Making Reality Sensible: The Mexican Documentary Theatre Tradition, 1968–2013 Julie Ann Ward
«Post-truth» has emerged as the description of the current political age, as though reality were an event with a before and after: the 2016 Oxford Dictionaries International Word of the Year was «post-truth,» while the Society for the German Language selected «postfaktisch» as its 2016 Word of the Year.1 In the 2016 US political election, a campaign based on falsehoods and half-truths has succeeded, even though the reality of the popular vote, laws governing conflicts of interest, and plain facts would lead one to expect its downfall. This post-truth phenomenon is not limited to US politics; indeed, in Mexico, where the current president’s campaign began years before it legally should have thanks to promotion by a powerful television conglomerate, including his highly publicized marriage to one of its soap-opera stars, the concept of truth is precarious. Mexico is among the world’s most dangerous places to be a reporter: it ranked sixth on the Committee to Protect Journalists 2016 impunity index, with twenty-one journalists killed with complete impunity during the past decade.2 Freedom House ranks Mexico’s press freedom status as «Not Free» and summarizes that “[j]ournalists and media outlets frequently face harassment, intimidation, and physical attacks, and self-censorship remains widespread in areas heavily affected by drug-related violence. The Federal Telecommunications and Broadcasting Act, known as the ‘Ley Telecom,’ signed by President Enrique Peña Nieto in July 2014, continued to draw criticism for threatening freedom of expression.”3 The organization Article 19 reports 397 documented aggressions against the press in Mexico in 2015,4 and names the state the «administrator of fear.»5 As the press faces threats to its ability to freely and independently investigate and report on real events affecting the lives of citizens, the need for a forum in which experiences can be recorded and held up as examples is urgent. Mexican documentary theatre has positioned itself over the past half-century as just such a forum. In this essay I argue that Mexican documentary theatre, by presenting documentary and autobiographical evidence onstage, has emerged as an alternative source for reality in the face of unreliability and a lack of transparency from other sources traditionally associated with objective facts.
This informative role can be seen outside of Mexico as well, in the international tendency toward staging reality. What Yochai Benkler calls the «networked fourth estate,» nontraditional media like Wikileaks have challenged the definition of the press, particularly with regard to the rights and protections enjoyed by the press.6 Benkler cites US court decisions regarding who or what should be regarded as the press, including Branzburg v. Hayes (1972) in which the United States Supreme Court noted that «[t]he informative function asserted by representatives of the organized press in the present
Copyright © 2017 Johns Hopkins University Press. This article first appeared THEATRE JOURNAL, Volume 69, Issue 2, June, 2017, pages 197-211.
cases is also performed by lecturers, political pollsters, novelists, academic researchers, and dramatists.»7
It is this last category that interests me especially, as I believe that theatre in particular, in the Mexican case, has taken up the mantle of the responsibility of the press. As the press’s independence and responsibility has waned worldwide and especially in Mexico, other discourses of truth, including the theatre, have expanded, positioning themselves as sources for the real story. Indeed, in the United States one of the first prominent public protests to the newly elected Trump administration took place on the stage of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s musical Hamilton.8 While the administration responded with disdain, the symbolic value of this first protest had political repercussions outside the White House and can be linked to other public demonstrations and protests, thus demonstrating the inextricable and intense connection between the real and the theatrical. Borrowing from Rancière, I identify the contemporary stage’s focus on the real as part of the aesthetic regime of the arts. For him, aesthetics is
the system of a priori forms determining what presents itself to sense experience. It is a delimitation of space and times, of the visible and the invisible, of speech and noise, that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience. Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.9
Rancière’s conception points out the important role that the arts play in making sensible what might seem natural and therefore go unnoticed. The stage, then, makes visible, audible, and sensible the real stories of real people—real Mexicans within the context in which I explore it here. These stories might have been effaced, ignored, or manipulated in other media, but the combination of the documentary evidence and the lived, bodily experiences portrayed in the plays make them, again in Rancière’s terms, “sensible.” In this way the theatre establishes itself within the political field as a source of truth, challenging the traditional discourses associated with reality, as well as governmental power.
Mexican theatre offers a model for bringing reality to light by presenting factual, verifiable evidence alongside lived experience to a present audience. In this way it challenges the government’s lack of transparency and offers an alternative to the threatened journalistic enterprise. I examine three plays from distinct moments in Mexican theatre history—Vicente Leñero’s Pueblo rechazado (Rejected People, 1968), Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda’s La fiera del Ajusco (The Beast of the Ajusco, 1985), and Gabino Rodríguez’s Montserrat (2013)—to trace the relationship between theatre and reality. I demonstrate how the body interacts with the text to support theatre’s claim to be a source of truth in the
face of untrustworthy and corrupt politics. I situate Mexican theatre of the real within the debate surrounding the genre to show contemporary Mexican theatre of the real’s place within the tradition of Mexican documentary theatre, and to reflect on how the text functions as unstable evidence throughout the history of Mexican theatre of the real. Such a reflection reinforces the theatre as an important repository for reality in the face of challenges to verifiable facts.
While documentary theatre has a strong tradition throughout Latin America, the genre holds a special place in Mexican theatre history. In 1968, amid violent repression of student movements and with the world’s eyes on Mexico as it hosted the Olympic games, Vicente Leñero’s Pueblo rechazado premiered in Mexico City. This, Latin America’s first example of documentary theatre, appeared only three years after Peter Weiss’s production of Die Ermittlung (The Investigation) in Germany. While some critics insisted that the ripped-from-the-headlines play was opportunistic, deeming it a flash in the pan, staging reality quickly became an important part of Mexican theatre and the popularity of the form continues today. Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, Leñero’s disciple, was a prominent voice in Mexican documentary theatre in the late twentieth century, helping to solidify the genre within the contemporary canon, and the twenty-first century has given way to experimental theatre, which continues to concern itself with staging what really happened, a characteristic of what Carol Martin calls theatre of the real.10 Among other theatre companies, Mexico City’s Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Lizards Lounging in the Sun), founded by Luisa Pardo and Gabino Rodríguez, is a leading player in producing theatre of the real.
Recent debates around theatre of the real have focused mainly on Europe and the English- speaking world, and I would submit Mexico’s long tradition as a reminder that the academic community might look to Latin America for interesting contributions and innovations of the genre. José Sánchez does include several Latin American examples in his Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage,11 and the Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença dedicated an issue to postdramatic Argentine theatre.12 Likewise, in Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage, Martin includes excerpts from Argentine Vivi Tellas’s work.13 The focus in critical work, however, generally remains on examples from Europe, the United States, and Canada. In this essay I use Martin’s term theatre of the real as an umbrella definition that includes documentary theatre. In these modes the plays communicate that what is being shown is real by presenting documentary evidence onstage and including contextual information in programs and publicity, among other techniques. Documentary evidence in particular has been an important touchstone for theatre of the real in Mexico, since its origins.
Throughout the history of staging reality in Mexico, it is the document that has had a primary role in demonstrating the supposed authenticity of the staged material. This is particularly significant given the historical lack of transparency associated with Mexican politics, famously dominated in the
twentieth century by the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI). In the theatre, the text, seemingly immutable, interacts with the fluid presence of performers’ bodies, thus creating a double claim to truth, the two sides of which at times bolster and at other times contradict each other. The text is at once used as evidence while, at the same time, known to be untrustworthy; indeed, in the postcolonial context of Latin America in general and Mexico in particular the document has a suspect quality. In her discussion of pre-conquest performance, Diana Taylor argues that «[t]hrough tricks of the archive, the scene-as- seen gets reproduced and inserted, unabridged and unacknowledged, into written accounts. The how-we- know, then, seems based on assertions by unidentified witnesses and the highly suspect reworking of lost originals.»14 Therefore, although the archive seems to be resistant to change and is consequently trustworthy, it is also known to be contaminated by unsubstantiated observations, rumors of rumors; lived experience, on the other hand, is presented as ephemeral and yet, somehow, more real. This appeal to experience as evidence challenges authoritarian versions of history, providing an alternative source of reality. In the age of «alternative facts,» theatre of the real conserves reality and honors the truth, while revealing the theatricality of unreliable official claims totruth.
As an art of co-presence in time and space the theatre cannot replicate the originating event completely, but documentary plays promise this replication through their connection to what really happened. This connection may be demonstrated through reproducing verbatim language or by claiming experience, autobiographical or familial. The plays examined here are exemplary of the genre and have an explicit relationship to textual evidence that reveals the impossibilities of recreating reality. In the failed attempt to do so, however, the plays create an alternative forum in which the transmission of bodily knowledge, rather than the supposedly sacred text, claims its position as the ultimate authority. In a political climate in which objective facts are called into question daily by those in power, theatre gives credence to what we know to be true, including bodily experiences, memories, and desires.
My reading of these plays draws on performance studies’ critical effort to parse theatre of the real and properly situate the text vis-à-vis performance. In their introduction to the concept of theatricality in performance theory, Tracy Davis and Thomas Postlewait trace society’s mistrust of the theatre, from ancient Greece to the present, citing condemnations of its «illusory, deceptive, exaggerated, artificial, or affected»15 character. Marvin Carlson, meanwhile, notes how the field of performance studies itself has seen theatricality as suspect, associating the term «primarily with formal, traditional and formally structured operations, potentially or actually opposed to the unrestricted and more authentic impulses of life itself.»16 This tension between authenticity and structure hearkens back to Elinor Fuchs’s essay on the importance of the text within theatrical performances of the 1980s, «Presence and the Revenge of Writing.» What she calls «a new kind of textuality» challenges the theatre’s «enterprise of spontaneous
speech with its logocentric claims to origination, authority, authenticity—in short, Presence.»17 Twenty- first-century discussions of theatre of the real parallel the twentieth-century debate over the authenticity of spontaneous speech and the unreliability of edited writing. Liz Tomlin aptly points out that
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there is a tension at the heart of twenty-first century verbatim practice and reception that is the result of seemingly irreconcilable conflict between, on the one hand, the drive for political change that necessitates both a relationship with the «real» world and an ideological commitment to a particular political discourse, and, on the other, a philosophical skepticism of the «real» world, and a consequent discrediting of truth claims or ethical imperatives that seek to distinguish any one narrative as authoritative.18
In a more recent contribution to the discussion, Carlson reminds us of the question of mimesis in theatre: «what challenges to representation and to mimesis arise from the fact that the dramatic artist, unlike the painter, utilizes material from the real world to create his art?»19 Because audiences know better than to trust even so-called reality, documentary plays become treatises on the nature of documentary theatre. Indeed, the theatre has recently focused on representing the real, even in the face of anti-theatrical prejudice (although critics like Carlson argue that using real material «has been a defining characteristic of theatre from its very beginnings»).20 The tension between reality and theatricality is like the tension between speech and writing that Fuchs examines. As reality itself is recognized as theatrical, the ritual presence that theatre offers can be considered a more reliable source for facts than other discourses more traditionally associated with reality, as the next section elaborates.
Mexican Documentary Theatre
Documentary theatre emerged onto the Mexican scene in 1968 with Pueblo rechazado, Leñero’s theatrical portrayal of a monk’s use of psychoanalysis at a monastery in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and his consequent excommunication from the Catholic Church. It premiered October 15, 1968 in the Teatro Xola in Mexico City, only thirteen days after the massacre of student protestors by military and police in the Plaza de las Tres Culturas in the Tlatelolco district of the city. The furor of the student movement, its violent repression, and the intensity of the Olympic games and its international witnesses combined to create a critical moment for the foundation of Latin American documentary theatre. Although Pueblo rechazado‘s ties to the documentary are at times tenuous, later practitioners would study Weiss, Piscator, and Brecht more closely and focus on testimony as their primary sources. Documentary theatre remained firmly planted on the Mexican stage thereafter through Leñero’s prolific work, as well as that of subsequent playwrights, especially of his disciple Rascón Banda. Rascón Banda followed Leñero’s
example with historical plays like La Malinche (1998), testimonial theatre with Sazón de mujer (Taste of a Woman, 2001), and the documentary mode in, for example, La mujer que cayó del cielo (The Woman Who Fell from the Sky, 1999). His La fiera del Ajusco, on which I focus here, is based on a real case. It portrays Elvira Luz Cruz, a woman convicted of murdering her children, who was widely exploited in tabloids and by the justice system. Twenty-first-century theatre practitioners like Gabino Rodríguez and his company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol draw on the strong tradition of performance in Mexico, with its emphasis on the body and the political, to experiment with the representation of reality, revealing the problems with asking audiences to both believe and disbelieve. I examine Rodríguez’s play Montserrat, which delivers a false plot, complete with falsified documentation, to communicate a very real desire.
Mexican theatre is, then, often rooted in historical fact and documentary evidence and has a contentious relationship with official political power. The following analysis shows how documentary theatre in Mexico has positioned itself alongside traditional authoritative discourses, such as religion, journalism, and officialdom, offering a more nuanced and complex version of reality, because rather than in spite of its theatricality.
Pueblo rechazado
Leñero’s Pueblo rechazado is considered to be Latin America’s first example of documentary theatre. While Heinar Kipphardt’s In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer (In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer, 1964) was the first documentary play to be staged in Mexico City, Pueblo rechazado followed it as the first example produced by a Latin American playwright about Latin American themes.21 The play premiered in 1968 as part of the festivities surrounding the Olympic games in Mexico City. Leñero was out of the country on a Guggenheim fellowship and so missed the success of the play, as well as the army’s occupation of the National University and the October 2 massacre in Tlatelolco. The play’s subject matter is religious and although it displays a sympathetic vision of its characters, their real-life counterparts were not pleased with its take on psychoanalysis. It treats the case of Gregorio Lemercier, a Belgian monk who founded a monastery at Santa María Ahuacatitlán outside of Cuernavaca in the state of Morelos. After experiencing a hallucination, Lemercier was referred to a psychoanalyst and subsequently employed psychotherapy in the routines of the monastery. Leñero, the playwright, spent a week at the monastery in 1963 to finish his novel Los albañiles (The Bricklayers).
He was obviously impressed by what he experienced, as he went on to stage the rise and subsequent Vatican suppression of psychoanalysis at Santa María Ahuacatitlán five years later in his play Pueblo rechazado, basing the script on journalistic accounts, Lemercier’s book, and interviews. The primacy of the document for the development of Pueblo rechazado is well-established and follows the example of
early documentary plays by Weiss and Kipphardt. Its relationship to power lies in its portrayal of the Catholic Church.
In this first example of Mexican documentary theatre, the source text is literally sacred. In addition to documents produced by the Vatican, Leñero’s sources include «newspaper reports, magazine articles, taped or personally witnessed interviews as well as Lemercier’s book about his disagreement with the authorities of the Church.»22 Leñero himself considers this use of primary sources to be problematic. In his 1982 memoir Vivir del teatro (Living Off the Theatre) he recounts his personal experience with Lemercier and the monastery, as well as how he came to write Pueblo rechazado, his first theatrical work after a successful career as a novelist. Leñero would go on to be a successful writer of nonfiction and journalism, as well as a screenwriter and playwright. He conceived of Pueblo rechazado as an auto sacramental, a religious play in the Spanish Catholic tradition that depicts the Eucharist. On the one hand he sought universality, rejecting the use of proper names; on the other, however, he used the version of the Our Father prayer published in Lemercier’s own book, Dialogues avec le Christ (Dialogues with Christ), fragments of the priest’s homilies, Bishop Méndez Arceo’s speech supporting Lemercier and the use of psychoanalysis during a Vatican council, and fragments of journalistic interviews with Lemercier and the monks.23 Additionally, some of the written text quoted in Pueblo rechazado was produced by the pope himself. For example, in 1961 the Holy See issued a monitum «against the practice of psychoanalysis by clerics or religious and against its use for testing religious vocation.»24 The warning is echoed in the play when a priest reads the monitum to an audience made up of the Chorus of Catholics and the Chorus of Journalists:
PRIEST: The Church never rectifies! On July 16, 1961, the Holy Office pronounced a monitum that, wisely and energetically, with luminous clarity, condemns the experiences of the monastery. (Reading) The opinions of those who consider that a prior psychoanalytical examination is necessary before receiving Holy Orders, says the monitum, must be disapproved.
CHORUS OF JOURNALISTS: Oooooh!25
Although Leñero’s play assumes a sympathetic tone toward Lemercier, its use of sacred original sources reveals deep reverence toward the text and the Church, confirmed in Leñero’s memoir through his discussions of his admiration of the bishop. In fact, psychoanalyst Gustavo Quevedo, portrayed in the play as «Analyst,» opposed the play’s production, and it was through Bishop Méndez Arceo’s influence that it was even staged.26 Indeed, such negotiations to secure a performance space as part of the official
celebrations is reminiscent of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s comments that «[f]or the politics of the performance space is much more than a question of a physical site for a theatrical show. It touches on nearly all aspects of power and being in a colonial and postcolonial society. It is germane to issues of what will constitute the national and the mainstream.»27Indeed, this play, which subtly criticizes the Church’s decision while respecting its authority, slips into the national mainstream via the official celebrations being held, even as the government violently repressed its own citizenry. An analogous relationship with the official, yet dissenting Church authority is reflected in the play, which criticizes the Vatican’s actions, creating instead identification with the protagonist, but does not stray from the constraints of the hierarchy. Indeed, it seems to hope for change from within, advocating for the liberty of individual priests and monks to decide whether to use psychoanalysis in their religious practice. As Tamara Holzapfel argues, «in airing the shortcomings of the Church, Leñero at all times keeps before the audience the venerable traditions and enduring values that institution has offered its followers through the ages.»28 The play establishes its nonfiction status by firmly planting its script in the supposedly unassailable, infallible written canon of the Holy Office of the Catholic Church. At the same time, by portraying the Prior and monks sympathetically, the play challenges the Church’s decision. The play, then, turns the theatre into a space for respectful questioning, asking spectators to consider the way that decisions made in the highest echelons of power affect the day-to-day lives of ordinary people an ocean away.
Likewise, Leñero does not stop at the pope: he goes back to the primary source, quoting the Gospel of Luke in his play. In the first act a strange transition occurs after a psychoanalysis session between the Prior and the Analyst. The Prior tells his analyst that he is willing to face the truth, no matter what it is. The Analyst replies: «Magnificent. You have wanted it thus. Let us destroy the temple!»29 Throughout the session the Chorus of Monks chants Gregorian lamentations in the background. The Analyst exits; the Prior and monks remain. The character known only as «Soloist» tells the biblical story of Jesus and Zacchaeus, ending with Jesus’s statement: «For the Son of Man is come to seek and to save that which was lost» (Luke 19:10 KJV). The spoken confessions of the Prior to his Analyst blend with the sacred text, quoted by the Soloist. They are spatially and temporally linked, as the psychotherapy session takes place simultaneously and in the same place as the monks’ chants; the staging gives equal weight to the psychoanalytical utterances and the sacred texts, quoted verbatim.
Here, with Jesus’s promise to «seek out and save the lost,» the play likens psychoanalysis to the sacred work of recovering desperate souls. Rather than reject the traditions of the sacred texts and rebel against the Church, Leñero uses the Church’s own Scripture to argue against its ban on psychoanalysis. Both the play and the Church recognize the sacred texts as ultimate authority; both refer to Scripture to defend
their points of view. The use of verbatim quotes from the Bible and the Holy See is a way of reassuring audiences of the infallibility of the play’s relationship to real events. Through an aesthetic recreation of a historical event, represented by professional actors with no relationship to the event, the play declares itself a conduit to the truth by wielding the written word; it thus renders the Church’s decisions sensible, merely by staging them.
Reverence to the text runs throughout Pueblo rechazado. The play itself is highly theatrical, and one could walk away from a performance of it without realizing that it is based on facts. While the drama is not strictly verbatim or testimonial, however, it is based on various texts. Judith Bissett asserts that the «newspaper accounts and other related material served as a point of departure,»30 likening the documentary play to a historical drama rather than a reenactment of the events. I would argue, however, that the verbatim repetition of certain texts in the play bind it to the historical events the play portrays, supporting its claims of a connection to reality. As we shall see, in later iterations of Mexican documentary theatre the word as ultimate authority begins to waver. Here, however, in the genre’s foundational gesture the word is impeccable and impenetrable. While the play tacitly questions the pope’s decision against psychoanalysis by staging Lemercier’s own passion, its structure upholds the word’s dominance as source of unassailable truth. That is, the play does not invite audiences to question whether the events occurred; rather, it draws on Brechtian techniques that invite the viewer to adopt a critical attitude toward the actions taking place onstage.31While it is obviously a representation, a reenactment of real events, the events’ reality is not questioned, because the text stands in for the moment being recreated; rather, the Church’s actions are called into question by staging the events and thus opening them up to criticism. The theatre is, then, working in the aesthetic regime: through their representation onstage, the events portrayed become sensible, worthy of consideration and even judgment.
La fiera del Ajusco
Rascón Banda also stages reality, calling the public’s attention to the margins. His approach differs from Leñero’s in the case of his play La fiera del Ajusco in that rather than uphold the text as proof of the reality of the scenes represented, here the playwright depends on the audience’s skepticism of sensationalist newspapers to create a sense of reality. The documentary play treats the case of Elvira Luz Cruz, a mother sentenced to twenty-three years in prison for the 1981 murder of her four children. The incident was publicized in the sensationalist newspapers of the country, and has been commented on by various cultural critics in the years since the events.32 Cruz’s attorney, Mireya Toto Gutiérrez, publicly denounced the judicial process and the surrounding commentary, citing the facts that her
originally assigned defender grossly neglected the case and that statements by Cruz’s partner and his mother were contradictory. Indeed, Toto Gutiérrez maintains that Cruz’s crime was merely «being a woman.»33 According to the attorney, the psychologists’ conclusions for Cruz’s motivations were jealousy, desperation, and poverty, which are linked to a misogynistic society’s view of women and their expected roles. Public commentators, coming to Cruz’s defense, cited her poverty as the reason for her crime, accepting that she did, indeed, take her children’s lives, while urging public sympathy for this victim of a sexist tragedy. The story was finally brought to the stage with the play La fiera del Ajusco by Rascón Banda, and to the screen in the film Los motivos de Luz (Luz’s Motives, 1985) by Xavier Robles. Rascón Banda includes snippets from the prensa amarilla (yellow journalism) that contrast with the intimate scenes from Cruz’s life portrayed in the play. An attorney himself, the playwright insists on the injustice of Cruz’s case, in that she was denied a right to privacy. Cruz’s poverty and gender might relegate her case to oblivion, but by staging it Rascón Banda renders it sensible and asks spectators to consider its complexities.
La fiera del Ajusco is, like Pueblo rechazado, very recognizable as a traditional, scripted play.
Theatricality is the rule, although the subject matter would have been present as real in the viewing public’s mind, as in Leñero’s play. Rascón Banda invents scenes of dialogue, private moments, and flashbacks into Cruz’s past, while it brings to the forefront sensationalist newspaper text through the title, a reference to the nickname that journalists gave Cruz. Myra Gann characterizes the play as documentary, Brechtian, and didactic.34 With plays like La fiera del Ajusco, Mexican documentary theatre begins to question the text as a source, offering instead an alternative history to the one that the prensa amarilla sells on the streets. Of special importance is the name, that unit of logos that gives individuals their power or lack thereof. Cruz is stripped of her name by the hysterical shouts of the newspaper vendors and instead called la fiera del Ajusco, the beast of the Ajusco, in reference to the Ajusco volcano in the Mexico City metropolitan area where Cruz made her humble home. Here in particular we see Mexican theatre positioning itself as superior to traditional discourses of reality such as journalism by offering more reliable, and more humane, versions of the facts.
By the 1980s, then, Mexican documentary theatre claimed to have alerted the viewing public to the real nature of the events portrayed (the scandal was national news) and to question the media’s version of what happened. The play quotes headlines directly, thereby establishing the events it portrays within national reality, but also presents scenes of dialogue between Elvira and her partner that directly refute the headlines’ accusations of ferocity. In the scene just before the killings, Elvira argues with Felipe, her companion:
(They lie down on the floor, on a blanket. Felipe climbs on top of Elvira, who rejects him)
ELVIRA: Scoot over.
FELIPE: What’s wrong with you? ELVIRA: I don’t want any more kids.
FELIPE: Seems to me you’re the type that kills them.
ELVIRA: It doesn’t cost you anything to make them……… I carry them, birth them, and feed them.
Does that seem like nothing to you?35
This scene stages the origin of Cruz’s tragic problems: the conception bed. Felipe’s reference to Elvira’s probable propensity for abortion («eres de esas que los matan«) is judgmental and premonitory. He minimizes the negative effects having another child would have for Elvira, cruelly equating her possible decision to end a pregnancy with murder. His use of the verb matar, «to kill,» points to the tragic denouement of the play, when Elvira does in fact murder her existing children. Her attempts to rebuff Felipe anger him and the space of the stage becomes a space of simultaneity. Felipe is at once in the future, answering investigators’ questions about Elvira, and in the present, contributing to Elvira’s desperation:
FELIPE: (With rage) Why are you asking me all of this? What do I have to do with it? I couldn’t guess what she was going to do. I saw her the night before and didn’t notice anything.
Well. Yeah. Kids cry sometimes. It’s natural. All children cry, don’t they? And they drive you nuts with their whining, right? It’s natural. (He addresses Elvira’s shadow in the dark corner) Shut those brats up already!36
Rascón Banda uses the space of the stage to collapse time. Before and after are present in one horrible moment. Here, however, the focus is not solely on Elvira. After the tragedy, she is the only one lambasted in the news and the only one whose side of the story is ignored. Nevertheless, in the play Felipe’s abuse and complicity in her «shutting up» the children are brought to light. Just as the media scandalously creates a villainous persona for Cruz, effacing her humanity, in this scene she is literally sent to the shadows, her point of view once again effaced and replaced by Felipe’s.
La fiera del Ajusco gives the sensationalist press a forum in its title, repeating journalists’ nickname for Elvira. However, the play also gives Elvira, the character, time and space to become a multifaceted human being. The theatre contains multiple discourses, creating a more complete representation of reality. She is far from perfect—once losing all her children, including an infant, at a fair and another time threatening to sell them all—so the play is not a hagiographic whitewashing. It is
instead a complex portrait of a woman suffering from mental illness and poverty. Rascón Banda does not deny that Cruz committed the murders of which she was convicted; rather, the play argues against the press making her into a villain, denying her right to privacy. The humanizing effort mostly lies in the backstory. At one point Elvira recounts a dream she had about her childhood, before she came to the city. When her sister tells her it was only a dream, Elvira counters: «Dreams are truth» («Los sueños son verdad»).37 The play presents the personal, ineffable truth of Elvira’s unconscious alongside the questionable truth of the written word, which the nation has consumed. Their simultaneous presence, then, contests the totalizing power of the text. While on the one hand the play uses verbatim text to establish the reality of the dramatic situation, on the other it calls the same text into question, privileging instead the contradicting interior thoughts and dreams of the protagonist. La fiera del Ajusco continues Mexican documentary theatre’s tradition of opening new political spaces, allowing for more participants with «the ability to see and the talent to speak,» in Rancière’s words.
Montserrat
In the twenty-first century, Mexican theatre of the real tends to blend the documentary with the autobiographical, expanding the concept of what realities can exist onstage. An example of this is Rodríguez’s 2013 work Montserrat,38 a play about his mother’s life and death. In the play he reconstructs her biography based on textual evidence like diaries, letters, and her death certificate. Photographs also play an important role in establishing the reality of Montserrat’s life. Here, however, rather than using text to create a pact with the audience wherein what is presented onstage should be understood to be rooted in reality, the text is revealed to be treacherous. The documents that Rodríguez presents as evidence that his mother did not die, but rather is still alive and hiding in Costa Rica, turn out to be falsified. Additionally, his claims that real documents were falsified turn out to be false. What is real inMontserrat is dream and desire, as in the case of Elvira in Rascón Banda’s play. Rodríguez brings his own longing into the aesthetic space, thus making affect sensible in the political field.
Rodríguez’s company, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, has a long history of presenting documentary plays. It has produced works on the history of water in Mexico City, on the history of the political party PRI, and on the guerrillas of the 1960s, so its audiences are accustomed to theatre of the real.
Montserrat, aside from being presented in Mexico City, premiered at the Santiago a Mil Festival in Chile, and has been presented in various festivals and venues in Europe, the United States, and Latin America. This play is about a search and about reality. The reality central to Montserrat is Rodríguez’s late mother, the eponymous character who died when he was very young. The play represents his attempt to recuperate the memories of his mother and create a connection with her that death has made
impossible. In the documentary style the company has established through previous works, Rodríguez stages an investigation of Montserrat’s death. He begins with a letter he reads to the audience in which he apologizes to his family for staging their real pain (fig. 1).
Figure 1. Gabino Rodríguez reads a letter to his family in Montserrat. (Photo: Andrea Kaus, reprinted with permission.)
From this auspicious beginning, with Gabino reading a physical document that he himself has produced, the actor inserts his real, historical self into the world of the play, becoming an autobiographical character. This letter to the family indirectly creates a pact with the audience. While it is addressed to his family, he reads it to the spectators. By apologizing, he creates sympathy for himself and his case. Through the course of the play Rodríguez presents evidence that his mother did not die, but instead lives clandestinely in Costa Rica. He creates a detective story, complete with international travel and conspiracies, which is falsified. Through a mix of real evidence—such as family photos, Montserrat’s death certificate, her journal, and falsified evidence, like the letter he reads at the beginning of the play or another email that is supposedly from his aunt telling him to go to hell—he tricks his audience (fig. 2). Rodríguez presents false texts as documentary evidence in his play, thus returning the focus of theatre to representation rather than reality.
Figure 2. Gabino Rodríguez reveals Montserrat’s «counterfeit» death certificate. (Photo: Andrea Kaus, reprinted with permission.)
Whereas Leñero depended on the Church’s texts as the foundation for the reality of Pueblo rechazado and Rascón Banda cited newspaper headlines to refer to a real event and uncover the truth behind the sensationalized story, here the concept of the text as reliable is thrown out the window. The only «real» thing being presented in Montserrat is the all-too-real and impossible desire of a son to be reunited with his deceased mother. The play itself functions as a funeral rite; the spectators are participants in the ritual. As Rodríguez has no memories of his mother and no space to use to feel as though he is in contact with her, he must create one. Montserrat, of course, breaks the rules of documentary: it uses the tools of documentary to create a falsehood; it also, however, uses the tools of documentary to create an alternate reality, a space where a son can commune with the memory of his late mother.
In the last scene of the play Rodríguez claims to have found his mother, but the photographs he projects onto the wall behind him are absent of any human figures. The final words in the play indicate that this is Rodríguez’s only memory of his mother, and he is not sure whether or not he dreamt it. The
primacy of the text has been rejected; instead, lived, bodily experience and desire are privileged as sources of truth. In other words the reality this play presents is corporeal, emotional, and affective; it absorbs the audience, inescapably. Rodríguez reminds audiences persistently that they are watching a play by using masks, presenting a detective story so clichéd it is comical—he even references a trench coat—and by incorporating music and dance into the presentation. Even so, the desire for Montserrat is so strong that it defeats logic, and audiences regularly walk away from the play believing the fiction that was presented so theatrically. Rodríguez effectively transmits his own orphan’s longing to spectators by presenting himself onstage. The promise of theatre of the real is not only the promise of a verifiable reality, but it also offers the communication of various realities that go beyond the documentary. The play makes the innermost workings of the soul sensible, an operation that history or journalism would not dare attempt. With Montserrat, Mexican documentary theatre announces its capacity to present verifiable historical fact, as well as real, lived emotional experience.
Conclusion
Mexican documentary theatre’s relationship to the real has undergone a revolution since its introduction in 1968. Whereas early examples privilege the text as a symbolic stand-in for reality, contemporary theatre of the real questions the possibilities of representing reality via the document, and instead offers up the body that lived the portrayed experience as the ultimate evidence. In Pueblo rechazado sacred texts are used to ground the drama in reality. Leñero appeals to a devotional respect for biblical and papal texts, offering up their verbatim reproduction as a substitute for the reality that audiences are promised by the genre. In La fiera del Ajusco, meanwhile, the text as token of reality is challenged; while newspaper headlines are still reproduced in the play, the unconscious offers up an alternative version of reality that questions the authority of the written word. Finally, in Montserrat the text is revealed to be untrustworthy; instead, the body onstage, which lived through the loss and longing it reproduces in the play, is the true source of reality. This varied treatment of the text reflects the difficulties of finding out what really happened in a Mexico whose journalistic field is threatened and whose government is widely perceived to be corrupt. The theatre offers itself as an alternative source of reality.
In every case the theatre proposes an alternative history that can only come to life through the ritual of performance. Although the text is the basis for documentary plays, it is the experience of simultaneous presence between audience members and players that allows a glimpse into Lemercier’s private psychoanalysis sessions, Cruz’s dreams, and Rodríguez’s deepest desires. The evidence, long consigned to the written word, only goes so far in recreating reality; the sharing of time and space brings
the text to life, thus illuminating the limits of the written word. While the sacred texts privileged by Leñero would be recognizable to Catholic audiences, the play’s equal attention to the psychoanalytical experiments going on in the monastery subtly challenges the text’s supremacy. Similarly, the prensa amarilla might capture national imagination with its grotesque headlines, but La fiera del Ajusco presents another version of Cruz that contextualizes her criminal act in a life of poverty and abuse.
Finally, Rodríguez presents the personal officialdom that legitimizes modern life by displaying his mother’s death certificate in Montserrat. He overtly challenges the validity of the certificate, finally arriving at a climax in this trajectory of theatrical use of the written word to represent reality. By casting doubt on the document, Rodríguez privileges the reality of desire to that of the text. This trajectory inverts the use of the written word in Mexican theatre of the real. Early examples rely upon text to lend credence to the plays; later examples reject the text’s supremacy and rather privilege subjective, lived experience and desire as tokens of reality.
This trajectory has its parallels in other theatrical traditions, as theatre of the real becomes more focused on autobiography and theorizing the practice of representing reality. It also accompanies national political processes, including abuses of power, corruption, and limits to freedom of the press. The theatre, then, challenges political authority, acting as an aesthetic lens and bringing new facts to light, thus providing alternative versions of the real. By considering examples from Mexico—an extreme example of journalistic crisis and a lack of governmental transparency—we have seen how the theatre positions itself as an alternative source of truth by verifying its claims via documentary and bodily evidence, as well as questioning other discourses that claim to represent reality, such as the Church, the press, and the state. The theatre, then, challenges political authority, acting as an aesthetic lens and bringing new facts to light, providing alternative versions of the real. In a time marked by disregard for, or even outright hostility toward, facts on the part of the world’s most powerful people, theatre of the real, like the examples analyzed here, becomes a space that discusses the truth. It is precisely through that suspect quality, theatricality, that documentary drama and theatre of the real can reach audiences and convince them that what they have lived and what they know to be true are valid. It is the combination of documentary evidence and embodied knowledge that allows for the representation of complex realities. While politics may be post-truth, art, we are reminded, remains truth’s timeless guardian.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my appreciation for Karlee Bradberry’s very helpful work on this essay as honors research assistant, and for Julia Chang’s thoughtful comments on early drafts. I also thank the anonymous reviewers and Joanne Tompkins for their invaluable feedback.
FOOTNOTES
1 «Dealing with Post-Truth Politics: ‘Postfaktisch’ Is Germany’s Word of the Year,» Deutsche Welle, December 9, 2016, available at http://www.dw.com/en/dealing-with-post-truth-politics-postfaktisch- is-germanys-word-of-the-year/a-36702430.
2 Elisabeth Witchel, «Getting Away with Murder: 2016 Global Impunity Index,» Committee to Protect
Journalists, October 27, 2016, available at https://cpj.org/reports/2016/10/impunity-index-getting- away-with-murder-killed-justice.php.
3 Freedom House, «Freedom of the Press: Mexico» (2016), available at
https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-press/2016/mexico.
4 Article 19, «Miedo: Medios, Impunidad, Estado, Democracia, Opacidad» (2016), 6. Here and throughout, all translations, unless otherwise noted, are my own.
5 Ibid., 136.
6 Yochai Benkler, «WikiLeaks and the Networked Fourth Estate,» in Beyond WikiLeaks, ed. Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz, and Patrick McCurdy (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 11–34.
7 Branzburg v. Hayes, 408 U.S. 665, United States Supreme Court, June 29, 1972, 705, available at
https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/408/665/case.html.
8 «Hamilton,» Twitter post, November 18, 2016, available at https://twitter.com/HamiltonMusical.
9 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London: Bloomsbury, 2004), 8 (emphasis in original).
10 Carol Martin, Theatre of the Real (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 5.
11 José A. Sánchez, Practising the Real on the Contemporary Stage, trans. Charlie Allwood (Bristol, UK: Intellect, 2014).
12 Revista Brasileira de Estudos da Presença 3, no. 3 (2013).
13 Carol Martin, ed., Dramaturgy of the Real on the World Stage (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
14 Diana Taylor, «Scenes of Cognition: Performance and Conquest,» Theatre Journal 56, no. 3 (2004):
353–72, quote on 356.
15 Tracy C. Davis and Thomas Postlewait, eds., «Theatricality: An Introduction,» in Theatricality
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 1–39, quote on 4.
16 Marvin Carlson, «The Resistance to Theatricality,» SubStance 31, nos. 2–3 (2002): 238–50, quote on
242.
17 Elinor Fuchs, «Presence and the Revenge of Writing: Re-Thinking Theatre after Derrida,» Performing Arts Journal 9, nos. 2–3 (1985): 163–73, quotes on 165, 172.
18 Liz Tomlin, Acts and Apparitions: Discourses on the Real in Performance Practice and Theory,
1990–2010 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013), 120.
19 Marvin Carlson, Shattering Hamlet’s Mirror: Theatre and Reality (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016), 5.
20 Ibid., 17.
21 Tamara Holzapfel, «Pueblo rechazado: Educating the Public through Reportage,» Latin American Theatre Review 10, no. 1 (1976): 15–21, reference on 16–17.
22 Ibid., 17.
23 Vicente Leñero, Vivir del teatro (México City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012), 23.
24 «Psychoanalysis,» Catholic Herald, July 21, 1961.
25 Vicente Leñero, Pueblo Rechazado,» in Teatro completo (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2008), act 1.
26 Leñero, Vivir Del Teatro, 29–30.
27 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, «Enactments of Power: The Politics of Performance Space,» TDR: The Drama Review 41, no. 3 (1997): 11–30, quote on 28.
28 Holzapfel, «Pueblo Rechazado,» 18.
29 Leñero, Pueblo Rechazado,» act 1.
30 Judith I. Bissett, «Constructing the Alternative Version: Vicente Leñero’s Documentary and Historical Drama,» Latin American Theatre Review 18, no. 2 (1985): 71–78, quote on 73.
31 Bertold Brecht, «A Short Organum for the Theatre,» in Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an
Aesthetic, trans. John Willett (New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 179–208, reference on 190.
32 See José Ramón Enríquez, «Elvira Luz Cruz: Más que una Medea, una mujer que se moría de hambre,» Proceso, December 7, 1985, available at http://www.proceso.com.mx/142594/elvira-luz- cruz-mas-que-una-medea-una-mujer-que-se-moria-de-hambre; and Carlos Monsiváis, «Notas Sobre La Violencia Urbana,» Letras Libres 5, May 31, 1999, available at http://www.letraslibres.com/mexico/notas-sobre-la-violencia-urbana.
33 Mireya Toto Gutiérrez, «Un proceso medieval en el Siglo XX: El caso de Elvira Luz Cruz,» Fem 37 (1984–85): 25–30, reference on 30.
34 Myra S. Gann, «El teatro de Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda: Hiperrealismo y destino,» Latin American
Theatre Review 25, no. 1 (1991): 77–88, reference on 77.
35 Víctor Hugo Rascón Banda, La fiera del Ajusco, in Teatro Del Delito (Mexico City: Editores Mexicanos Unidos, 1985), scene 17, reference on p. 156.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid., scene 5.
38 All references to the play are based on the performance of Montserrat, directed by Gabino Rodríguez, at Fox Entertainment Plaza, Riverside, California, May 11, 2014.