Mexico City's October 2017 Theatre Season, with a Bonus Performance in Querétaro

For more than 25 consecutive years, I have travelled each year to Mexico City to study its theatre. Because of my school-year obligations at Northern Michigan University, I have always gone in the spring or summer. For the first time, in October of 2017, I experienced Mexican theatre at a different time of year. Although the primary purpose of my trip was not related to theatre, I managed to see nine absolutely first-rate plays in Mexico City and an astonishing performance in Querétaro.

La espera, written and directed by Conchi León, had the biggest impact on me. I had heard of "teatro penitenciario," but this was my first experience with it. The Foro Shakespeare works with the Teatro Penitenciario theatre company, which started in the Santa Marta Acatitla prison. The company performs both at the prison and at the Foro. I saw La espera in the Foro's Espacio Urgente 2, with a cast of four actors whose training as actors began while they were inmates at Santa Marta. In the play, they told of/represented key moments of their own lives: their crimes, their arrests, their jail time, and their post-release experiences. They described and performed events and scenes that were at times violent and at other times humiliating, but with touches of humor, reflection, and hope. León deserves praise for interviewing the four actors, culling their testimonies, organizing and intertwining them, and giving them a dramatic frame. I admired her work as a director equally. She achieved a beautiful combination of narration and representation, giving the actors the power to communicate in little more than an hour enormous insights into their lives, but also making the audience a witness to many of the most dramatic and influential moments of the actors' lives. They represented themselves most of the time, but occasionally played other key people in their own lives or in the lives of their companions, whether family members, police officers, prison guards, fellow inmates, or victims of their crimes. The play used a variety of theatrical elements to present harsh topics and scenes without traumatizing audience members. For example, the actors attacked a chalk outline on the wall to illustrate the abuses endured at prison and used toy cars to show how one of them had stolen cars. On the other hand, they also used real props, such as knives. The guns they used were not real, but their sounds were loud and realistic, and they pointed them several times at some spectators. In fact, they came very close to the spectators on the first row and would occasionally dissolve the fourth wall to talk with them. The intimate space of the small foro suited the intimate subject matter perfectly. The organizing frame León created to introduce the play seemed exceptionally clever to me: each actor introduced himself and launched a Mexican top. As the tops spun, the actors compared our lives to theirs in the way they spin, sometimes high and sometimes low (they picked up the tops as they spun, to mirror the words). After each actor-character told his story, he placed his top on the stage next to a sign indicating his crime and the number of years he served in prison, which cleverly signaled the transitions from one story to the next. The autobiographical testimonies of La espera were compelling and of considerable sociological, psychological and historical value, but Conchi León turned them into art.

Javier Cruz, Ismael Corona, Feliciano Mares, and Héctor Maldonado also deserve praise for their acting. With other actors the play would have been memorable, but it reached a new dimension knowing that the actors were telling and showing their own stories. I continue to process what it means for human beings to have lived through the experiences of losing their freedom, of being abused and humiliated, of recognizing and lamenting the damage they did to society and fellow human beings (both direct victims as well as indirect ones such as spouses and children), of trying to return to...