Them Belly full But you might be left a little bit hungry BY MEGAN GRUMBLING
	Yemaya’s Belly By Quiara Alegria Hudes. Directed by Peter Sampieri. Produced by Portland Stage Company through March 20. Call (207) 774-0465.

When young Caribbean islander Jesùs reaches for his first bottle of ice-cold Coke, he recoils and drops it, as if it’s stung him. Turns out this is his first encounter not only with Coca-Cola, but with refrigeration, and it will prove a bracing awakening. Jesùs’s coming of age and into bigger worlds is the story of Yemaya’s Belly (produced by Portland Stage Company), the winner of the 2003 Clauder Competition for New England Playwriting, by Quiara Alegria Hudes.

As a result of winning a game of dominoes against his wily uncle Jelin (Joaquín Torres) and the village rum peddler Tico (Gilbert Cruz), Jesùs (gamine Alexis Camins) happens to be away in the city with his uncle, drinking that cold Coke, when his village burns to the ground and kills his parents. He won’t stay in the village after that. He wants his name on a neon sign; he wants to stay in the fanciest hotel; he wants to meet America’s President, and so steals back to the city. There he helps a woman named Lila (Brigitte Viellieu-Davis) run her grocery, sleeps on the shop’s floor, and befriends the young port-rat Maya (Stephanie Beatriz), whose mother once ran a business boating immigrants to America. He dreams nonstop of the land where there are, Maya tells him, "1000 different kinds of Coke."

Does the story sound familiar? To a sometimes trying extent, it is. But to enliven what often come across as well-traveled tropes in Jesùs’s developing-world narrative, Hudes infuses her play’s sensibility and style with the bright rhythms of Caribbean spirituality. The "Yemaya" of the title is the maternal oceanic goddess of the Latin American/Afro-Cuban religion Santeria, a fusion of West African beliefs with the Catholicism of the New World’s landowners. Hudes manifests elements of Santeria as a sort of mild magical realism, one that’s more psychological than fantastical. It includes frequent, colorful interludes of ritualistic dance, the transubstantiation of the bodies of the dead into feathers and rice, a near-death dream sequence in which Jesùs finds heaven at the bottom of the ocean, and the visceral epiphany of Jesùs and his Coke.

As a symbol of America in the developing world, of course, Jesùs’s Coke is rather fraught with cultural ambiguities. Sure, it’s sweet, fizzy, and invigorating, but there’s also the little matter of American cultural hegemony in the developing nations, and then there’s that "Killer Coke" college campaign that’s been protesting the deaths of Coca-Cola union workers in South America. Yemaya’s Belly does raise the specter of the darker implications of Jesùs’s quite religious aspirations for American-style wealth and success. But it does so with the same gesture with which it lifts feathers to the sky — with a lightness, almost a fancifulness, that leaves that specter hanging. The image of Jesùs and Maya subsisting on Spam and Coke on a raft bound for "America" seems a pretty tragic sight, but the two youngsters banter with such cute spunk that the scene’s gravity is strangely sugared with a Disnified sense of adventure.

It’s the vibrant Caribbean rhythms that carry the play through such ambiguities, and Yemaya’s all-Equity cast moves to them with ebullience. Torres has a great slick style and vigor as Jesùs’s uncle, Cruz brings good range to the bereaved rum-peddler Tico, and Viellieu-Davis is engaging as the confident store-keep Lila. As Jesùs, Camins is nimble and winsome, but he often can’t help but come across as more of a loveable cartoon than a nuanced young man, particularly when he and the rather excitable Maya come together as proverbially charming street urchins.

Rhythm and cultural texture are the real stars of this production, and Hudes’s script is a recipe for stagecraft of the most energetic and whimsical flavors. Anita Stewart’s simple set of wooden pallets and rustic white backdrop is especially well-suited for the playful and frequent changes in setting. It changes in tone with arousing fluidity as it absorbs the gorgeous fluctuations of Bryon Winn’s light plot, from the rum colors of late afternoon to the elongated shadows of Jelin and Jesùs as they dig graves at night. Punctuating Jesùs’s travels, the dances of Santeria, and such poignant rituals as the playing of dominoes is a remarkable body of percussion music and sounds. Composed and performed on stage by the Iranian-born musician Shamou, this exceptional accompaniment uses wood-blocks, a rain-stick, and drums of all distinctions to animate the doings of the islanders.

Hudes’s script and the resonance of the production itself are both at their best when they depart from the broad, cartoon-bright coming-of-age tropes to linger in revelations of more singular intimacy. A grief-stricken Tico declares a cup of dry rice the new vehicle of his wife’s lost body, and slowly pours it over himself. In the soft staccato of rice grains hitting the ground is one of Yemaya’s rare moments of startlingly original beauty, and a wise contrast to Jesùs’s fizzly gulps of Coke.

Like the Coke that so entrances its hero, Yemaya’s Belly is at once effervescent, sweet, and — beneath the bubbles — a troubling story often obscured by sugars. Its celebration of Caribbean-music culture is delicious and buoyant, but if you can stand to look at its more difficult cultural and political questions, you might wish it were accompanied by a good deal more of Tico’s harsh rum.

Megan Grumbling can be reached at mgrumbling@hotmail.com