Mexico City’s Spring 2014 Theatre Season

Mexico City offered a wide array of theatre offerings during its Spring 2014 season, ranging from an extremely expensive version of Wicked to street theatre financed by local government, from well-equipped, large theatres to adapted, tiny venues, from world and Spanish Golden Age classics to new plays written by very young Mexican playwrights, from plays featuring universal settings and themes to others focused on specific Mexican locales and issues, from plays intended for mature audiences to others accessible to audiences of all ages and backgrounds. The theatre world of Mexico City marches forward with vibrance despite several earthquakes and the usual snarl of transportation and big city issues.

In my opinion, the season’s finest play reached out to spectators of all demographics despite its designation as children’s theatre. Written by Bertha Hiriart and directed by a visiting Polish director, Ewa Piotrowska, Si no lo cuentas tú, ¿quién lo sabrá?: Historia de los niños de Santa Rosa had a distinctively Polish flavor. It focused on the riveting story of how a group of refugee children fled their Polish homeland during World War II, spent time working in virtual slavery in Siberia, then went on to live first in Persia, then India, and eventually in the Santa Rosa Hacienda in Mexico’s state of Jalisco. Many made Mexico their permanent home, while others joined the large Polish community in Chicago. Hiriart based the play on interviews with the children and grandchildren of a number of the refugees. She personalized it by focusing on a brother and sister who survived harrowing journeys and conditions to settle in Mexico and the U.S., respectively. In this compelling story of danger, survival, and adventure, spectators could easily identify with and care deeply about the pair of protagonists in their innocence and goodness. Their separation from homeland and family was wrenching, their pluck inspiring. But the beauty of the play extended well beyond the storyline. Edyta Rzewuska, an immigrant of Poland to Mexico herself, designed numerous stunning visual elements. A large metallic square, perhaps ten feet tall, dominated the Orientación theater’s generous stage. With an open circle perhaps five feet across its middle, it looked like an enormous square nut (from a mechanical nut and bolt set). Behind it stood another slab. Photo and video projections onto these slabs transformed the play’s setting. At times actual newspaper clippings were projected onto the slabs. Other times maps illustrated the route of the characters’ journey. The actors usually acted in front of the slabs, but often entered into the circular opening, allowing the actors to “be” in a variety of indoor locales. Video projections of a train, together with the repetitive movements of the actors and effective sound effects, created spectacular illusions of rail travel, for example. Toward the end of the play, photographs of the actual historical children from Santa Rosa appeared poignantly on the structures. Puppets of several sizes of the children themselves, clothing matched to that of the actors, enabled the entire illusion to suddenly exist in miniature, as also happened with a toy train, a small ship, and a minute village. Other elements of the set contributed to the play’s beauty and playfulness: a trunk containing dolls and a doll-house, which showed up in Mexico in the play’s final scene to the delight and nostalgia of the now-grown sister; wheelbarrows containing numerous dolls representing the cadavers of children who did not survive the rigors of Siberia; metal tins that represented bathtubs in which the children were harshly disinfected in Persia; and a three-foot long boat representing the vessel that took the children across the Atlantic to Mexico, perched on top of the captain’s head, dipping this way and that as he narrated the travails of the voyage. Music from the various parts of the world enhanced the settings. Some of the dialogue was either in Polish or mimicked Polish, with just enough Spanish thrown in to clarify the situation. Snippets of other languages helped establish settings and illustrated the linguistic challenges the refugees faced. All four actors...