Given that nowadays many playwrights are driven to address pressing contemporary issues, it could be suspected that we’re in for a spate of border dramas. If so, we may just be getting the first of them: Isaac Gomez’s the way she spoke.
Just as conditions have much of the north-of-the border populations riled up (more often than not thanks to the present White House occupant), this enterprise—which only tangentially touches on current goings-on—has the ability to send audiences exiting up the aisles mad as hell and not prepared to take it anymore.
Gomez, brought up in El Paso and Juarez, is ideally suited to write about Mexican situations as they implicitly effect United States-Mexican relations. His immediate focus is on the horrifying treatments many Mexican women are enduring or, ultimately, are unable to endure.
His implied message being: In contrast to official White House insistence that a high percentage of south-of-the-border asylum seekers are criminals, women attempting to escape, at best, abuse and, at worst, death may represent a more likely hefty percentage.
To bring home his intense message he introduces a Mexican woman identified as The Actress (Kate del Castillo). Out of breath from a just-finished audition, she arrives to test for a playwright named Gomez. That is, Gomez imagines a man, apparently himself, sitting where the audience is. Without ceremony, The Actress picks up a manuscript—sitting on a desk in the middle of Riccardo Hernandez’s set—called the way she spoke a docu-mythologia.
To be exact, she’s been invited not to read one part. Since this is a one-woman play, she’s to read the 13 parts, all involving women and at least two men in some way related to women and/or children who have either died at the hands of men or are classified as disappeared—desaparecidos—and are presumed dead or not presumed dead by family and friends clinging to slim hopes.
Sometimes perplexed by the script and sometimes engulfed by it, The Actress not only acts the various characters but interrupts her reading to quiz the unseen Gomez and/or to take notes. The more the histories mount up, the more terrifying are the tales of women and children beaten, murdered, dismembered, dropped in dumpsters, and worse. Gomez writes about, among other daily atrocities, women leaving for work in the morning or returning late at night who are waylaid and never sighted again.
In an intermissionless 80 minutes—some of it in Spanish—one woman declares that things “are so dangerous here for women we can’t even take out our own garbage.” Another woman talks about nipples sliced off dead women that are “worn around the necks of men as dog tags.” The father of a missing girl reports being offered a television set to shut him up. A fast-talking, obviously dissembling ex-con claims, “Most of these young girls were killed by the police.”
Increasingly disturbed by what she’s reading, The Actress becomes completely undone by the last segment she’s asked to intone: a list of names and death descriptions of the dead. It’s a requirement she finds too upsetting to continue, and the inevitably downbeat denouement ensues.
In his campaign to collar overdue attention for the subject, Gomez has written an actor’s tour de force. Furthermore, in his stage directions, he stipulates that since the play “reflects the breath, depth, and differentiation of Mexican people, the actress must be Mexican.”
No problem there. Del Castillo is Mexico and has performed in her native land and abroad since she was nine when she appeared in her first movie. Popular nationally, in 2009 she was appointed ambassador for the Mexican Commission on Human Rights, an organization devoted to combat human trafficking. (There’s another nod to today’s headlines.)
So del Castillo, a dark and compelling beauty, has the goods. But as Gomez has penned his piece in inflammatory ink, even she, accomplished, as she undeniably is, isn’t entirely ready for it—the problem not hers but Gomez-created.
In his compulsion to record it all, he’s asking too much of any actress, and that includes del Castillo. In addition to playing The Actress and the other eleven characters, she’s expected as The Actress not only to converse with the audience (Gomez) but also to provide his replies.
It may be that no one, no matter how technique-perfected, would be up to differentiating these shifting characters on a dime.. One of Gomez’s stage directions for the actress goes, “As Blanca, as the Actress, or both.” What’s a body to make of that?
With skillful director Jo Bonney keeping del Castillo nearly constantly on the move and with Lap Chi Chu’s shifting lighting and with Elisheba Ittoop’s subtle lighting design, as much as can be done to elucidate Gomez’s play is being done. But only to some commendable avail.
Holding the spotlight throughout, del Castillo isn’t able to overcome the script demands stacked as high as that proposed border wall is still trumpeted to be. Yet, she makes a valiant attempt. Without question, she embodies the outrage Gomez feels about the dreadful current Mexican events and relentlessly hammers into the way she spoke—events not that familiar stateside. In the last analysis, that’s what really counts.
the way she spoke opened July 18, 2019, at the Minetta Lane and runs through August 18. Tickets and information: audible.com
