Hungry Woman by Josefina López (review)

Boyle Heights, an East Los Angeles neighborhood known for its large immigrant population, is home to the vital and flourishing community theatre CASA 0101. Josefina López, the Chicana playwright, screenwriter, and novelist most famous for Real Women Have Curves, founded CASA 0101 in 2000 and serves as its artistic director. Operating out of a converted bridal shop for its first eleven years, in 2011, CASA 0101 moved a block away to its current location, a ninety-nine seat theatre with an art gallery in the vestibule. At a time when many community theatre projects fail due to the difficulties of financing them, CASA 0101 has been successful in providing its community a space for theatre, film, art, and even education through generous support from local foundations, endowments, and individual donors. Such funding allows the theatre to keep its ticket prices as low as about $20 for general admission and $15 for residents of Boyle Heights.

CASA 0101, then, was the ideal space for the 2013 world premiere of López’s new play, Hungry Woman, adapted from her 2009 novel Hungry Woman in Paris. (The play’s title seems to pay homage to fellow Chicana playwright Cherríe Moraga’s play The Hungry Woman.) López’s play starts with George W. Bush’s reelection in 2004, when the protagonist, Canela Guerrero (played by Rachel González), a young Mexican American woman, finds herself in a state of despair brought on by the political climate. Troubling her also are the haunting memories of her cousin’s recent death from problems related to diabetes, which we later find out was actually a suicide. Calling off her wedding, Canela uses her ticket for what would have been her honeymoon to fly to Paris, where she enrolls in a culinary arts school in order to be allowed to stay in Paris for nine months.

Hungry Woman features twelve actors, most whom are Latina/o, playing thirty-one different roles. Only Canela remained onstage at all times, where she often spoke directly to the audience and narrated her memories or acted them out with the other characters. As the Hungry Woman of the title, her centrality cemented the identification of the audience, many of whom were Latinas, with her character. Canela’s worldview as a first-generation Mexican American resident of Boyle Heights represented that of the community in which CASA 0101 is based. She faces both the rigid gender roles prescribed by her Mexican American culture and family, which insist on her marriage to a man who can care for her, as well as the xenophobic governments in France and the United States, where immigrants take to the streets to protest the inhumane treatment they face by institutions attempting to exclude them from the nation-state.

Mary Mendoza (La Calaca Flaca) and Rachel González (Canela Guerrero) in Hungry Woman.

(Photo: Ed Krieger.)

The play offered a critique of the sexism in Mexican and Mexican American culture. Canela’s relationships with the women in her life, which enable her to resist the expectations of her community, dominated the landscape of the play. A particularly poignant scene occurs at the funeral of Canela’s cousin, where she openly challenges the women in her family who accuse her of transgressing the family’s wishes. The heated arguments about Canela calling off her wedding reveal the obstacles that Mexican American women must overcome to build a feminist family base.

Beyond a feminism rooted in Mexican American female autonomy, the audience saw moments of potential transnational feminism when Canela encounters immigrant women in Paris. Perhaps the play is at its most powerful when these episodes occur. Canela befriends a Colombian mother whose experiences as an undocumented worker echo a scene from earlier in Canela’s life when her family, doing agricultural work, hides from the border patrol. Later, a Turkish Muslim woman who struggles to communicate with Canela pleads for her help in escaping her husband. Canela...