Marcel Mascaro Joins Asolo Rep's SOTTO VOCE, Opening Next Month

Asolo Repertory Theatre has announced a casting update for its upcoming production of SOTTO VOCE. Marcel Mascaró will be playing the role of 'Saquiel/Ariel'.

Mascaró* is thrilled, blessed and excited to be making his Asolo Rep debut. His previous credits include Eddie in Tango at the Robert Moss Theater, and Doctor in Alveoli as part of the Strawberry One Act Festival. Marcel graduated two years ago from SUNY Purchase Acting Conservatory with a BFA. Purchase credits include Hedda Gabler (Jorgen Tesman), Rock & Roll (Max), Peer Gynt (Peer, Hussein, Borehead), Much Ado About Nothing (Leonato), and many more.

Pulitzer Prize- and Greenfield Prize-winner Nilo Cruz's exquisite new play opens Thursday, April 2, 2015 at 8pm in the Historic Asolo Theater and runs through Sunday, April 26, with previews on Tuesday, March 31 at 7:30pm and Wednesday, April 1 at 8pm.

This hauntingly beautiful metaphysical love story will be directed by Melissa Kievman, who previously directed Searching for Eden: The Diaries of Adam and Eve, and The Blonde, The Brunette and The Vengeful Redhead, and Expecting Isabel at Asolo Rep. Sotto Voce premiered in February 2014 at New York's Theater for the New City, and had a brief yet celebrated run the following month at Miami-Dade County Auditorium's On.Stage Black Box theater. The title of Mr. Cruz's new work is an Italian musical term that means to speak in a soft manner with purpose.

Cruz captures the resiliency of true love and the power of memories in this spiritual masterpiece. German-born novelist Bemadette Kahn lost her one true love when he fled Nazi Germany aboard the SS St. Louis, a ship carrying 937 Jewish immigrants seeking refuge in Cuba. Cuba and the United States tragically turned the ship away, leaving the ship's passengers to return to Europe where many perished in Nazi concentration camps. Her heartbreak resurfaces when a young Jewish Cuban writer contacts the now 80-year-old reclusive, lovelorn Bemadette to research the ship's ill-fated voyage.Their relationship slowly evolves into a transcendent romance based on her memories of the boy she never stopped loving.

Olivier Award-winning actress Kathryn Hunter, who was the first British female to ever professionally portray the title role in Shakespeare's King Lear, stars as the wistful Bemadette. On screen, Ms. Hunter played Arabella Figg in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. NYU Tisch School of the Arts CAP21 graduate Ben Rosenbach and Cuban-American stage and television actress Hannia Guillen star alongside Hunter.

Cuban-born Nilo Cruz was the first Latino to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2003 for his Tony-nominated play Anna in the Tropics. He crafted the Spanish translation for Asolo Rep's 2012 production of Hamlet, Prince of Cuba. In 2014 Mr. Cruz was awarded the prestigious Greenfield Prize and commissioned to write a brand new play, which will soon be read for the first time at Asolo Rep.

Sotto Voce continues the third season of Asolo Rep's five-year American Character Project. The play artfully depicts several different American immigration stories throughout the 20th Century and the dawn of the 21st Century.

*Member of Actors' Equity Association, the Union of Professional Actors and Stage Managers in the United States.