A moment I keep coming back to remains the heartfelt end of Las 22+ bodas de Hugo (The 22+ Weddings of Hugo Multiple), a production by D.C.’s GALA Hispanic Theatre. In the play, written by Gustavo Ott, an American man marries dozens of people, enabling whole families to stay together and prosper in the U.S., which the show calls “a beautiful crime.” The script doesn’t demarcate a breaking of the fourth wall, but under José Zayas’s direction, the title character stepped out of the scene, looked around at us in the theatre with a soft smile, as if showing us in real time his line: “Aquí cabemos todos.”
Here there is room for us all. The theatre became a country.
Even this diverse lineup of shows shared commonalities: key moments of silence, movement, and endings with direct audience calls-to-action. Fear crept in too, but again and again creatives combatted the infection. Some were more subtle, and others threw caution to the wind with their bold bravery. Luis Ordaz Gutiérrez’s jaw-dropping Cabarex 2: RevoLUZiones (ProyectoTEATRO of Austin), for instance, wasn’t afraid to rip apart oppressors across 500 years of Latin American history in comedy and drag. Onstage, our gods’ fight against Uncle Sam at the border didn’t look too different from the fights of half a millennium ago.
“Should borders exist?” one teen asked during a Yamel Cucuy post-show panel. “They don’t exist,” the creatives responded, recounting histories of shifting borders as mere penciled lines on a map. Or, as a character in Antigona 3.0 (Borderlands Theater of Tuscon, Arizona) put it, “Our bones belong here.”
Our artists and our gods have been working overtime. But still there must be space to dance. In the multitudes at Los Angeles Theater Center’s refuge, it wasn’t all trauma or “proving” ourselves; each evening artists grabbed drinks or danced to live music in the lobby.
These conversations weren’t the only encounters among creatives. As at previous Encuentros, the Latino Theater Company put participating artists into groups, empowering them to collaborate across companies, geographical borders, and languages. I got to see the result on the final day in performances that centered the sacred power of togetherness and solidarity—antidotes to any challenge.
Carola García López’s contribution resounded in particular, as she stood among an ensemble of performers who extracted and exploited her, then begged her to save them, in a parallel to Mother Nature. Also writer, director, and star in Teatro Público’s Blanco Temblor from Puerto Rico, García López spoke frequently and resonantly throughout the three weeks of Encuentro. Toward the end of her group’s devised performance, she spoke a poem, “Estamos viviendo en tiempos sombríos.” We are living in dark times. Then the actors linked hands.
Mauricio Marte, a Pitchblack artist, later responded to García López’s poem in a share-out, “We’ve been talking about living in the dark. And as someone who works in the dark, I know even the smallest light is so bright.” I recalled his play: The majority of Odd Man Out unfolded in a darkness so deep, I couldn’t tell if my eyes were open or closed. At the end of the play, the actors lit a single candle, and the audience gasped: Suddenly you could see everything.
