Pulitzer Prize winning dramatist Robert Schenkkan (The Kentucky Cycle, All the Way) wrote Building the Wall before Donald Trump won the presidential election. He said, “I sensed that even during the campaign real and lasting damage had already been done to the country.” This play was released in 2017 and has been performed in sixty cities worldwide. Costa Rica’s Teatro Espressivo translated the play into Spanish. La Construcción del Muro is now back on stage in New York after runs in Costa Rica, El Salvador and Spain.
Mr. Schenkkan released the play in 2017 a day before Trump threatened to paralyze the government if Congress did not clear the way for a border wall. The work is in the genre of speculative fiction. The story is a nightmare scenario made believable through easily drawn comparisons to history. This view equates Trump’s rise as a symptom of problems with Western democracies where white nationalist and supremacist right-wing movements have emerged.
You are asked to enter the theater in a straight line. The house is split into North and South with a white dividing line down the middle aisle. Attendees are separated intentionally. The ushers are prison guards. On stage there are two chairs on opposite ends of a table in some sort of conference room. A man is escorted in wearing an orange prison uniform. He has handcuffs on and takes his seat.
Rick is awaiting trial for unspecified crimes committed during the period where he was put in charge of a detainment center in Texas. Gloria is a professor and historian who has come to interview him and uncover the truth. She is not sure what will come of this conversation. In the original play, Gloria was written as African American. In this Spanish version, she has been changed to a woman of Latina descent. That alteration seems to add a vital element of outrage and immediacy to an incendiary topic.
Rick is a Texan who is part of the downwardly mobile lower white middle class. He struggles to make ends meet for his wife and child. His job in the border detainment camp is going well and he has increased responsibility. These prisons are profit-making enterprises so there is significant pressure. He is fiercely anti-immigration noting “if we don’t have borders, we don’t have a country.”
In Mr. Schenkkan’s imagination, the Justice Department was beginning to shut down America’s prison industrial complex but the election changed that direction. After an attack in New York, martial law became law. As Trump said (and this play repeats), there’s a lot of “bad hombres” out there. Before his arrest Rick was in charge of a stadium which had been co-opted to house illegals and other undesirables. Everything was fine, he says, before the sanitation problem.
This dystopian fantasy is not especially shocking since the imagined scenarios are grotesque exaggerations of current events. In 2020, cages are in use at the border. The Nazi parallels are obvious. When the conflicting passions of these two characters finally collide, their anger and disbelief registers strongly. If America displays how immigrants are treated, “who would want to come here now.”
That’s a bleak picture for sure. In this production, directed by Natalia Mariño, voice-over quotes by Donald Trump heighten the plausibility of the story. When children’s pleas on an actual 2018 tape are played, it is hard to reconcile a nation which pompously crusades itself as a model of Christianity. A question is posed very early in the play. What makes history change? Is it the academics, science or people?
Rodrigo Duran and Magdalena Morales are actors from Costa Rica and Guatemala, respectively. Their solid and nicely controlled performances highlight their character’s intense convictions. By the play’s end, they shine a blinding spotlight on an immoral future state which doesn’t seem impossible.
The play is performed in Spanish with English supertitles. There are quite a few distractions in the production including video projections of the interview. Overhead lights in the conference room changed positions and brightness but I was unable to determine why. The ideas were enough tension to hold my interest. When leaving the theater, I wondered how audiences throughout the world digested this material.
La Construcción del Muro (Building the Wall) was written in 2016 as dystopian fiction. From the perspective of 2020, is it? Your observations of current events will likely inform the gradient of your answer to that question.
This Costa Rican stage adaptation, co-produced by Teatro Espressivo and Teatro LATEA, is running until March 15, 2020.