ARTicles vol.4 i.1b: The Crying of the Plañidera

When the director by Nicolás Montero and the leading Colombian actress Vicky Hernández began developing a new, one-woman piece, they spent the first week of rehearsal working on a series of improvisations. An anthropologist who acted with the Teatro Libre de Bogotá before training at the Central School of Speech and Drama in London, Montero guided, observed, and responded as Hernández explored a range of painful emotions and memories. After hours of exhausting improvisations that produced tears and screams, the actress sat down and said, “My heart is wide open.” Even before the two artists had a text, they had a title for their project: Con El Corazón Abierto(With a Heart Wide Open).

Montero and Hernández quickly found themselves in need of a writer who could create a character out of these initial exercises, and transform them into a dramatic event. So they reunited with their friend Humberto Dorado, a screenwriter and actor who had performed in Montero’s production of David Mamet’s Oleannaat the National Theatre. Dorado had written roles in his screenplays specifically for Hernández, and he was immediately interested in building a play around an actress he describes as “a force of nature – the kind of performer who makes you think you need to put up bars between the stage and the audience. She’s like a tiger, but with a profound tenderness.”

Inspired in part by the dearth of new Colombian plays, the three artists resolved to create a piece that grappled with the reality of their contemporary society. “We decided to make a piece about something immediate, something that was part of our daily lives,” explains Dorado. “We hear about the horrors that surround us every day, but we’re numb to them.” The project, which the writer began to envision as a modern Colombian tragedy, would recover the brutality and horror of the atrocities that have become quotidian in the country’s decades-old civil conflict.

As Dorado observed rehearsals, a character began to take shape. Years earlier, the playwright had met a plañidera(a professional mourner or keener) in northern Colombia who shared her life story with him. Drawing from that woman’s experiences, from stories he had heard over the years, and from Hernández’s improvisations, the playwright started to develop his narrator. He imagined an anonymous plañiderawhose suffering would recall the experiences of so many rural Colombian women and whose dirges would lament the pain of the entire nation.

In a country where calamity has become routine, it wasn’t long before a gruesome article fell into the playwright’s hands and gave him new raw material for a tragedy. While the artists were continuing to develop the play, Dorado was sent Washington Post correspondent Scott Wilson’s investigative report about the massacre at Chengue, a small village known for its avocado or-chards. Situated in northern Colombia near major transportation routes leading to the Caribbean coast, the region around Chengue has been caught in the crossfire of guerrilla, military, and paramilitary forces for years. On January 17, 2001, months after Chengue residents had repeatedly pleaded for protection from the president and the regional military command, paramilitary forces cut off the village’s electricity, marched into the town, and slaughtered twenty-six of the townsmen using stones and a sledgehammer. As they left, the forces set fire to the town. The paramilitary AUC (Autodefensas Unidas de Colombia or United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia) carried out the attack to punish Chengue for allegedly giving supplies to the leftist FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia or Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia). Two days after the massacre, Wilson interviewed the remaining inhabitants of the town. They told him that they believed the Colombian military, which is stationed in the region to combat both guerrilla and paramilitary forces, had helped the AUC carry out the attack.

Dorado incorporated Wilson’s report in the script, changing the locale but preserving the names of the victims. And as the overall structure of the play emerged, so did the protagonist’s overarching objective. The plañidera, Dorado decided, was not only sharing her life experiences with the audience; she was also in the process of making a decision about how to confront the violence tearing apart her country.

As Dorado finished the script, the internationally renowned Mexican scenic designer Alejandro Luna joined the artistic team. Luna created a symmetrical, elevated playing space for the production that could serve as a hospital, a morgue, or a funeral home – all spaces the plañidera revisits over the course of the play. A large mirror was positioned upstage, and fluorescent lights extended out from the stage over the audience’s heads. “I wanted to create a kind of amplified microscopic exhibition,” explains Luna, “as if the set were a slide on a microscope. I wanted it to be a kind of resonator for the emotions of the piece.”

Luna also made the four elements – earth, water, fire, and air – an integral part of the design. Incense and smoke made the air visible; purifying water flowed out of a tap; candles brought ritualistic fire to the stage; and black volcanic rocks surrounded the central playing space, referencing the violence that has transformed a once-lush countryside into a charred, carbonized wasteland.

When the play opened in Bogotá after almost two years of development, the public response was overwhelming. Even the ex-president, Ernesto Samper Pizano, and the then mayor of Bogotá, Antanas Mokus, came to see the production. “The piece was a huge success,” remembers Luna. “At the end of the performance, everyone kept saying ‘thank you, thank you.’ Most of the families in Colombia can tell you that they have a nephew who has been killed. Or that they don’t know if one of their relatives is alive or in jail. They live with this all the time. But you never see it in the Colombian theatre.”

“It was a purely theatrical event,” Dorado recalls. “People hear about these tragedies every day – about the massacres, the bloody repression, the misery, the displaced refugees, the violence. Everyone knows what’s going on. But when you see it in the theatre, the experience surpasses other means of communication.”

For the director, the suffering endured by the victims of rural massacres could never be fully represented on the stage, but the production had brought them closer to understanding their experience. “I made this piece in order to understand reality,” Montero reflects, “not to interpret it. Reality in Colombia is so baroque, so complicated. When you turn on the TV and hear about the massacres, and the way they are performed – not just shooting people but virtually destroying their bodies – you understand that you’re dealing with something very complex. I don’t think there’s a language that can represent their pain. A play, painting, music or any artistic language can’t really describe the feelings we’re dealing with. But the production brought us closer to the voices of these victims.”

In 2004, A.R.T. Artistic Director Robert Woodruff saw Con El Corazón Abiertoat the biannual International Theatre Festival of Bogotá. Struck by the intensity and immediacy of the production, he invited Montero to direct the play at Zero Arrow Theatre, the A.R.T.’s new second stage in Harvard Square. Using a translation by Joe Broderick retitled The Keening, Montero will restage the piece this fall with the actress Marissa Chibas. Luna will redesign the set, adjusting his original model slightly for the Zero Arrow Theatre.

Montero didn’t need time to consider Woodruff’s offer to stage The Keeningat the A.R.T. For him, directing the play is an act of conscience and a social obligation. “As a society, we need to know who the victims of this conflict are,” he explains. “These are real names that will travel all the way from Colombia to Cambridge, and be heard on the other end of the world. It’s a sort of exorcism to say these names aloud to audiences abroad. We have to try to find language that will give voices to these victims. As a Colombian director and actor, I can’t turn my face away from them. For me, theatre is about necessity. You don’t do it because you want to – you do it because you have to.”

Ryan McKittrick is the A.R.T.’s Associate Dramaturg.

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