8 shows, Thursday-Sunday, August 23-September 2, 7pm
San Miguel Playhouse, Independencia 82
Tickets 300, 200, and 100 pesos. Least expensive seats in the only section of the San Miguel Playhouse from which supertitles are not easy to read.

The Madres, bilingual - theater

A production of La Troupe
Fredric Dannen, executive director
Marcela Brondo, creative director

This year we are presenting a powerful, award-winning new play, The Madres, by Stephanie Alison Walker. It is 1978, in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and political dissidents who defy the military junta are disappearing by the thousands. Among the disappeared: 20-year-old Belén Acosta, whose activist mother, Carolina, has joined “the Madres,” heroic women who march in public in an organized resistance, wearing white headscarves as a symbol of protest. Belén’s grandmother, Josefina, the play’s protagonist, is deeply conservative, and believes her family must at least pretend to support the regime, to preserve their own safety and that of Belén. But her convictions are being steadily worn down by the betrayals of those around her. The well-meaning but equivocating priest Padre Juan urges conformity. And her former neighbor, Diego, who was enamored of Belén till she rejected him, has become a soldier and a fanatical supporter of the repressive regime, and seems willing to use his power to wreak his revenge on Belén and her husband.

Our theatrical company, La Troupe, was created last year with a mission: to use live theater, the most communal of all art forms, as a means of uniting people of different nationalities. All our productions are bilingual, to be shared by a combined audience of native Spanish speakers and native English speakers.

We employ an advanced supertitling system. Our debut production, last year, Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night, was performed in Spanish with English supertitles. Obie Award-winner Jesusa Rodríguez called the production “a tour de force.” One attendee wrote: “It was such a joy to see so many Mexicans at the production and to be able to invite two Mexican friends to share a theatrical experience. A gift to the community.”