International Hispanic Theatre Festival (review)

International Hispanic Theatre Festival. The Duke on 42nd Street, New York City. 20-30 June 2001.

Soon after the passing of its producer Joseph Papp in 1991, the New York Latino Theatre Festival came to a close. Since that time, and throughout the history of Broadway theatre, Latino and Latin American productions have persisted at the margins. New York, with its diverse population, has fostered less than parallel diversity in support of groups from Latin America. New York theatres that conduct their season in Spanish, such as Repetorio Español, have carved out viable niches at the edge of Off-Off Broadway. However, their audiences rarely reflect a strong English-speaking constituency, even as simultaneous translation becomes more readily available.

Thus, it was with considerable cultural diplomacy that the International Hispanic Theatre Festival (IHTF), now in its sixteenth season in Miami, traveled to New York City in a highly anticipated expansion of its borders. The festival showcased five pieces chosen from the numerous Miami productions: Compañía Nacional de Teatro de México's De Monstruos y Prodigios: La Historia de los Castrati (Of Monsters and Prodigies: The History of the Castrati); Brazil's Cia. dos Atores' Melodrama; Teatro de los Andes' Las Abarcas del Tiempo (The Sandals of Time); from Ecuador, Malayerba's Nuestra Señora de las Nubes (Our Lady of the Clouds); and from the Spanish province of Andalusia, La Zaranda's La Puerta Estrecha (The Narrow Door). This was not the first time that the IHTF had traveled north—a limited version of the festival came to New York in 1995. However, unlike its earlier incarnation held at INTAR, this year's festival paired up with Teatro Avante, Arts International and the New 42nd Street, staging all five productions in the gleaming 199 seat Duke on 42nd Street. The festival also garnered significant press sponsorship as well as coverage in The New York Times and El Diario. Beyond the five productions, festival director Mario Ernesto Sánchez and Beatriz Rizk, Educational Program Coordinator, assembled a book presentation of recently published scholarship on Latin American and Latino performance and an academic conference with some of the leading intellectuals from the United States, Europe, and Latin America to discuss Hispanic art and culture. This thoroughly successful profusion of artistic and intellectual talent suggested that Hispanic theatre had secured a place on Broadway's glittering white way.

The Compañía Nacional de Teatro de México opened the festival with a brilliant and multilayered testament to the history of the Castrati in Europe from the Baroque period to the late-nineteenth century. De Monstruos y Prodigios chronicled a world moving between historical figures, mythical references, and a brilliantly acted synthesis between European culture and the specificities of Mexico's colonial past. Quirón, modeled after the Greek centaur Chiron, joined a racially marked, mocked, and downtrodden Sulaimán, and the Paré brothers—Siamese twins whose opening monologue described grotesque genital mutilation with outrageously comedic overtones. The scenes were interspersed by lush performances of a Castrati virtuoso, whose flamboyant feathered headdresses were simultaneously reminiscent of the excesses of the Baroque and the feathered costumes of the Aztec warrior. The production traveled seamlessly, if not wildly, through the interaction between these characters as well as through multiple layers of European and Latin American signification. While press materials emphasized the Castrati as a historical precedent to the boyish and androgynous pop stars of today, the production also suggested such freakish emasculation as a metaphor of Mexico's racially complex past. Sulaimán, darker skinned than the other actors, and wearing only some sort of indigenous covering on his lower half, physically demonstrated the agony of castration as the Paré brothers describe the operation with glee. In another scene, the regally Baroque brothers repeatedly called Sulaimán "Negro," translated somewhat problematically as black dog; and in a pivotal movement, a phallic prosthesis fell out of his costume as his scant covering was yanked to his ankles.

Monstruos y Prodigios was not...