Guns, Flags and Coca-Cola

[September 17th, 2008]

It’s stifling in the theater, maybe 85 degrees, and onstage a man in a Ronald McDonald wig holds a damp flag bandana to his mouth and huffs himself into a stupor. This comes as no surprise. In the past half-hour Michael Jackson has boogied down with Subcomandante Marcos; the massacre at the Alamo and the sacrifice of Lost Niños Heroes, its Mexican equivalent, have been reenacted; and resentful hotel staff have looked on in horror as American teens debauch themselves on the beach.

It’s the first full run-through of Dos Pueblos, an international collaboration 18 months in the making that opens the 25th season at Miracle Theatre Group, Portland’s nationally respected Hispanic performance center.

Unlike Miracle’s usual programming of Spanish and Mexican classics, original plays about the immigrant experience and crowd-pleasing variety shows, Dos Pueblos isn’t a particularly Hispanic-American piece of theater. It would be better described as a border crossing conversation between five cosmopolitan Mexicans and five white Portlanders about our overlapping and, often, contentious cultural histories and the historical no-man’s-land—Texas, essentially—that separates us.

The show is the product of the efforts of three visionary directors: Rubén Ortiz, head of Mexico City’s La Comedia Humana; Jonathan Walters, director of Portland’s Hand2Mouth Theatre; with Olga Sanchez, Miracle Theatre’s artistic director, acting as dramaturg and referee.

Ortiz, a tall Mexico City native with a head of curly hair, an immaculate beard and a taste for Mandarin collars and Bob Fosse, teaches at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México and is three-quarters of the way through a quartet of site-specific plays inspired by Dante. His intellectual composure makes him an almost comic foil to Walters, a perennially disheveled 35-year-old world-traveler and artist-about-town, prone to enthusiastic rants and tricky international projects.

The two met while Walters and company member Faith Helma were on their honeymoon in Chiapas, and, according to Ortiz, he and Walters immediately wanted to collaborate. “When we met it was amazing the number of coincidences, the things we were thinking about theater,” Ortiz said at a lunch in February. “I asked him, ‘Wait, what’s the theme?’” Walters said. “He said, ‘What could it be but U.S. versus Mexico?’”

In May 2007 the two companies met for the first time at an artists’ retreat in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and began working. Miracle signed on as presenter (with the help of a Rockefeller Foundation grant) last summer, and the international ensemble has had three periods of rehearsal since, both in Mexico and Portland. A planned Mexico City premiere fell through when funding failed to pan out, so the whole affair will hit the stage for the first time here, next week.

Walters says the show may take Miracle’s audience by surprise. “It’s not really a show about immigration—it’s about neighbors. It could be about France and Germany, or any people who share a border and have really fucking conflicted feelings about one another.

“Some of Mexico’s most sacred figures get skewered a little, and that’s a lot easier to do in Mexico City than it is in Portland. I was nervous in February, but now I’m worried I’m going to get my ass kicked,” Walters continues. “[La Comedia Humana] are very self-critical, but when you’re away from your country, I think you tend to idealize it more.”

Dos Pueblos has a few nontextual surprises, too. The semi-abstract set, printed on a single sheet of vinyl stretched across a wooden frame, serves as a backdrop for projected video, filmed live on a miniature model backstage. It’s an effort to create an artificial, mythical world—what Walters calls a “zero place”—in between nations. It’s an evolving place: interviews with day laborers and audience members, recorded nightly, will change the show throughout its run. It is, for all parties involved, something of an exotic creature. “I treat the show as if it were an animal,” Ortiz told WW in a recent interview. “I ask it, ‘What do you want from me now?’”