|
|
|
by Aaron Mack Schloff |
|
MEXICO CITY: Flying in and out of Mexico City is a humbling and exciting experience. Stretching out across the ancient volcanic lakebed on which the city rests is a sprawling metropolis of almost 20 million people (only Tokyo is larger). Its 16 delegaciones (counties) comprise over 350 colonias (neighborhoods)—Mexicans themselves need a street guide the size of a small white-pages to negotiate the city. How can they possibly get to the theatre? And, once they get there, what do they see? The answer to the first question is the standard one: They don’t, mostly. Here, as everywhere, theatre is primarily a minority, middle-class taste; only in Mexico there is the added pain of trying to pay first-world ticket prices with third-world wages. But those who do show up can find offerings to rival or best those of many American cities—and a theatre that is, whether of necessity, ravenous curiosity or cultural insecurity, far more internationally oriented than our own. Our general ignorance of Mexican theatre in the U.S. may be lessened this year as a new wave of Mexican plays and productions reaches New York City. These productions have little to do with Zorro, Frida Kahlo or the folkloric, but neither do they have to do with the more recent stereotype of the Mexican capital as a Hispanic Blade Runner–ish edge city—a stereotype that the American action-film director Tony Scott seemed to have in mind when he said, while filming Man on Fire with Denzel Washington in the city last summer, “I want to show the new Mexico, which is beautiful, sexy, dark and dangerous.” Instead, the new Mexican shows New Yorkers will have the opportunity to see are almost promiscuously cosmopolitan: Happy New Century Dr. Freud by Sabina Berman—a dazzlingly theatricalist take on Freud’s sexist misdiagnosis of the Dora case, in which a young woman’s report of a family friend’s sexual advances was diagnosed as “hysteria”—will be directed and produced by John Gould Rubin Off Broadway, in English, with an American cast, in late February or early March. Faust/How I Rose by American John Jesurun and directed by Martín Acosta, in which God and the Devil battle each other against a backdrop of ruined cities and show trials, will be performed by a Mexican cast in English and Spanish on alternating nights at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in November 2004. El Automóvil Gris by Claudio Valdés Kuri uses Japanese Benshi-style narration, in English, to explain and complicate the projection of El Automóvil Gris (The Grey Automobile), a silent 1919 Enrique Rosas semidocumentary Mexican gangster picture with Spanish intertitles. In this way, the Mexican cast, which will travel to the Bronx’s El Museo de Barrio in November 2004, manages to perform in English and Spanish more or less simultaneously. Valdes’s show, like Faust, is part of “Mexico Now,” a multidisciplinary arts festival sponsored by the Mexican Consulate and Arts International. What is Mexican about these works is harder to find in the shows themselves than in the conditions of their production in Mexico City, where hours are longer and the wages smaller than in the American theatre. In Mexico, rehearsals are unpaid and the profession of literary agentry does not exist. The only consolation is that in a nation with a single cultural capital, actors and writers may work, or have to work, in all media. The content of the New York–bound productions reveals that Mexican artists are as open, or susceptible, to foreign influences as their nation has been to foreign armies. Acosta, for instance, counts among his influences Eugenio Barba, Peter Stein, Peter Brook, Tadeusz Kantor and Robert Lepage—auteurs of productions he saw at Mexico’s Festival Cervantino in the ’70s and ’80s. It was far easier to view European or Canadian theatre in Mexico than American theatre, he notes. “As a Mexican I belong to all—everything that filters through my thoughts is mine. I don’t ask permission,” Acosta says. “Mexico is a culture of survivors, of all the influences, of all the colonialisms. What is permitted is all we have been.” Playwright Valdés Kuri, of The Grey Automobile, is completely international not only in his influences but in his patrons. “When I was with Monsters and Prodigies [his previous show] in Venezuela, a man from Singapore saw my work and commissioned a play for the House of Culture in Berlin,” he says. The work was later developed in North Carolina, and (in Spanish, French and English versions) has played around Europe, the U.S. and Asia in both theatre and film venues. What is Mexican in it? Temporarily forgetting the very film itself, with its Mexican Revolutionary background, he pauses: “The Virgin of Guadalupe, maybe?” Sabina Berman, similarly, sees internationalism in her Mexican audiences: “They don’t care if the work is Mexican, American or Yugoslavian,” she says. “We’re beyond the nationalistic phase.” At the same time, anyone looking for Mexican material on stage need look no further than Extras, Berman’s hit adaptation of Marie Jones’s Stones in His Pockets, in which Jones’s rural Irish types become Mexican ones; or Antonio Castro and Flavio González Mello’s adaptation of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged), whose topical references and underlying attitudes the adapters transformed to connect with a Mexican audience. Yes, there are tamale sellers on the ramparts of Elsinore, but, more significantly, the actors no longer fear playing Hamlet, as they do in the American original. “Never have I encountered an actor who was afraid to do a part,” says Castro. “There was no way we could imagine three actors not wanting to do Hamlet.”
Those still searching for something “authentically Mexican” in subject matter might investigate large-scale shows like Antonio Calvo’s stage adaptation of Antonio Velasco Piña’s Regina, which continues to feature a series of pop stars in the role of a Mexican warrior at Teatro San Rafael; or the González Mello–written, Castro-directed 1822, Year We Were an Empire, in which a gadfly priest faces off against a power-hungry president-cum-emperor at the dawn of Mexico’s independence. (1822 continues to perform at Teatro Juan Ruiz de Alarcón, in the University Cultural Center of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, known as UNAM and located in the southern part of the city.) But you also can find satisfaction in smaller venues like Teatro La Capilla and its sister cabaret El Habito, in Coyoacan. Here, Mexico’s recent fascination with homosexuality gets an optimistic rendering in Humberto Robles’s farcical Ornitorrinco (Platypus): Unlike numerous other sexploitation plays on view in the city, in Platypus boundaries are crossed and taboos broken without tragic retribution. For the male lead—who is at first with a woman but with a man later—the nature of sexual roles is flexible and fluid. Next door, in El Habito, Jesusa Rodríguez’s Foximiliano Y Martota keeps its knives sharp for the doddering administration of President Vicente Fox. The title itself mocks the Fox administration by mixing the names of Fox and his wife, Marta Sahagún, with those of Mexico’s French-installed imperial couple, Maximiliano and Carlotta, who reigned, briefly and disastrously, in the 1860s. No one is spared, least of all the U.S. president. In one puppet segment, the widely disliked Sahagún is shown having sex with George W.; moaning with envy, she screams: “They only hate me in Mexico. But they hate you in the whole world!” For a further taste of the real Mexico, follow the money—or rather, the lack of it. Here, a still-centralized state system of arts patronage meets a free-form private production system (corporate patronage remains scant) and an actors’ market overwhelmingly dominated by television. “There are no rules to producing a play in Mexico, in a way that forces everyone to work imaginatively through the production aspects of a show,” says Castro, who is one of the producers of Shakespeare (Abridged). “That can be interesting, but a lot of anxiety derives from it.” The results can be seen in the poster for Extras, ubiquitous throughout the city this past summer, in which Berman’s version of Jones’s two-hander was advertised with…three actors. The reason: television. “If you get the call from your soap, you have to go,” says Verónica Jaspeado, one of the two women alternating in the female lead of Platypus, whose poster, featuring both women, inadvertently suggests a lesbian scene that never happens. Extras director and adaptor Sabina Berman says she rehearsed all three actors—in her case, the famous Bichir brothers—in each of the two roles. Castro, too, readying Shakespeare (Abridged) at the time when actor and producer Diego Luna’s star was just ascending, prepared two entirely different casts, and then a third. Ultimately, Castro was glad he did so, after the commercial success of Luna’s film Y Tu Mama También. “An actor could be shooting a film, doing a commercial or a soap opera and rehearsing with you at the same time,” Castro says. Actors are only paid when they perform—there are no understudies. The further challenge to keeping a cast together is that plays are often booked to run only a few performances a week, but for many weeks. A run of 50 performances, not uncommon here, will keep a show on stage for a quarter of a year with only three shows a week. Other shows, like Carmina Narro’s curdled romantic playlets Love Potions (which may reach New York this year as well), have run over a year—on Tuesdays only. The result is a constant scramble on the part of directors and producers to keep the casts filled. According to the program, the role of the mother in a recent production of True West at Teatro Orientación could have been played by any one of four different women. Playwrights, like Platypus’s Robles, earn a living doing other kinds of writing, or sometimes produce telenovelas, multi-month miniseries soap operas. The socially conservative Mexican ones are globally popular. “I met someone from Bulgaria,” said Berman, who now eschews writing telenovelas herself. “She spoke Spanish. I asked, ‘How come?’ She said, ‘What do you mean how come? From morning to night in Bulgaria we watch Mexican soap operas.’ Her language was very melodramatic.” The Mexican movie industry, in contrast with well-funded TV companies, pays only modestly for the 15 scripts produced every year. And even when authors do get work, low expectations or naiveté may lead them to sign away their rights. “There is a long tradition of the laws being violated and trespassed,” says Shakespeare (Abridged) adapter González Mello, “so it is very recently that the laws began to have some kind of meaning.” SOGEM (Sociedad General de Escritores de México), the Mexican writers’ union that covers theatre, film and television, collects money from theatres and producers and distributes it to authors, but most are unaccustomed to asking SOGEM’s advice when signing a contract. Playwright, lawyer and SOGEM president Victor Hugo Rascon Banda published a booklet of author’s rights, which he only half-jokingly suggests his members carry with them at all times as they would a medical card. Production teams still look anxiously to the state for grants, although theatre workers differ on the impact on the arts of Presidente Fox, who was elected in 2000 for a six-year term. “The Mexican government wants to invest less money in cultural life, and at the same time there are no political measures being taken to invite or stimulate private enterprises to participate in cultural life,” Castro says. Luis Mario Moncada, a playwright and the director of the government-funded Hellenic Cultural Center, partly concurs. “There is no great tradition of philanthropy or aid from private enterprise,” Moncada says. Still, government support for his institution has remained flat, losing only to inflation. Moncada admits he has “great autonomy” under the state funding system, in part because theatre is not a “strategic area” for the government. Autonomy is also on the mind of Henrique Singer, national theater coordinator of the National Institute of Fine Arts (INBA). As administrator, Singer oversees the six theatres in the Centro National del Bosque, which is the closest thing Mexico has to a national theatre complex. Each theatre is developing a different profile—one for private productions, one guest-curated by an experimental company, and the largest one devoted to the productions of the Mexican National Theater Company. For their next production, Moncada’s version of the romantic Spanish classic Don Juan Tenorio, directed by Acosta, Singer hopes to get some private funding. The centralization of funding is mirrored by the centralization of training. Actors may emerge from one or two universities (UNAM’s program is the most prestigious) or the telenovela-oriented programs of the two television companies. Writers may study dramatic literature at the National Autonomous University of Mexico or go through SOGEM’s own writing school, although the former is focused on history and criticism while the latter, more practice-oriented, covers all genres of writing. Directors have no formal training program at all, although in directing, as in the other fields, private workshops abound. Perhaps no formal training is best, the careers of many Mexican theatre artists suggest. Among the writers, Moncada graduated from an INBA school that is now closed; Narro trained as an actress, González Mello as a film director; Berman studied psychology; and maverick Robles has no college education at all. Among the directors, Valdés Kuri trained as a film director and singer, while Castro went to college at Hamilton College in upstate New York. The best young directors in Mexico are orphans, who are not trying to follow any particular tradition or guru. “Many directors who come from schools are overwhelmed by convictions not their own,” says Castro. “There is something oppressive about theatre education in a patriarchal society.” None of this may be immediately apparent when characters like Jesurun’s Faust, or Berman’s Dr. Freud, or the Geisha in The Grey Automobile take the American stage. What is abundantly clear is that the two theatres cannot ignore each other any longer. In the past, says Castro, the U.S. ignored Mexico, “and Mexicans said, we don’t care about you either. But the enormous number of Mexicans emigrating to the U.S. has forced everyone to change their positions.”
Aaron Mack Schloff, a former American Theatre Affiliated Writer,
graduated in 2003 from the University of Texas at Austin with an MFA in
playwriting.
© - 2004 by Theatre Communications Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No portion of this publication may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. |
