Airborne Sonia and the Wimberly launched BY CAROLYN CLAY
	Sonia Flew By Melinda Lopez. Directed by Nicholas Martin. Set by Adam Stockhausen. Costumes by Kristin Glans. Lighting by Frances Aronson. Sound by Drew Levy. With Carmen Roman, Jeremiah Kissel, Ivan Quintanilla, Amelia Alvarez, Will LeBow, and Zabryna Guevara. Presented by the Huntington Theatre Company at the Virginia Wimblerly Theatre in the Stanford Calderwood Pavilion at the Boston Center for the Arts through November 28.

Peter Pan figures prominently in Sonia Flew, Melinda Lopez’s engaging new play about family, flight, and forgiveness. The work, which is being unveiled along with the new Virginia Wimberly Theatre in which it occupies a first-class seat, has its root in Operation Pedro Pan, the program through which thousands of apprehensive Cuban parents sent their children by plane to America in the wake of the Castro revolution. Lopez, however, fixes on the image of J.M. Barrie’s flyboy taking a furlough home only to find the window of his nursery locked. "I always used to wonder," muses the play’s title character, a middle-aged Cuban-American severed from her kin by Operation Pedro Pan, "what kind of a terrible mother would do that? Even after years and years, wouldn’t you keep the window open? Even through blizzard and rain and heat and locusts, wouldn’t you keep the window open?"

It’s a question that haunts Sonia, who has angrily slammed shut windows at both ends of an American life that stretches from the Bay of Pigs to Operation Enduring Freedom. Act one is set in December 2001 in Minneapolis, where Sonia, a public defender, is raising two children with her Jewish psychiatrist husband, Daniel. Paternal grandpa Sam is about to show up from Miami (a seat of both Cuban and Jewish culture) for a Hanukkah visit when son Zak, home from Brown for the holiday, announces he’s enlisted in the Marines and all maternal hell breaks loose. Act two takes us back to 1961 Havana, where, in a milieu of paranoia and political rallies, spying among friends and co-opting of the young to do the work of the revolution, 15-year-old Sonia’s parents, Orfeo and Pilar, make the wrenching choice to send their only child to safer haven.

"Ninety miles spread across the ocean like oil on water," says Pilar of the distance between Cuba and Miami in a poetic, dry-ice-smoking prologue that prefigures her suicide. How, the play asks, does one survive the loss of a child, however it happens? What do we owe our parents? Our children? Our cultures? Our leaders when they seem hell-bent on disaster? The play incorporates both politics and poetry, and under Nicholas Martin’s direction, the back-and-forth between familial realism and solitary reverie is almost balletic. But what makes Sonia Flew so moving is less its studied, sometimes sentimental artfulness than its feisty portrayal of family life, whether bathed in the sunlight and fear of early-Castro Cuba or tucked into a bicultural jumble of tchotchkes and adamancy in the post–September 11 Midwest.

The evolution of Lopez’s play is a different sort of fairy tale from Peter Pan. A little over a year ago, the author was commissioned, along with three other promising local writers, as a Huntington Playwriting Fellow. The idea that germinated in Operation Pedro Pan grew through mentoring and feedback in this pilot program to become Sonia Flew, which the Huntington, after a staged reading last spring, decided to produce, with artistic director Martin volunteering to helm this the company’s inaugural outing at the Wimberly. And the troupe has done Lopez proud, serving up an excellent cast and sets by Adam Stockhausen that help fuse the play’s heightened fragments and kitchen-sink comedy and drama. From behind a curtain emblazoned with the emblem of the now-defunct Pan-Am airline emerge two sets, one cluttered and comfy, one spare and Caribbean, unfolding from an indented wall of cloud-studded sky.

Each of the company’s six actors plays two parts, one in each act — of which the first is funnier, the volatility and anguish of Carmen Roman’s Sonia cut by the bantering interplay of Ivan Quintanilla as the idealistic Zak and Amelia Alvarez as his charmingly sharp, peacekeeping sister. Most irresistible are Jeremiah Kissel as the wry Daniel, from whom true fire emerges only after occupationally ingrained amelioration, and ART stalwart Will LeBow, brusque, gimpy, and sporting the timing of a Bulova, as Polish emigrant and World War II vet Sam. Zabryna Guevara, who appears as Zak’s military compatriot in the act’s explosive coda, returns after intermission as Pilar, the young, fierce Cuban wife and mother whose Old World life has crumbled into nervousness and nostalgia. LeBow plays the initially cowed Orfeo, a professor who after seeing colleagues shot is roused to a hard burst of heroism. Kissel is all shifty bonhomie as family friend and Castro flunky Tito.

Here Alvarez is pert young Sonia, and Roman plays Marta, outspoken former housekeeper to Pilar’s family. It’s hard to see Roman as anyone but the first act’s angular and vehement powerhouse of thwarted mother love; her character is the focal point even when she’s playing someone else. Still, this second act brings more than just the backstory. There is also, at last, the opportunity to pry open that window to the past. Slipping through it with sorrow and grace, Sonia flies. And so does Melinda Lopez.