The Old Man and the Sea
On Friday Jan. 17, the Ontarion attended a monologue performance at the George Luscombe Theatre titled Hot Havana. Master storyteller and director, Brian Gordon Sinclair, produced the play; Spanish professor Rosario Gomez introduced the performance; and the Hispanic studies department of the University of Guelph promoted the play.
Dr. Gomez told the Ontarion that there is a unique relationship between University of Guelph and the University of Holguin, Cuba. At last year’s conference on teaching foreign languages, communication and culture, Hemingway’s Hot Havana was one of the events playing.
Although the theatre was not filled to capacity, Sinclair provided a rare insight into the life and drunken times of American author, Ernest Hemingway.
Sinclair, the author of Hemingway On Stage, studied at the National Theatre School of Canada, and holds a master’s degree in Theatre from the University of Denver.
Sinclair recently completed a six-play series, entitled Hemingway: the Road to Freedom. The first five plays premiered at the Five Days Festival in Key West, Florida.
He offered to perform in Guelph this year to raise funds to help the Latin American and Caribbean Studies (LACS) students participate in the 2014 conference.
The story of Hemingway began when he was born in Chicago on July 21, 1899. He held both a Nobel Prize in Literature and Pulitzer Prize of fiction. After surviving two plane crashes in Africa, Hemingway began Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT), which is argued to have caused his suicide in the summer of 1961.
Hot Havana is about the boastful experiences and existential life of Hemingway. Sinclair narrated the play in first-person prose, and the method-acting monologue rested mostly on the time Hemingway spent fishing and drinking in Cuba. It was as if the machismo, arrogant Hemingway was performing in front of the very eyes of the audience. In fact, Sinclair bore a striking resemblance to Hemingway himself, both in girth and in his eerily similar white-beard.
He reminisced about Hemingway’s time drinking rum on his boat, Pilar; his children; romantic dalliances; and the rousing adventures he once had.
Interacting with the audience, Sinclair’s culminating act resulted in the fatal gunshot that took Hemingway’s life.