Mexico City’s Summer 2018 Theatre Season

Almost everyone I talked to in Mexico City about the upcoming presidency of Andrés Manuel López Obrador was upbeat and hopeful that the next six years would be better than the sexenio presided over by Enrique Peña Nieto. While new administrations bring changes that affect cultural and artistic institutions, theatre practitioners seemed upbeat about the future. Of the seven plays that stood out to me as the best of Mexico City’s 2018 summer season, most expressed explicit criticism of Mexican society and government, while all reflected government and societal corruption and the idea that Mexico needs change. Overall, the season seemed a little less vigorous than most seasons I have witnessed—I found fewer overall plays and no blockbuster play for the ages. Nonetheless, I did see some tremendous plays and many others with strong elements. Surely I missed other noteworthy plays due to the fact that no one can see all the plays offered in Mexico City during any one season.

For years Gabino Rodríguez and his theatre company, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, have been garnering increased recognition. They have now performed throughout Mexico and in numerous other countries. From July 5 through August 2 the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes organized and sponsored its 14^th Festival of Monologues “Teatro a una sola voz.” The festival featured seven monologues, each performed in twelve different cities. It started in Hermosillo on July 5, with one performance per night through July 11. The pattern repeated itself two days later in Culiacán, then two days later in Durango, and so forth in Saltillo/Torreón, Nuevo Laredo, Guadalajara, Colima, León, San Luis Potosí, Morelia, Xalapa, and finally Mexico City. The finale in each of the twelve cities was Tijuana, a unipersonal written by Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, directed and acted by Gabino Rodríguez.

On the surface, Rodríguez narrated in Tijuana his story of going to the city of Tijuana for six months to experience working at a maquiladora and living on Mexico’s minimum wage (and yes, he really did go to Tijuana and work there). He described and acted out his experience of creating a new identity, locating housing, the conditions of his housing, his relationship with the family he lived with, his job packing clothing, the social atmosphere at the company, the socio-economic situation of Tijuana, the things he would do in his free time, the newsworthy events that took place there, and his strategies for documenting his experience. So, on the surface, Tijuana showed the plight of Mexico’s working poor, the difficulty of living on the wage government officials had declared adequate for a family of three, the hopelessness of ending the cycle of poverty, the pathetic and rare opportunities to enjoy life after long and grinding work days, and the crime and violence people face in poor neighborhoods. The play showed these elements with exceptional power. In the case of violence, when the protagonist witnessed brutal vigilante justice, he realized that if his cover were blown, locals might take exception to him and treat him the same way, so he pulled out of the experience early.

These themes in Tijuana form part of a much, much bigger vision and project that Lagartijas has called La democracia en México (1965–2015), in which they are exploring government policies and practices and their effects on people throughout Mexico. I have read that they have ambitions to write and perform a play on the theme for each of Mexico’s states, and this particular one corresponded to state #3. But as I stated, this was “on the surface.” At the next level, the play posited rich questions concerning identity, acting, and interpersonal relations. After all, during his time in Tijuana, Rodríguez was doing another kind of acting—acting as though he were NOT an actor, taking on the identity of the fictional character Santiago Ramírez. Much as if he had been a spy, he infiltrated a new society to gather information. This situation hearkened back to the idea Octavio Paz posited about Mexican...