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The Northwest's premiere Latino arts and culture organization 425 SE 6th Avenue Portland OR 97214 503-236-7253 |
| DOS
PUEBLOS “In
Mexico, your heart gets cracked open.”
Urgent and brave, desperately shattering the mirror of our expectations Directors notes: In this clean, empty space of the theatre the performers channel the distrust, mutual respect, shared dreams, bloodletting and stereotypes that have marked the past 400 years and will mark the future, as our populations and cultures mix more and more. The artists who created this show traveled to one another’s country over two years to live and work together, rehearsing in Mexico and in Portland. In the course of making the performance, the artists have made a difficult journey from their own prejudices and preconceptions towards a complicated appreciation of each other’s way of life. We hope that the integrity of the journey is in the piece you see tonight … because all of us here in North America, whether in the United States or in Mexico, whether we like it or not, stand together in the same space. Cross-Cultural Collaboration The Miracle Theatre Group produces work that celebrates Latino culture, including bilingual and Spanish language productions, while the young Hand2Mouth Theatre has a history of collaboration with international theater companies. The two Portland companies are a natural match for a co-production with Mexico City's La Comedia Humana: Dos Pueblos features ensemble members from Hand2Mouth and La Comedia Humana, direction from Hand2Mouth's Jonathan Walters and La Comedia Humana's Rubén Ortiz, and dramaturgy from the Miracle's Olga Sanchez, in a frank, bilingual exploration of how the cultures of the US and Mexico view and shape one another. It's an ambitious collaboration, a welcome attempt to broaden both the scope of and audience for local theater. Dos Pueblos is a shuffled series of snapshots of Mexican and US cultures. A historical timeline threads through the show, connecting relations today to the countries' shared history. We're treated to familiar tropes about the relationship between the US and Mexico: Mexicans illegally crossing the border, college kids from the US getting shitfaced in Acapulco. Hand2Mouth's highly sexualized pop sensibility is on display here, hearkening back to last year's Repeat After Me, but this show relies more heavily on the less literal conventions of movement, as well as more direct (some might say more manipulative) appeals for audience participation. The audience is asked to join in several rituals, from reading aloud from Spanish and English texts to sharing toasts for the dead. A large part of my dissatisfaction with Dos Pueblos stemmed from the fact that I literally didn't understand all of it. This bilingual show really requires a bilingual audience: with only one language, you only get half of the story. While this may make for a neat metaphor for US/Mexico relations, it also makes for a frustrating theater experience for the monolingual. I would be remiss in not noting, though, that the show seemed to resonate with Spanish-speaking audience members, who chuckled at the Mexican company's jokes, answered questions in Spanish, and gave the show a warm ovation—all of which made me yearn even more to know just what I was missing. Stage Review: Dos Pueblos Hell is other people. Can you feel it? This is the question repeatedly asked by the menagerie of characters in Dos Pueblos, the bilingual lovechild of Mexico City’s La Comedia Humana and Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre. Its 10-member cast comprises five actors from Mexico and five from Portland interacting in a fluid series of vignettes crafted by Ruben Ortiz and Jonathan Walters, the companies' respective artistic directors, with dramaturgical help from Miracle Theatre Group's Olga Sanchez . On its surface, Dos Pueblos is a story about the contentious border between the United States and Mexico. That isn’t to say that the play is an extended policy discussion, nor does it offer up any easy ideological solutions. Instead, it portrays a series of interactions: Americans in Mexico, Mexicans in America, and both of them in Texas/Tejas trying to figure out just who really owns the land. There is no single, overarching narrative, and Dos Pueblos makes no attempt to tell a single conventional story. Rather, as one scene transitions to the next an actor—for example Alejandro Benítez—can go from playing a security guard to a Mexican trying get through US customs to a game show host dressed as Ronald McDonald. The play may superficially be a story about American/Mexican relations, but its real theme is less topical and rather more existential. The real theme of Dos Pueblos identity, so it’s fitting that no actor’s identity is ever really set. Nor is the stage. The intimate setting at El Centro Milagro features a simple blank wall as a backdrop. While it is kept in the near-dark for much of the play, at times it serves as the screen for a projected image of a Southwest-themed diorama, replete with cacti and sandstone and the occasional subtitle. The wall is also peppered with hidden doors that cast members pop open and speak through, Laugh-In style. Dos Pueblos can be brutally funny, like in one scene where a group of American college students head down to Acapulco for some Spring Break debauchery. Cordoned off behind a partition of plastic Mexican flags strung on a thin white rope, the Gringos grind up on one another in an almost-violent, oversexed gyration shouting “I love Mexico!” as the master of ceremonies holds bottle of Jose Cuervo upside down over their heads, pouring its contents down their throats and all over their bodies. It’s entertaining at first, in the same way Animal House is entertaining; but somewhere along the line the insane, Girls Gone Wild excesses turn revolting. Understandably, the natives stand outside looking on in disgust. By the time the Americans collapse to the floor the ground is strewn with their trash and it’s hard to begrudge the locals for taking advantage of the opportunity to comb through the spoiled students’ pockets while they lie there unconscious. There is a constant emotional pendulum at work. Dos Pueblos never stays upbeat or downtrodden for any length of time and tears of laughter blend tears of sadness on a several occasions, no more poignantly than the aforementioned scene where Alejandro Benítez plays a Mexican citizen trying to proceed through US customs. Two agents tear apart each of his items before shrink wrapping them in cellophane. The visitor’s eager smile slowly morphs into an expression of shame as the officials end by stripping him of his clothes and taping him up like a mummy in boxer shorts. As bad as this is, the real horror is what takes place off stage: as this is going on, the seven other members of the cast sit in the stands with the audience pointing and laughing hysterically. But as already mentioned, the contrast of mirth and the morbidity is not the only duality that twines through the play. Being split between two languages, usually with no translation, Dos Pueblos runs the huge risk that those who never got beyond counting uno, dos, tres (or conversely, one, two, three)will be wondering just what the hell is going on. Fortunately, thanks to smart writing and even smarter choreography and acting, I never once felt like I didn’t know what was happening on stage, despite never getting past quince. While stopping short of doing a full-on, Broadway-style dance routine, the actors move about the stage in disciplined, choreographed manner, using the space and their bodies to full demonstrative effect. Maybe we have to learn vocabulary and syntax, but one idiom we all come into this world knowing is that of the face and body. Whatever the language, whatever the culture, whatever the skin color, the human body is a constant. The human body, and with it, humanity. Dos Pueblos effectively draws a series of parallels between life in Mexico and life in the United States. It documents the almost mirror sacrifices of those Texans who gave their lives at the Alamo in the fight to maintain their independence from Mexico, as well as the Mexican youths who surrendered their lives rather than their freedom fighting the Americans at Chapultepec Castle in Mexico City during the Mexican-American War. Nowhere in the play is there an attempt made to portray one side or the other as the villain in these conflicts, or to pin the blame on anyone. Instead, the deaths are portrayed as tragic sacrifices for something greater than the self: the idea of freedom. Somewhat less grimly, another parallel is drawn when the Mexican and American actors alternate telling stories in the mother tongues about their fondest memories from childhood. Each story is punctuated by a question, asked in the speaker’s native tongue: “Can you feel it?” The response, in the opposite language, emerging from one of the Laugh-In doors suddenly burst open: “I can feel it.” But can they really? How can any of us feel with the feelings of the Other? This is the essential question that Dos Pueblos asks. If each of us is ultimately our own self, locked away inside our own skull, seeing the world from behind our own eyes and looking over the border of our own nation, can any of us really understand the life of another? The character who asks the question most eloquently is a woman whose life occurs in fast forward. In a span of just a couple of minutes we see her leave a former lover, marry another man and bear his child while and just across stage the simultaneous story of the love of her youth unfolds as events takes him off to the army and eventually to war. After giving birth, she quotes the Mexican poet Octavio Paz and his poem Sunstone, asking: This our life when was it truly ours? Paz’s words make all our existential loneliness comes to seem like so much nihilistic sophistry, the product of hypertrophied egos too self-absorbed ever to give, and too proud ever to receive, Love. It’s not about being good to people, which seems a bit too much like a moralistic imperative, but about seeing others as an integral part of one’s own deepest being. It’s a lesson any person, or any nation, would do well to learn. Hell isn’t other people. Other people are what life is made of. Yes, we are all different, but Dos Pueblos’ deepest lesson is that on a deeper level, we are all the same. At no time does this come across more strongly than during the play’s emotional climax, which takes place not on the stage, but in the stands, as members of the crowd follow the cast in naming deceased loved ones. The cast members have handed out cups full of water to everyone in the stands, from which they all drink as they say in unison, “Salúd.” Can you feel it? More than just acting GOSIA WOZNIACKA The question comes from an actor on stage: "If there is a just God, why would he condemn the United States and Mexico to live together?" It's directed at an evangelical preacher in bright leggings and big hair. She yells the question repeatedly, shaking, while other characters break into a frenzy. She then wheels around and bellows: "Viva la Mexico!" The scene comes in the middle of the English-Spanish bilingual production "Dos Pueblos" -- means two towns, two people -- which opened this weekend at Portland's Miracle Theater. With bold acting, violent emotions and mocking satire, the play explores the link between Mexico and the United States. It portrays the tensions, attractions, stereotypes and dreams between the two countries and its people -- and offers a mirror to the debate on immigration and American attitudes toward Mexico. The play also is the story of how actors of two theater companies -- Hand2Mouth of Portland and La Comedia Humana of Mexico City -- came together to work but also overcame their own prejudices and fears. A neighborly act Two years ago, Hand2Mouth director Jonathan Walters decided to collaborate with another theater. "We have this neighbor to the south that we know nothing about," he said. Mexican peers recommended La Comedia Humana. When Walters met its director, Ruben Ortiz, a few months later in Mexico City, they didn't yet know what the play would be about. "It's obvious, Ruben said, it should be about us," Walters remembers. The theme would center around the relationship between two countries. But it would play out between the actors from Portland and Mexico, whose personal stories, perceptions and developing relationships would be incorporated into the production. "The connection between Mexico and the U.S. is one of co-dependency," Ortiz said. "It's a relationship of love and sometimes of open hate. It's very intense. Whether we acknowledge it or not, we are thinking about this relationship." In May 2007, Portland actors joined the Mexicans at an artist residency in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, to rehearse. They did not work off a script. Instead, they created the play through improvisation. Both companies perform physical theater, the actors using their bodies as expression. Their journeys of transformation lay ahead. Alamo and Chapultepec The play is a series of mini-explorations on the theme. Though sometimes they can feel disjointed or confusing, the images of Ronald McDonald, border crossers, the Virgin of Guadeloupe, a chaotic spring break party, as well as the sounds of American and Mexican popular music, work on an almost subliminal level. Excerpts from journals of Lewis and Clark open the play, with the theme Manifest Destiny. The scene then jumps to Texas/Tejas, a piece of territory the countries battled over, Walters said, but also a symbol of the current struggle over immigration and cultural encroachment. "It's really about different people wanting to be on the same piece of earth and the friction that this causes," Walters said. The play then develops around the battle of the Alamo and that of Chapultepec, the castle that guarded Mexico City. The 1836 siege of the Alamo has become a symbol of patriotic sacrifice for many Americans. Chapultepec took place in 1847 during the Mexican-American war, known by Mexicans as "the invasion." During the battle, six Mexican military cadets refused to fall back. One wrapped himself in the Mexican flag and jumped off the castle point. All six became national heroes. The two stories, according to the play's directors, laid part of the foundation for the strain between the U.S. and Mexico, leading to confusion and insults for generations. "Small understandings" When the actors started work, there was a lot of embarrassment. "The process of developing the play was about being honest about where we come from, what we represent, our ignorance," said Faith Helma, one of the Portland actors. The directors wanted the actual understanding of history and the real attitudes and prejudices to come out, so they discouraged any studying of the other's cultures. "Over time, while working on this play, our attitudes changed," Helma said. "Our sense of history and of people changed." "We had to overhaul our own selves, our perceptions and stereotypes," Ortiz said. The misunderstandings were mostly about food (not enough time to eat) and the rhythm and pace of work. When Portland actors arranged a walk at the Oregon coast, their Mexican peers shivered with cold and frustration -- they had imagined sunbathing on a tropical beach. "These small misunderstandings make up the problem between our countries," said Avelina Correa, a Mexican actor. "We don't ask ourselves questions about the others. We just assume and think that it's the same for them as it is for us." Everyone acknowledged the Mexican actors speak better English than the Americans speak Spanish. The play in Portland was directed in English. But when the Oregonians visited Mexico, they tried to integrate and speak Spanish. "We grow up learning to speak English," said actor Alejandro Benitez, echoing a line in the play. "A lot of things in Mexico are in English. Mexicans think more about the United States than Americans think about Mexico. Going north and speaking English is a sign of status." But English and American things also are considered part of an economic and cultural invasion, Mexican actors said. They said the two sides had a deep distrust they were taught as children -- "un odio ancestral," an ancestral hate -- Correa said. "You grow up with it," she said. "But now I am getting to know things in the U.S. that I like. People are very open, very creative here in Oregon. It has been a process of opening for us." Portland actors said they, too, embraced Mexican culture -- and re-examined their American roots. "I'm so taken with the Mexican culture, I have fallen in love with it," said actor Erin Leddy. "This experience forced me to look at my relationship with America." But it also taught them not to romanticize the other. And to become more aware of the relations between Americans and Mexicans in Oregon and the conflict over immigration. "I realized there's a barrier that doesn't get crossed between Americans and Mexicans who live in Oregon," Leddy said. "There's this tension, a separation. But I'm so hopeful that 20 years from now, there will be true mixing." While it stretched comfort zones and emotions, the play proved to be about reconciliation. After the Portland actors' two trips to Mexico City and the Mexican actors' two trips to Oregon, tensions dissipated and prejudices changed. "We're absolute best friends," Walters said. "The message from that is a simple one. We're not denying history, we have to be aware of what's out there. But there is hope for human connection and understanding." Theater: 'Dos Pueblos' explores the borderland between Mexico and the U.S. We hear in the news that some Americans hope to make the relatively arbitrary boundary line separating the U.S. from Mexico an impenetrable partition by advocating for the construction of an insurmountable wall or fence. The fact is that since the Mexican-American War of the 1840s, when the youthful United States lopped off the northern section of the recently liberated Mexico and annexed it in the name of "Manifest Destiny," the border between the two countries has been extremely porous. Still, separated by language and traditions, Spanish-speaking Mexicans and English-speaking U.S. residents have not always understood each other. The actual boundary line has often seemed irrelevant as Mexicans and Americans struggle to live side by side in the multicultural borderland region. These tensions are embodied, embraced and, at least temporarily, transcended in the engaging bilingual theatrical production "Dos Pueblos" ("Two Towns") --a collaboration of Portland's Miracle Theatre Group, Hand2Mouth Theatre and La Comedia Humana of Mexico City. Under the direction of La Comedia Humana's Ruben Ortiz and Hand2Mouth's Jonathan Walters and the dramaturgical eye of Miracle Theatre's Olga Sanchez, four Portland actors and four Mexico City actors offer a theatrical collage in which different facets of Mexican-U.S. cultural and social relations are explored. The piece consists of theatrical vignettes, artful movement sequences and intriguing video work. While these theatrical elements are employed to convey various perspectives of the people living in the borderlands from the pre-Columbian period to the present, "Dos Pueblos" isn't meant as a simple political or cultural history of the region. Despite frequent references to whether our "Lone Star State" is properly called Texas or Tejas, the borderland represented in this production is neither the Southwestern U.S. nor Northern Mexico. It is, in fact, what Walters describes in a program note as "a psychic borderland in an existential limbo." This "psychic borderland" is given visual form with a miniature model of a desert scene, the focus of the video work, which appears as a projected backdrop for many of the play's scenes. During the course of the evening, this barren landscape becomes cluttered with artifacts suggesting the cultural baggage separating and linking Mexico and the United States. Our idealized memories of the Alamo and Mexican recollections of the sacrifices at the Battle of Chapultepec Castle at the end of the Mexican-American War are addressed on stage and represented on this model -- as are troubling border crossing episodes and the crass, ugly American tourist attitude toward Mexico, which ironically, some Mexicans find lucrative. "Dos Pueblos" explores the misapprehensions that separate Americans from Mexicans, but through testimonials and shared laments, the production also suggests the common human experience that unites those who live on both sides of the border. This latter sense of connection becomes especially paramount as the piece draws to its moving conclusion. While some scenes -- especially a few of the overtly allegorical episodes -- are not as successful as others, and occasional failures to translate or at least paraphrase the Spanish dialogue might make it difficult for non-Spanish-speaking audiences to appreciate fully the Mexican perspective offered here, the overall movement of the evening is clear. More importantly, the actors work well together, forming a tightly woven ensemble that skillfully slips back and forth between satiric humor and passionately played dramatic action. Guns, Flags and Coca-Cola It’s stifling in the theater, maybe 85 degrees, and onstage a man in a Ronald McDonald wig holds a damp flag bandana to his mouth and huffs himself into a stupor. This comes as no surprise. In the past half-hour Michael Jackson has boogied down with Subcomandante Marcos; the massacre at the Alamo and the sacrifice of Lost Niños Heroes, its Mexican equivalent, have been reenacted; and resentful hotel staff have looked on in horror as American teens debauch themselves on the beach. It’s the first full run-through of Dos Pueblos, an international collaboration 18 months in the making that opens the 25th season at Miracle Theatre Group, Portland’s nationally respected Hispanic performance center. Unlike Miracle’s usual programming of Spanish and Mexican classics, original plays about the immigrant experience and crowd-pleasing variety shows, Dos Pueblos isn’t a particularly Hispanic-American piece of theater. It would be better described as a border crossing conversation between five cosmopolitan Mexicans and five white Portlanders about our overlapping and, often, contentious cultural histories and the historical no-man’s-land—Texas, essentially—that separates us. The show is the product of the efforts of three visionary directors: Rubén Ortiz, head of Mexico City’s La Comedia Humana; Jonathan Walters, director of Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre; with Olga Sanchez, Miracle Theatre’s artistic director, acting as dramaturg and referee. Ortiz, a tall Mexico City native with a head of curly hair, an immaculate beard and a taste for Mandarin collars and Bob Fosse, teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and is three-quarters of the way through a quartet of site-specific plays inspired by Dante. His intellectual composure makes him an almost comic foil to Walters, a perennially disheveled 35-year-old world-traveler and artist-about-town, prone to enthusiastic rants and tricky international projects. The two met while Walters and company member Faith Helma were on their honeymoon in Chiapas, and, according to Ortiz, he and Walters immediately wanted to collaborate. “When we met it was amazing the number of coincidences, the things we were thinking about theater,” Ortiz said at a lunch in February. “I asked him, ‘Wait, what’s the theme?’” Walters said. “He said, ‘What could it be but U.S. versus Mexico?’” In May 2007 the two companies met for the first time at an artists’ retreat in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and began working. Miracle signed on as presenter (with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation grant) last summer, and the international ensemble has had three periods of rehearsal since, both in Mexico and Portland. A planned Mexico City premiere fell through when funding failed to pan out, so the whole affair will hit the stage for the first time here, next week. Walters says the show may take Miracle’s audience by surprise. “It’s not really a show about immigration—it’s about neighbors. It could be about France and Germany, or any people who share a border and have really fucking conflicted feelings about one another. “Some of Mexico’s most sacred figures get skewered a little, and that’s a lot easier to do in Mexico City than it is in Portland. I was nervous in February, but now I’m worried I’m going to get my ass kicked,” Walters continues. “[La Comedia Humana] are very self-critical, but when you’re away from your country, I think you tend to idealize it more.” Dos Pueblos has a few nontextual surprises, too. The semi-abstract set, printed on a single sheet of vinyl stretched across a wooden frame, serves as a backdrop for projected video, filmed live on a miniature model backstage. It’s an effort to create an artificial, mythical world—what Walters calls a “zero place”—in between nations. It’s an evolving place: interviews with day laborers and audience members, recorded nightly, will change the show throughout its run. It is, for all parties involved, something of an exotic creature. “I treat the show as if it were an animal,” Ortiz told WW in a recent interview. “I ask it, ‘What do you want from me now?’”
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REVISTAS Y ARTICULOS Cross-Cultural Collaboration Stage Review: Dos Pueblos More than just acting Theater: 'Dos Pueblos' explores the borderland between Mexico and the U.S. Guns, Flags and Coca-Cola
CAST AND CREW Alejandro Benitez Rubén Ortiz...Co-Director
Sponsored by
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Sitcoms and telenovelas,
sweet sixteens and quinceañeras,
Ronald McDonald and Pancho Villa. Over time, the stories of the overlapping
cultural histories of Mexico and the U.S. have warped, forcing
emotions deeper and wilder. Yet we remain connected as much as
divided. In this cantankerous reflection of our relationships,
we reveal our co-dependence, our brutal rage and our undeniable
mutual attraction.
This play takes place somewhere between the U.S. and Mexico — not the overcrowded urban border between El Paso and Juárez, or an empty stretch of desert split by the Rio Grande, but a psychic borderland in an existencial limbo. The performers, four residents of Mexico City and four of Portland, will struggle and celebrate with you here. Here is a place to experience how our two very different cultures live side-by-side as neighbors, or more accurately as a family sharing the same house, with no option of moving out, our only choice to find a way to make it work.
