The beginning of Bill Yule and Barry Ball's The Boys of Mariel is evocative. Pedro (played by Ricky J. Martinez), a dancer who's been kicked out of the National Ballet of Cuba, stands center stage in tight jeans and a muscle shirt. He gyrates his hips and pelvis fluidly, smiling provocatively while the profile of a man kneeling in front of another looms in the background. Other men enter the scene -- some checking Pedro out, others minding their own business, until the sound of Cuban police arriving sends everyone scrambling to hide, escape, or look "normal." In this brief scene (also choreographed by Martinez), one has a strong sense of how it would feel to be a gay male in Castro's Cuba -- pre-Mariel. And this is what the play purports to do. The Boys of Mariel, which debuted in Los Angeles in 1999, follows the fate of six gay men who are booted out of Castro's Cuba in 1980 via the Mariel boatlift and struggle to find new lives in Miami. Unfortunately, the concept is more ambitious than the final production.

Because of its biographical focus, Julian Schnabel's film Before Night Falls, about Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas, only gives a glimpse at the magnitude of how gay men's lives were dramatically altered by the Mariel boatlift. Not only were at least 25,000 (the exact numbers are disputed) shipped off on Mariel -- many against their will -- but within a decade at least half of them were dying from what was then still called "the silent killer." The second act alludes to the onslaught of AIDS deaths that befell this group of men, who were enjoying the freedom to be openly gay for the first time. The idea of local writers telling such a compelling and untold story is great, but juxtaposing the tragedy of Mariel with the sex scenes that are stock for any B-quality gay flick is disconcerting. The shower, the rape, the street fight, the perverted priest, and the incestuous father -- all of these scenes, as well as the director's inclination to strip down the cast to their underwear or completely disrobe them as frequently as possible, blur the line between adult entertainment and serious theater, to the play's disadvantage.