Comedy
Diálogos entre Darwin y Dios
Jesusa Rodríguez and Liliana Felipe
Fri, Jul 31, 9pm
El Viejo Topo Café-Teatro
Stirling Dickinson 28
Cover: per person 
200 pesos (seat)
250 pesos (table)

Darwin delivers master conference
By Isaac Toporek

When I lived in Mexico City, I was lucky to live in a wonderful neighborhood called Coyoacán. While I was there, I went to see a lot of theater and performances in Mexico City. I saw everything from opera and ballet to street theater and guerrilla theater, and everything in between.

No doubt, the most memorable shows I saw in that period took place in this funky little house in my neighborhood. This house had been converted into a theater/night club, a cabaret space called El Hábito. Almost every weekend at El Hábito some kind of show was going on, usually a comedy revue filled with songs and satire. Usually these revues featured one of the women who ran El Hábito—she was the director, actress, singer and star of many of these performances. This place, El Hábito, was the place to be in Mexico City 14 years ago. Always packed, always lively, always friendly and always welcoming, it was the place to get the truth about what was going on in Mexican politics at the time.

The woman behind this cabaret at that time was becoming a major cultural icon in Mexico City. Now, 14 years later, this woman is even more. She is a national figure. She has reshaped what theater and performance can be in Mexico. She has opened the way for the irreverent, the transgressive, the wildly imaginative, the profound, the marvelous and the resistant in theater. She has found new ways to inject theater into politics and politics into theater.

As a Mexican director, actress, playwright, performance artist, scenographer, entrepreneur and social activist, Jesusa Rodríguez has been called the most important woman of Mexico. Her performances challenge traditional classification, crossing with ease generic boundaries from elite to popular to mass, from Greek tragedy to cabaret, from pre-Columbian indigenous work to opera, from revue, sketch and carpa to performance acts within political projects.

She and her partner, Argentine singer/composer/actor Liliana Filipe, own and operate El Hábito and Teatro de la Capilla, alternative performance spaces in Mexico City.

They won an Obie for best performance in Las horas de Belén (in English, called A Book of Hours) in 2000, with the famed Ruth Maleczech and New York-based Mabou Mines.

Rodríguez has won a Guggenheim grant and a Rockefeller Foundation grant. She has adapted and staged her own version of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, called Donna Giovanni. Her version of William Shakespeare’s Macbeth in 2000 received much acclaim. She has also directed a version of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz’s First Dream for chamber opera.

Several weeks ago, I made a few phone calls to contact Jesusa and explore her feelings about presenting her most recent show in San Miguel. Later, I went to Universum, the UNAM science museum in Mexico City, to see what the play was about and to make sure my venue has everything to meet the technical requirements of the show.

For some absurd reason I thought I could buy my ticket if I got there on time, but the show was completely sold out. I came up with the idea of sneaking in through the rear entrance of the museum, hoping to find a way to the dressing rooms, run into Jesusa and ask her for a seat. I had to go back to San Miguel the next day and I wouldn’t have any other chance to see the play before the presentation at El Viejo Topo. As I was crossing the gardens that surround the museum, I found a small party of people heading to a big glass door located on one side of the building.

I was in a hurry, but this strange group—a short old man dressed in an old-fashioned way, flanked by a middle age couple—was walking very slowly. The old man, with a long white beard and a cane in his hand, was staggering after each step, and a woman helped him by holding his arm to balance the weight of his body. As I was about to pass them, I recognized the woman: Carmen Aristegui, one of the most famous journalists in Mexico. I slowed down to find out who this nineteenth-century English gentleman was. I had seen that face in old pictures and cartoons in scientific publications. It turned out to be Sir Charles Darwin himself!

At that time, I still hadn’t seen the promotion poster for the play; I only knew Diálogos entre Darwin y Dios was the title of the play. I wasn’t expecting to actually introduce myself to Sir Darwin, asking him to use his powerful personality to break the rules and help me jump the huge line of people waiting for the off chance of a seat opening up. Being 200 years old and about to dictate a master conference in the science museum of Mexico’s most important university, the English gentleman put aside his strict British formality and arranged (in a Mexican way) for me to have one of the three seats assigned to the radio journalists. I learned later that because of the conditions of the improvised dressing rooms in the museum, Jesusa prefers to start her impersonation of Darwin from the time she leaves her home, driving her car to the university as the bicentenary man.

The keystone speech—dictated in perfect Spanish—was splendid, daring and, above all, hilarious. With eloquent arguments, Darwin demonstrated that in Mexico, as in certain parts of the world, the behavior of some individuals of our species—whose main activities are politics and voracious global trade—had reversed the direction of the evolution of Homo Sapiens.

Some people without strong Spanish language skills may have trouble understanding this master conference. Some, even if Spanish is their native language, may not want to understand it.





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Theater
Under Milk Wood
By Dylan Thomas

Mon, Aug 10, 8pm
50 pesos, Monday only

Tue–Sat, Aug 11–15, 8pm
Sun, Aug 16, 5pm
Teatro Santa Ana
Biblioteca Pública
Reloj 50A
100 pesos


A challenge to actors
By Murray Kamelhar

Under Milk Wood is a marvelous piece of writing and a challenge to the actors and director. The radio play became a stage play and then a film starring Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor and Peter O’Toole.

In 1944, Thomas went out one winter morning, in this fishing village in Wales, and wrote 30 or more characters of this town while they were sleeping. They existed only in his imagination and for many days after he continued to expand on these characters and gave them things to do and created relationships between them. In September 1953, he finally delivered a full draft of Under Milk Wood to the BBC. Nine years of rewriting and editing, improving, perfecting it.

George Walker said on seeing a New York City production of Under Milk Wood, “…when I go to the theatre, I expect miracles. I fully believe that characters will appear, stories will be told, mysteries raveled and unraveled. Despite incredible odds, and it happens only part of the time. This night’s performance of Under Milk Wood was one of those happenings.” Actors Lab will make a George Walker out of you, but you have to be there.

Michael Sudheer is Voice One and Cleo Stevens Kamelhar is Voice Two. Other cast members are Norman Araiza, Gerry Camp, Paula Clark, Betsie Davies, Chris Davis, Phoebe Greyson, Henry Vermillion and Britt Zaist. 

Tickets are available in the Biblioteca patio and at the theater box office, 11am–5pm.

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Playreaders Theater
The Mercy Seat
Wed–Thu, Aug 5–6, 7pm
St. Paul’s Church
Cardo 6
Donation 20 pesos

Disappear from your life
By Lola Smith

Playreaders present Neil LaBute’s 9/11 drama The Mercy Seat. Have you ever been in the perfect position to disappear from your life—abandon family, friends, job and start all over? The two people in The Mercy Seat are in that position. They survived the World Trade Center disaster, but no one knows that yet. The question is, what will they do?

Critics called the show “an intelligent and thought-provoking drama” and its author

“the first dramatist since David Mamet and Sam Shepard—since Edward Albee actually—to mix sympathy and savagery, pathos and power.” Another critic wrote that the play was “uncomfortable yet fascinating. The Mercy Seat makes for provocative theater—sharp, compelling and more than a little chilling.” Still another said, “a powerful drama. LaBute shows a true master’s hand.”

John Wharton and Judy Newell star in The Mercy Seat and Lola Smith directs. Eli Nadel will handle lights.


Performances start at 7:30pm, or earlier if the house is full. Doors open at 7pm.