“The
Pink Crosses of Juárez”
Ciudad Juárez,
Mexico, a city just over the border from El Paso, Texas, is notorious for the
number of women raped, mutilated, and killed there since the 1990s. The extreme
poverty of many of its residents has contributed to the horrific deaths of
hundreds of women in what has been dubbed a
wave of feminicide (feminicidio). Isaac Gomez’s (Steppenwolf’s La
Ruta) the way she spoke is only the latest effort to bring the situation
to those who might not be aware of it, although its tale of callous brutality
and inhuman cruelty has been the subject of multiple books, poems, songs, and
movies, both documentary and fictional.
 |
| All photos of Kate del Castillo by Joan Marcus. |
For all its tragic content, the way she spoke is far less emotionally affecting than might otherwise be imagined, partly because of Gomez’s narrative approach.
The set has been “designed” by
Riccardo Hernandez to be nothing more than the brick-walled stage of the
Minetta Lane Theatre, its furnishings a table and chair and nothing else. (Aside
from the furniture, it could as easily serve for another current one-woman
play, Jacqueline Novak: Get on Your Knee, at the Cherry Lane.) Lap
Chu Li provides visual interest with unusual lighting transitions, and Aaron
Rhyne’s projections of vaguely seen images offer subtle suggestions of the play’s
world.
The play begins when, after
knocking loudly at the stage right door, a beautiful actress, Kate del Castillo
(a TV and movie star in her native Mexico), rushes in. (Gomez insists a Mexican
actress play the part, not one from a long list of other Latin nations he mentions.)
Chattering away, she recognizes the playwright, presumably sitting in the house.
We take it this is Gomez, who appears to have once been her lover.
She complains about this and that,
and relates how the men who just auditioned her for a part saw her only in
terms of her looks for a stereotypical Latina sexpot. She proceeds to audition
for the invisible playwright, slipping between her own and his voice. This is a
cold reading, so she only grasps the potency of the material as she gets into
it, stepping out of the script every now and then to talk to the director,
sometimes reading from the script as it she’d never seen it before. Ultimately, she does without it at all.
The play-within-a-play, then, is
the play we’ve come to see, intended for a solo performer, presented as part of
an audition by an actress with exceptional sight-reading talents. It requires her to play both the playwright himself, who narrates the events, and the
multiple other characters he encounters when visiting Juárez after many years
to research the stories of the murdered and disappeared women.
Mostly in blank verse English, but
with significant infusions of Spanish and Spanglish, the play introduces
various characters whom the playwright ostensibly interviewed as he was driven
around the dangerous part of the city by a local friend and her mom. We meet mothers; a butch bus driver who drove the women to and from their factory jobs; a man who confessed to murder, was nevertheless released
from prison, and blames the police for the killings; and so on, including imaginary commentary from the Virgin Mary.
The names of numerous actual
victims are recited, all symbolized by pink
crosses erected as symbols of resistance to such slaughter. As the coup de grâce,
the Actress recites—or does so until she reaches a point where she can’t go on—an
endless list of victims, from a three-year old girl to elderly women, but
mainly women in their teens and 20s.
The play exists not to offer
solutions but merely to describe conditions, as if by exposing these the world
will somehow rise up and do something about it. Looking at the half-filled
theatre, it didn’t seem this approach was going to appeal to many would-be
saviors. More a memoir than a drama, the way she spoke never theatricalizes
its subject matter to the point where we become emotionally invested, even the
roll call of names having little impact, although its intention is to overwhelm
the Actress as much as the audience.
del Castillo is a talented
actress, but so physically fit-looking in her black slacks and sleeveless black
top it’s difficult to see beyond her sleek appearance to the world of hardship,
pain, and blood envisioned by Gomez’s play. And while she’s lithe and graceful,
she’s not a chameleon, able to clearly enough differentiate the characters’ physical
and vocal differences so we always know who’s talking. Working under Jo Bonney's direction, she makes a strong
effort but not enough to overcome the ennui that arises, regardless
of the inherent power of the subject matter.
One thing a play about so dramatic
a story (or accumulation of stories) should not be is undramatic. And one word
a play like the way she spoke should never allow its audience to speak
is “boring.”
Minetta
Lane Theatre
18
Minetta Lane, NYC
Through
August 18
OTHER
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