Monkey Business Theatre

Acknowledgments

acknowledgments A great host of people, many known and many more unknown, have given life and substance to the Monkey Business Theatre, Teatro Lo’il Maxil, projecting it to the world outside. The first word of thanks should go to Karen Bassie, who reformatted this text and undid in the play scripts Word’s magical trick of turning all italics into regular print and all regular print into italics! Amy Trompetter was the midwife for the birth of the theatre, reassuring the members of the Tzotzil-Tzeltal writers’ cooperative, Sna Jtz’ibajom, that puppeteering could be fun both for them and for the unsuspecting audience. Later, at Antioch College, she astonished us by presenting her “Punch:Judy Show” from beneath the folds of her voluminous skirt. Amy was followed by Ralph Lee, who spent every February for a decade of his life creating a live stage where the actors learned to find their place, raise their voices, and speedily propel themselves into the next scene. While San Amy Trompetter’s Punch:Judy Show, 1982. Photo courtesy Miriam W. Laughlin Ralph Lee, 2006. Photo courtesy Casey Compton [ xxviii ] monkey business theatre Cristóbal food was not kind to Ralph, he persisted in his goal to make this a first-rate theatre whose simplicity would appeal to Mayas, Ladinos, and all others . The lively response of Indian audiences and the standing ovations by those abroad are a measure of Ralph’s achievement. His presence enlivened us all, sparking a desire to judge wisely every detail of a performance. He taught us that febrero loco, his month with the group, though rigorous, could be a delight. Francisco Álvarez Quiñones dedicated endless hours to creating Spanish versions of many of our plays and directing our earliest ventures. When everything went wrong, you could count on Palas (as he is known in Tzotzil) to be optimistic, to toast us with a flurry of possibilities—even impossible ones. His humor lightened every day. Michael John Garcés directed Mexico with Us Forever. When the actors tired of our exercises, he tossed them a ball, then another and another and another until the exercise became a game. In addition, he achieved the impossible , training the actors to jump in unison. Diego Méndez Guzmán took a course for body movement directed by Margie Bermejo in Mexico City. More recently, with the support of conaculta (Consejo Nacional para la Cultura y las Artes) and inba (Instituto Nacional Francisco Álvarez Quiñones, 1992. Photo courtesy Sna Jtz’ibajom Michael John Garcés, 2006. Photo courtesy Clara NiitSki acknowledgments [ xxix ] para las Bellas Artes), he received training by Luís de Tavira. Following this he was our first actor to become a director. His production of The World Turned on Its Head, performed at the Palacio de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, called up a crescendo of laughs from the audience of five hundred. The entire group received exercises by the Chilean director Carlos Barón and by Consuelo Anderson. Reynaldo Pacheco, a student at Wabash College, joined us for the past two summers to bring a young voice to several of our plays. Antonio Coello revived puppetry for us and created our first bilingual video, El rey de Zinacantán, starring Juan de la Torre’s son, Maryan, as the Indian king. Christine Weber, director of National Geographic’s Lost Kingdoms of the Maya, and John Sayles, director of the movie Men with Guns, with full appreciation of Mayan culture, lifted a number of our actors up to worldwide visibility. Mexico’s first two Indian women playwrights, Isabel Juárez Espinosa and Petrona de la Cruz Cruz, initially members of the House of the Writer, have, by their establishment of a women’s cultural center and theatre, fomma (Fortaleza de la Mujer Maya [The Strength of Mayan Women]), expanded the demands for a new world, which Petrona’s son and fellow playwright, Rogelio Hernández Cruz, turned on its head. Jeffrey Jay Foxx documented the beginning of our theatre with sensitive photographs. Patrick Breslin, Siena Craig, and Teague Channing have, in their illustrated articles, championed our cause in the United States, and Janet Schwartz on the Web, while Brenda Currin’s thesis brought it to academia. Carlos Montemayor’s Renacimiento del teatro maya en Chiapas gave the Mexican public a bilingual presentation of five of our plays. Cynthia Steele’s and Donald Frischmann’s...