by Sandra Ruiz, and in the “suspended present” by Catalina Maynard.)

Rep associate artistic chief Todd Salovey and artist in residence Herbert Siguenza have teamed to direct a production full of sensory satisfactions, from Ian Wallace’s ravishing, often painterly projections to the tense embrace of Michael Roth’s soundscape and music, which features violinist Batya MacAdam-Somer playing pensive solos from a high aerie.

Kristin Swift Hayes’ moody lighting, Anastasia Pautova’s detailed period costumes and Ericka Aisha Moore’s graceful dance sequences add to the visual richness.

Images of rebirth and metamorphosis inform the show, set in the sisters’ garden; the “butterflies” of the title, though, doubles as a reference to their underground code name.

The cast and creative team do well at delineating each character: the fiery and passionate Minerva (Lopez is particularly convincing here), the devout but steel-willed Patria, the courageous but naive Maria Teresa, and the torn Dede. (Maynard also conveys a visceral sense of older Dede’s lasting agony.)

Co-director Siguenza steps in with solid turns as Trujillo, the girls’ Papa and a DJ, although the latter role doesn’t feel fully developed.

Ruiz doubles as an American writer of Dominican descent who visits the latter-day Dede — presumably a stand-in for the novelist Alvarez.

While “Butterflies” could use a more explicit sense of what the Mirabals did in the underground that earned such wrath from the Trujillo regime, the 90-minute piece succeeds as a tone poem to a tragedy, and to the good that finally flowed from it.

These sisters, after all, helped liberate their country. As one of them says in a kind of heavenly reverie: “In the sanctuary of our dreams, we rise.”


“In the Time of the Butterflies”




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