Mexico City’s Spring 2013 Theatre Season (Plus a Note on a Play Staged in Xalapa)

Several new theatre spaces have enriched Mexico City’s vibrant theatrical landscape since 2012. The city has many large-scale, well-equipped theatres, but some of its finest offerings occur in smaller venues, sometimes in spaces not originally built for public performances. Carretera 45 Teatro A.C. draws its name and origins from the Chihuahua/U.S. border region. Its directors (Antonio Zúñiga and Rodolfo Guerrero) hail from Chihuahua but have well-established theatrical reputations in Mexico City and beyond. Removed from sections of Mexico City typically associated with theatre, Colonia Obrera houses Carretera 45 in what appears to have been a common house originally. Although much of the programming deals with issues from Chihuahua, some does not, such as El Grillo, by Suzanne Lebeau, which played during the season, and the play m³, performed by a group from Spain in January. The theatre itself features an experimental space with precious little seating—a capacity for perhaps 50 people. It is a modest but welcome addition to Mexican theatre.

Mendoza provides an example of the type of theatre Carretera 45 produces. Based on Macbeth, Zúñiga and Juan Carillo wrote and Carillo directed it. Sadly, the Mexican Revolution provided easy fodder for an adaptation of the Bard’s play, which the authors exploited brilliantly. Character names switched to Spanish, northern Mexico provided the setting, and the famous witches became a bruja, accompanied by a live chicken. The staging was noteworthy, to say the least. Folding chairs located around the stage’s perimeter provided seating for most of the spectators (with overflow bench seating in the usual spectator area). When audience members entered, many of the actors were already seated on the folding chairs, and as the play progressed they joined the action and returned to their seats intermittently. Actually, in several scenes, they took their chairs to the middle of the stage and used them as props. At times they would act right from their chairs at stage perimeter, often making eye contact with spectators as if in intimate conversation with them. In a noteworthy dinner scene, actors positioned a long tablecloth along one wall, just above the laps of actors and spectators, who wore masks for the scene. Several times actors had spectators join the action in simple ways, and at play’s end all spectators were offered a drink as if to acknowledge their complicity in the play’s performance. Marco Vidal performed the title role beautifully, transforming from a dutiful soldier to a power-hungry, scheming murderer. The rest of the cast, made up of the Los Colochos theatre group, acted most effectively as well. If Carreterra 45 can continue to produce well-attended, quality plays like this one, it will be an important addition to Mexico City’s theatre scene.¹

Mendoza.

Photo: Deniel Compton.

El Culebra joined Mendoza this season as evidence that the Mexican Revolution still resonates as a source of Mexican identity. Martín López Brie wrote and directed the play in a production by the Teatro de Quimeras company (http://www.teatrodequimeras.wix.com/teatro). It featured three memorable characters living toward the end of the Revolution. The first, the title character, was a soldier of Villa’s División del Norte who fancied himself a great hero, but seemed more of a Mexican Willie Lomax—a big-talking, illiterate drunk whose exploits and standing merit no great place in history. He took himself very seriously, but proved to be more clown than hero. His mujer, Ausencia, had lost her patience for the Revolution and had tired of El Culebra’s lifestyle and bluster. Clearly intelligent, she feigned ignorance and seemed trapped in the habit of playing the submissive partner. An American journalist, Mr. Brice, naturally evoked the image of Ambrose Bierce. He went to Mexico in search of heroes and utopia, but had become disillusioned. It didn’t help that El Culebra tied him up and demanded that Brice cast him as a revolutionary hero. The...