Valmir Santos*

A work of art can make its way through the bloodiest historical event without spilling a single scenic drop of blood, as the Colombian group Teatro Preta proves to us once again.

After the surprisingly fresh Mosca (Fly, 2002), a loose appropriation of Shakespeare’s tragedy (i.e., carnage) King Lear, featuring sword fights and bodies being pierced or dismembered amid fruits and vegetables, the group reaches even more astonishing levels in terms of language in Labio de Liebre (Hare-Lip, 2015).

This time, the fictional story is based on the real cases of serious human rights violations that took place in Colombia, without any concern for treating them with the objectivity of facts. The implied terrain is that of nightmares, despite the latent oneiric content. In an analogy, the dramatic result pierces the flesh of the collective memories and present-day realities of Latin American countries, flesh that was already scarred by the volatile effect of the violence employed by terrorists or dictators – or, sometimes, by both.

Fabio Rubiano’s text is permeated with images that are commonly seen in truth commissions. Directly or indirectly, it touches upon illegal and arbitrary detention, sexual violence, gender violence, violence against children and adolescents, executions and torture-related deaths, massacres or murders committed as part of a systematic policy, while never conforming to realistic dialogues.

The narrative and mise-en-scène used in Labio de Liebre consist of metaphysical structures. A constant sense of non-reality causes strangeness on every level. There are ways in and out for enchantment, for the tragicomic, for abrasive humor.

A confessed murderer is on house arrest for his crimes. After all, he’s killed a lot of people at the behest of an institutions or a crime syndicate – it’s not exactly clear which. As part of a court-ordered sentence, he is exiled in a country where it snows – quite opposite weather than that of his tropical paradise.

And it is in the freezing cold that the house-prison is taken over by the family of peasants who had been executed by him, under the suspicion that its members, including the hidden husband, had sided with “the enemy”. He had been a mere pawn in the game for those who call the shots and those who fund the underworld of crime, politics, drug cartels and the stock market.

In the chess game of metaphors and fables assembled by Rubiano, the territories – the frozen white land of his place, and the warm green of the forest – are more and more ingrained.

The mother, the two boys and their youngest, a girl, are the Sosa family: ghostly beings who won’t leave Salvo Castello alone, demanding that he recognize their existence. In his mind, his conscience is clear – after all, he was just doing his job. He had always been under orders, he argued. He hadn’t done the dirty work on his own accord.

In the absence of a narrator to organize the gushing flow of absurdities (he/she is not missed, by the way), the audience is free to make sense of it at all, at their own risk and stimulated by Rubiano’s sensorial rendering of the text.

The visual games include short pieces of footage projected amid the light drawings that last just a few seconds and cause a shift in perception. The scenic design deserves particular praise, as it’s a character in its own right. Laura Villegas’ art direction moves between realistic furniture and a constantly changing habitat, like the outdoors, reinforced by the presence of critters and foliage, erasing the notions of inside and outside the house, which seems to be physically suspended.

Everything in this experience is established by fissures, such as the congenital cleft lip alluded to in the title (one of the revived victims had a surgery scheduled to repair the condition, as a child, before being killed).

The subversions of time, space, and action – which gradually meld into one – give way to the implicit documentary evidence. The acts of naming something, of recognizing and forgiving become deeply intertwined and echo the everyday battles fought in the city, in the countryside and in the jungle.

It was not by chance that South and Central American nations set up truth commissions in the 1980s and 90s. During that period, “criminal accountability was made impossible by the amnesty laws in place”, as stated in the valuable report of the Brazilian Truth Commission, published in 2014.

The civil initiative replicated in more than 30 countries allowed for “more effective disclosure and registration of the violence caused by state agents, or with their acquiescence, by disavowing false versions or denial of such violence”.

Backed by its 31-year trajectory, Teatro Petra has shown at the opening of the current edition of Mirada that disappearance, reconciliation and enlightenment are notions that need to be problematized. The presence of a journalist to mediate the barbaric violence in this plot – she was also executed for siding with the “enemy” – highlights the relevance of this theme to our society.

The Sosa family does not seek revenge, but rather the recognition of a crime against humanity. All they want is to have the perpetrator call it by its name. To remember, and to resist. In his final despair, the executioner questions if he can be forgiven – but the play does not provide any answers. Instead, it leaves the answer to this lingering question up in the air.

Labio de Liebre materializes a theatrical vision that matches the level of restlessness that it seeks to instill. On the first night, the actors missed some of their marks – quite often, in fact. But that did not detract from Marcela Valencia’s performance as the matriarch Alegría de Sosa, the actress and character who bring a dynamic impact to this production.

*Valmir Santos is a journalist for Teatrojornal – Leituras de Cena