Some shows warm up an audience; ISLA seduces one. Long before the house lights dim at WP Theater, the room is already swaying to a pre-show playlist of Cuban anthems — Celia Cruz, the fiery voice who rose with La Sonora Matancera, and the immortal “Che Che Colé” of Willie Colón and Héctor Lavoe. Meanwhile, guitarist and co-composer Claron Hayden is already seated in his corner of the stage, an oracle in waiting, and Samantha Blain quietly feeds a vintage carousel projector with photographs of Havana — beaches, bicycles, grandmothers, ghosts. Consequently, by the time Blain turns to us and says “Hola,” we are no longer an audience. We are family, gathered at the table for a bedtime story that is, in her words, “half memory, half myth.”

The Story: Three Sisters and the Island That Would Not Let Go

That story belongs to the Blain sisters — Carmen, Alina, and Lulu — who fled Cuba on the Freedom Flights in 1969, landing first in Miami and eventually settling under one roof in upstate New York. From acclaimed Astoria ensemble Hit the Lights! Theater Co., ISLA weaves their actual recorded voices — interviews Blain captured in 2018 — through live music, three-part harmony, shadow puppetry, and stagecraft of astonishing tenderness. The sisters remember black-sand beaches and live seahorses; they also remember the sign that went up after the revolution: “Nadie Sale de la Isla!” — no one leaves the island. One recording lands like a sudden shock: “Fidel thought he might be able to brainwash these little kids into communism. It did not work.” Another simply says, “She was one of the bravest people I ever met.” And when a sister recites her exit-visa number — 129,915 — and is asked what it meant, the answer rings out twice: “Freedom! Freedom!” Later, sung a cappella as the sisters cross the ocean, the haunted hymn “Today’s World” carries the evening’s hard-won wisdom — “as the days pass and the nights return, the horrors and troubles will come back, just the same” — which is exactly why these stories must be told, and retold. It is, unavoidably, the story of every family that ever crossed water toward liberty, told with the intimacy of a kitchen and the sweep of an epic.

The Performances: A Trio in Glorious Harmony

As Lulu, Samantha Blain — who conceived the piece from her own family history and co-composed its score — is our warm, wry guide, equal parts archivist and enchantress. She narrates, she projects slides, she pulls a bomb from the mouth of a giant, ailing alligator puppet (yes, really — and you will believe it). Daniela Delahuerta brings Carmen a smoldering dignity as well as a voice that turns the nightclub reverie “La Musica” into pure liberation theology — “la musica es el ritmo de dios,” she sings, and who would argue? Meanwhile, Tiffany Iris gives Alina a cheeky ferocity, defiant before soldiers, luminous in “Dance with Me.” Together, in numbers like “Mami” and “Flores Morir,” their harmonies braid grief and joy so tightly you cannot tell where one ends and the other begins. Furthermore, the puppetry ensemble led by designer Casey Scott Leach — cackling chickens, a scuttling scorpion, a lizard, a flying crocodile who turns out to be the island itself — supplies the magic-realist bloodstream, while Vittoria Orlando’s lighting and the co-direction of Roman Sanchez and Mikayla Stanley keep each and every shadow exactly where the heart needs it.

Claron Hayden: The Guitar as Narrator

Special praise, however, must go to Claron Hayden, who underscores nearly the entire performance live, watching the stage like a hawk and riffing with the instincts of a jazzman and the patience of a monk. His guitar is not accompaniment; it is weather. It foreshadows, consoles, interrupts, remembers. Inspired, the company notes, by Hayao Miyazaki’s use of sound, Hayden’s motifs return transformed the way memories do — slightly changed, newly meaningful. It is the finest sustained feat of live theatrical underscoring this critic has encountered in seasons.

Why It Matters: Memory as Inheritance

Peter Brook taught us in The Empty Space that theater can begin with nothing more than a person crossing an empty space while another watches. ISLA proves that with three screens, a guitar, and a flashlight, that empty space can hold an entire homeland. Likewise, scholar Svetlana Boym observed in The Future of Nostalgia that reflective nostalgia does not attempt to reconstruct the lost home; instead, it “lingers on ruins, the patina of time and history, in the dreams of another place and another time.” That is precisely ISLA’s genius: it lingers, it cherishes, and then it passes the fragments forward. “I can give these stories to my daughter,” Lulu tells us, “and then maybe one day she’ll give them to someone else.”

WP Theater: A House Built for Stories Like This

Fittingly, this premiere lives at WP Theater, now in its 48th season as the nation’s oldest and largest theater dedicated to Women+ artists — a house that helped launch Lynn Nottage, Katori Hall, Rachel Chavkin, and Danya Taymor, and whose Space Program made ISLA possible. Hit the Lights!, the Queens ensemble behind WHALES, HORSETALE, plus shadow puppetry for Vogue, has found the perfect home. In the end, as the sisters themselves say on tape: “we are pretty tough cookies, the three of us.” So is this show. Go — and bring someone you love.

Organizations, Contact Information, and Tickets

WP Theater, 2162 Broadway (at West 76th Street), New York, NY 10024. Box Office: (929) 458-0636. Website: wptheater.org. Tickets for ISLA (through August 30, 2026). The show runtime is 75 minutes without intermission: wptheater.org/tickets. 

Hit the Lights! Theater Co., Astoria, Queens, NY (Company-in-Residence at Court Square Theater, Long Island City). Email: hello@hitthelights.org. Website: hitthelights.org. ISLA production page: hitthelights.org/isla