Photo: Ana Topoleanu.
Members of the theater troupe Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol, photographed in Mexico City on March 17, 2026.
Trust artists to find a way to say difficult things. And I believe that artists of the theater are often the ones to step up in the midst of political storms.
At the New York Times, Michael Snyder writes, “The actors Luisa Pardo and Lázaro G. Rodríguez met 25 years ago in Mexico City while auditioning for the theater program at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Once admitted, they bonded over their frustrations with the conservatism and rigid hierarchies of classical theater. …
“In 2003, they founded their theater group, Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol (Lizards Lying in the Sun), which has grown into an interdisciplinary collective of 10 or so artists who incorporate archival documents, autobiographies and found footage to build plays about everything from deforestation and leftist guerrillas to economic violence on the U.S.-Mexico border. If the problems of the real world could infiltrate the stage, they thought, maybe theater could help fix them.
“Over the last three decades, a growing cohort of theater artists across Latin America have, like Lagartijas, used journalism, documentary and memoir to explore the boundaries between fact and fiction while confronting their region’s troubled past and turbulent present in a genre known as Theater of the Real.
“Playwrights have staged recent history since at least the fifth century B.C., when Aeschylus wrote the tragedy The Persians. But Theater of the Real, a term coined by the New York University theater scholar Carol Martin in her 2013 book of the same name, traces its contemporary origins to the director Erwin Piscator, who, in 1920s Germany, projected newsreels, photographs and headlines onto the stage to stoke opposition to far-right militarism. …
“Other works of so-called verbatim theater, like Anna Deavere Smith’s Twilight: Los Angeles, 1992 (1993), and The Laramie Project (2000), by Moises Kaufman and members of the Tectonic Theater Project, reproduced word-for-word testimonies given in the aftermath of traumatic events — the 1992 Los Angeles riots following the acquittal of police officers who’d beaten Rodney King, and the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay student from the University of Wyoming. But where early works of documentary theater ‘wanted to say, “Look, this happened, this was wrong,” ‘ says Martin, today’s Latin American troupes aim instead for ‘an interrogation of the truth.’
“Take Lagartijas’ play Centroamérica (2024). … Pardo and Rodríguez dramatize two years of field work, traveling from Guatemala to Panama … and creating a disorienting collage of re-enacted conversations with priests, immigrants and exiles; news clips and recorded interviews; and intimate soliloquies of doubt and revelation. …
“Although Latin American Theater of the Real dates to the 1960s, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that a tight-knit group of artists from around the region coalesced, all ‘looking for ways to rewrite our own history,’ says the 50-year-old Argentine playwright Lola Arias. For her first fact-based work, My Life After (2009), Arias talked with the children of exiles, intelligence officers, journalists and pastors — all born between 1976 and 1983, during Argentina’s military dictatorship — to reconstruct their parents’ lives through images, objects and recordings. That play, along with other works she’s made, ‘becomes a form of reconciliation,’ she says, ‘a way to understand the pain of others.’ “
Although theater doesn’t have the power to right wrongs, it seems to me that speaking out is a kind of power in itself. Remember the trajectory of playwright Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia, who ultimately became president. Many ingredients make change, and they all matter.
More at the Times, here.
