Review: Las Borinqueñas Highlights Exploited Puerto Ricans Behind Birth Control

If good intentions were enough for a work of art, then Las Borinqueñas would be a masterpiece. Nelson Diaz-Marcano’s ambitious new play, making its world premiere with Ensemble Studio Theatre, shines a light on the Puerto Rican women who participated in trials during the 1950s for what would eventually become the first birth control pill. As a way to wrest the spotlight from much-feted white doctors — Gregory Pincus, John Rock, Edris Rice-Wray — onto the unnamed Latina women they exploited on the path toward greater female bodily autonomy, it’s worthy. As drama, though, the play is on shakier ground.

The play’s opening scene establishes its two running narrative threads. Chavela (Nicole Betancourt), a maid at a hotel in New York City in 1955, tells fellow immigrant Rosa (Maricelis Galanes) about a meeting she glimpses between Dr. Pincus (Paul Niebanck) and his wife, Lizzie (Helen Coxe). Pincus and Lizzie plan to recruit Dr. Rice-Wray (Hannah Cheek) to administer trials for a new contraceptive pill he’s developed.

During that scene, Rosa expresses feelings of homesickness for Puerto Rico. Despite Chavela’s reminders of the revolutionary turmoil they fled, they return a year later, where we are introduced to the other women of the play. Maria (Ashley Marie Ortiz) still yearns for Fernanda (Maribel Martinez) and vice versa, but the latter holds on to her husband and three children, afraid of being judged by a society that frowns on homosexuality. Fernanda’s conservative sister Yolanda (Guadalís Del Carmen) frequently regards Maria with disdain for her progressivism. That said, Yolanda herself is having an affair with a married man, Pablo (Mike Smith Rivera), who can’t quite bring himself to leave his wife and fully commit to her.

Diaz-Marcano also highlights the gap between public appearance and private reality in his depictions of the medical trials in Puerto Rico. Dr. Pincus’s assurances to Dr. Rice-Wray that the pill is safe for women turn out to contradicted by all the women, including four of the ones mentioned above, who report mood swings, painful cramps, and other side effects. That, however, isn’t enough to sway Dr. Pincus, who is willing to go to deceptive lengths to make sure the pill makes it to the market.

Taking place over the span of roughly five years, Las Borinqueñas aims to not only tell a famous medical story through a less-familiar historical and cultural lens, but also sketch a portrait of a society torn between those who desire independence from the U.S. and those who prefer to remain under its control. The machismo of the two male characters, Dr. Pincus and Pablo, suggests a critique of the patriarchalism prominent in both societies back then.

Unfortunately, the play as a whole leaves so little to the imagination. The scenes with Dr. Pincus, his wife, and Dr. Rice-Wray might as well have “historical/scientific context” flashing above their heads, so clumsy is Diaz-Marcano’s attempt to pass off bald exposition as organic dialogue. Niebanck, Coxe, and Cheek can only do so much to make their scenes feel like something other than history-class-level reenactments.

That heavy-handedness also afflicts the characterizations of the Latina characters. All the moments of raucous humor and warmth between them can’t quite cover up the fact that they seem less like flesh-and-blood human beings than two-dimensional emblems of Diaz-Marcano’s larger thematic points. (You might not get the humor, either, unless you know Spanish, since Diaz-Marcano has peppered their dialogue with many bits of untranslated slang.)

The most inventive aspect of Las Borinqueñas lies in Diaz-Marcano’s use of radio and television broadcasts in scene changes, with a Broadcaster (also Rivera) offering commentary that sometimes sets up scenes and other times offers snarky counterpoint. Director Rebecca Aparicio shows the most creativity in these bits, with projection designer Milton M. Cordero impressively corralling archival footage and bits of surrealism onto Gerardo Díaz Sánchez’s homely set design.

And the central quintet of Latina performers bring as much life and intensity as they can with their thinly written characters. Ortiz and Martinez generating real romantic heat in their scenes together, and Del Carmen making something genuinely harrowing out of a nightmarish emotional breakdown in the second act. None of the cast’s best efforts, however, are quite enough to banish the impression Las Borinqueñas leaves of a well-meaning yet ultimately overreaching mess.