New Myths for Mexican Drama

Today's playwrights are eclectic, experimental, enterprising—but seldom heard from in the U.S.

By Caridad Svich

Mexico is on the entertainment world's mind these days. Filmmakers Alejandro González Iñárritu, Alfonso Cuarón and Guillermo del Toro are making their mark in cinema. Mexican producer Salma Hayek has a top-rated TV show with the reconfigured-for-U.S.-market but originally Colombian telenovela "Ugly Betty (Betty La Fea)." The pop group RBD has its first English-language CD on the music charts. Actor Gael García Bernal is Hollywood's "next big thing," as he moves fluidly between Spanish-language films, English-language semi-indies and higher-profile movies such as Babel, which was directed by Iñárritu and written by another Mexican, Guillermo Arriaga.

While immigration issues remain highly debated, there is no question that the continued vitality of Mexican art is gaining visibility in American pop culture. But what kind of theatrical art is the U.S. seeing from Mexico in and out of translation?

In October '06, the Lark Play Development Center in New York City hosted a U.S./Mexico Playwright Exchange in collaboration with FONCA (Mexico's National Fund for Culture and Arts), with support from the Mexican Cultural Institute of New York. The Lark's ongoing, evolving partnership with Mexican artists and institutions is part of the theatre's larger international program. Producing director John Clinton Eisner describes it as an opportunity for "Mexican and U.S. artists to work together and deepen a discussion, through theatre, about significant social issues, while expanding an international dramatic repertoire." The U.S./Mexico exchange was devoted specifically to the translation of new contemporary Mexican plays with the reciprocal goal that new U.S. plays will also be translated and presented in Mexico.

Andrea Thome, director of the program, says that the project allows Mexican dramatists a unique chance to see firsthand how their work changes in translation from one language and culture to another as it crosses the border. Gaps in understanding are exposed. Differences are revealed. While there is often an impulse to "dismiss or bridge differences," says Thome, the art and craft of translation also serves to magnify them.

Under this lens, the artist and translator and audience are educated to the essential, transparent beauty of difference itself. In a previous incarnation of the U.S./Mexico exchange in 2003-04, co-sponsored by the U.S.-Mexico Fund for Culture, the Lark made possible the development of Silvia Peláez's play Fiebre 107 Grados (Fever 107 Degrees) in its original language and in English-language translation. Peláez's sexually charged piece is about the turbulent relationship between Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. The play received its Mexico City premiere this past November and will be restaged there this year. Whether it will be seen in the U.S., however, is another matter entirely.

New writing from Mexico in translation is presented more prominently across the pond, ironically enough, by the Royal Court's Arena Mexico festival, than it is in the U.S., a short border crossing away. Despite the best efforts of adventurous American university theatre departments, brave companies such as Borderlands Theater in Arizona and Repertorio Español in New York City, and international Latino theatre festivals in Chicago, Miami and Los Angeles, vibrant new text-based work from Mexico City has a circumscribed platform in the U.S., and young contemporary playwrights from Mexico are mostly unknown by the theatre community north of the border.

"Mexico is very good at selling two things to the world: violence and the folkloric," says avant-garde writer-director Alberto Villarreal. Speaking at a NoPassport encounter (an international theatre alliance devoted to fostering hemispheric exchange) that occurred at the same time as the Lark's '06 exchange, Villarreal was joined by fellow exchange dramatists Javier Malpica, Verónica Musalem, Richard Viqueira and Peláez. The dramatists described how theatre in Mexico City was in a time of crisis and change. This sentiment was reflected in their works, which ranged from Malpica's delicately surreal Our Dad Is in Atlantis (translated by Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, directed by Bruce Sevy), to Musalem's Oaxaca-set noir Adela and Juana (which I translated under Debbie Saivetz's direction), Viqueira's brutal text H (translated by Andrea Thome, directed by Louis Moreno), Villarreal's whimsically mordant take on urban living Events with Life's Leftovers (translated by Andy Bragen, directed by Jackson Gay) and Peláez's Spanish version of Chantal Bilodeau's Pleasure and Pain (under Daniel Jáquez's direction).

Mexican theatre, says Viqueira, "wants to unburden itself from the influence of European theatrical models now, and is seeking to forge its own voice. The move in new writing more and more is away from the folkloric toward the more recognizably idiomatic." All the plays in the Lark's exchange program registered idioms differently. Musalem's play Adela and Juana, for example, intersects stylistically and linguistically with quasi-telenovela tropes: The handsome, rich man on the lam flees the city with his trophy wife and his secretary to a poor town in the country, where he engages in a scandalous affair with yet a third woman, who is young and impressionable. Musalem's dialogue sometimes has the mannered emotional motifs associated with telenovela writing but places them inside a larger story of Mexican conquests, colonization and the myth of La Malinche. Viqueira's H owes great debt to the carpa tradition in its manner, speed and socio- political emphasis, but it amps up the raw energy and blunt textual approach of the Mexican theatrical form to shocking effect. Villarreal's Events with Life's Leftovers plays deeply parodic and paradoxical linguistic games with Mexican slang and specific historical allusions while framing his storytelling style within a nouveau-Mexican, post-European tradition.

Mexican theatre in the past has warmly embraced the theatre of the absurd and the theatre of excess. Sensibility shifts, however, are being felt as dramatists explore different forms, styles and subjects to express the sometimes all-too-real hallucinatory sociopolitical reality of living in Mexico City. Divesting themselves of the power structures of traditional venues, these writer-directors of a new generation are renting venues on their own, or presenting their plays with public backing from universities and a handful of powerful cultural organizations such as FONCA that offer annual grants and fellowships. Working in what would be the equivalent of New York City's Off-Off Broadway movement, these dramatists write challenging linear and nonlinear texts that question transnational corporate investments in Mexico's countryside; the history of conquest and colonization; the damaging effect of exile on families; and the inescapable lure of corporate dreaming.

Each writer in the U.S./Mexico exchange represented a chief strand in contemporary Mexican drama. Villarreal, as writer-director, focuses on investigative, formal modes of storytelling. His work explores states of being in space and time and the banal language individuals use to cover the surface brutality of contemporary existence. Musalem, who also writes and directs for opera, is concerned with women's roles in Mexican society and how indigenous stories are erased by history.

Viqueira is a media junkie. His theatre, highly confrontational and physical—and sometimes literally dangerous—circles around the effects on language and perception of TV, comic books, video games, etc. Malpica, who also has a distinguished career as a children's author, tells fantastical and sociorealist stories of the dispossessed. Peláez, who is a forceful new-writing advocate as well as an estimable dramatist, is interested, she says, in "hitting the audience emotionally." Her theatre is mysterious, sexual and Pinteresque.

In one way or another, all touch on what to make of drama as a form in and of itself. Alongside the question of form is a quest to engage in, on the one hand, extra-territorial concerns and languages, and on the other, in local stories that can resonate beyond Mexico's borders. The drama of this new post-Macondo generation can tell you a story about a secuestro express as readily as one about King Herod or art pornographers. Reared on the works of Heiner Müller, Robert Lepage, Bernard-Marie Koltès and John Jesurun, as well as teatro carpa, cabaret and ritualistic theatre, new writing practitioners see themselves poised at the intersection of new forms and audiences. They engage in an eclectic fashion with language and are driven by a desire for constant, uncompromising experimentation. Their goal as dramatists is to create a uniquely Mexican, but nevertheless trans-global, drama that does not depend on the absorbed influences of Europe and the U.S.

Imagistic in nature, the plays have distinctly atmospheric and sometimes quite dense verbal texts that reference Mexican history, world classics, cheap B-movies, newspaper stories and—as exemplified by Adela and Juana—the tonalities of the much-maligned but powerful popular form of telenovelas. Violence courses through these plays, as it does, inevitably, through Mexican history. It is not, however, the exploitative violence that is often exported to outside markets by Mexico's films and banda music, but rather the elemental violence of ruptured bodies seeking wholeness in a scattered, despairing geography that extends across the Americas.

While there is a great deal of significant work happening outside Mexico City, the capital remains the theatrical hub. About 300 plays open there in a year's time. Commercial productions compete for the same audiences as experimental productions and boulevard fare. Venues, thus, function mainly as rental or presenting houses for shows, save for a few. Audiences have a hard time distinguishing the governing aesthetic of a specific venue. The success of a Spanish-language production of David Eldridge's Festen, for example—which recently sustained a sold-out run at Mexico City's 450-seat Teatro Helénico under Martín Acosta's direction—had as much to do with star Diego Luna's presence in the acting ensemble as it did with the play itself. At a steep (for most Mexicans) ticket price of $20–30, Festen nonetheless attracted a diverse audience not only in the capital but also as it toured cities including Guadalajara, Tijuana, Ensenada, Monterrey, Chihuahua and Ciudad Juarez this past winter. But local playwrights working without celebrities in their casts have to fight to make their voices heard.

The writer is often, in effect, his or her own producer, taking on the responsibilities of pitching the work, mounting it and marketing it. All the dramatists in this exchange spoke candidly about how they had to take time away from writing and turn to the exhausting but exhilarating task of entrepreneurship. They admitted to feeling defeated at times by the extraordinary maneuvers exacted upon them by the arts-funding system. Yet, despite the pressures of making a writing life, what is evident in Mexico's new playwriting scene is a vibrant determination to create contemporary mythologies that speak to the world.

Caridad Svich is a playwright and founder of NoPassport.