Half an hour before seeing Teatro a Mil‘s Escuela͟, written and directed by Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón, I learned the entire play would be performed in Spanish
I gulped down a mouthful of tomato-pesto pizza and prepared myself to stretch out in a sparsely crowded theatre to digest like a bull sea lion capitalist.
But upon entering the Isemann Theater, where the Yale Repertory’s No Boundaries series was presenting Escuela, to reach the concierge I had to wade through the most diverse theatre crowd I have encountered at a New Haven production. Patrons of every age, race, and gender packed the Isemann on opening night, dressed in berets, peacoats, and logos alike.
Escuela opened on Wednesday, Feb. 24, and closesFriday, Feb. 26.
Escuela’s overhead supertitles proved easy on the eyes; even if we didn’t understand Spanish, we all knew what was going on. Calderón’s play about left-wing revolutionaries, music, and Chile’s lost generation invites us into the organizational meeting of a cell of leftist guerrillas during the closing months of the 1980s Pinochet dictatorship, which had overthrown Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government in 1973. The characters enthusiastically share their respective knowledge of explosives, combat technique, Marxism 101, and psychological warfare, but their identities remain shrouded by color-coded shawls, even to the audience.
María Paz González Photo
The strict use of masks underscores the plays surprisingly jovial tone with a fearful motif, suggesting the entire cast — Luis Cerda, Andrea Laura Giadach Christensen, Francisca Lewin, Camila González Brito, and Carlos Ugarte Díaz — might be kidnapped and dropped out of a helicopter at any moment. The masks also forced the actors, robbed of their facial expressions, to act with their entire bodies, getting at the essence of stage acting even when they harmonized like a Catholic choir. Each of them managed to convey the individuality of their characters, and seamlessly transferred a pair of aviator glasses from one person to the next to denote who was speaking.
Seeing a Marxist play put on by a capitalist institution in a capitalist country was as pleasantly disorienting as walking down High Street and hearing Yale’s Harkness Tower bells ring out the Internationale. Calderón, an activist who came of age during the Pinochet years, lays his red-icing dialectics on thick, making Escuela way dogmatic, more nonfiction than narrative — Guerrilla Warfare the Play.
But Escuela͟ is also very funny. Apparently physical humor is non-partisan, and subtle mockery saves the play again and again. Much of the laughter revolves around the military expert, who army-crawls around antique furniture with a snub-nose revolver snuck up his arse; the conspiracy expert, who fills a chalkboard with caricatures of paranoia; and the co-ed explaining exploitation in a sequined dress. Only the bomb maker and the psychological warfare specialist are taken seriously, and indeed, during a mock election designed to keep Pinochet as commander in chief, but elect a president, a populist struggle against capitalism (or democracy) would look more like terrorism than open war. Seeing where a U.S. audience laughs was worth the price of admission alone.
Yet this revolutionary play’s moral is as relevant today as ever. In the end, the characters resolve to withhold their votes in an election that will either validate Pinochet or provide his junta with a democratic puppet — a resolution that may well be echoed by contemporary Sanderistas, should the primary be decided by establishment superdelegates.
Escuela plays at the Iseman Theater, 1156 Chapel St., from Feb. 24 to Feb. 26.