n the United States, the adjectives "issue" or "political" affixed to the noun "play" give it a pair of concrete shoes that sink it in a blink, the assumption being that the work will be more or less "soviet": gracelessly didactic, grey and medicinal.

But these "issues," these "politics," like a team of surveyors, lay down the geography we follow in our daily lives. We may like to think, as good Americans, that we are ambulatory individualized psychologies free of history and obliged by divine fiat to our own material self-satisfaction. But the truth is that those "larger forces" make the clothes in which we vest our fictioned selves and that we are manifestly un-free as long as we keep ourselves ignorant of the big knives that sculpt our little rounds.

Next question (at least for me, the playwright): how to make the sculptors -- the "issues," the "politics" -- visible. And not just visible for the sake of visibility, but to honor a manifesto in my heart: to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted and -- yes, I will say it -- to make things different and better by what I write, not by prescription but by complication and irritation.  Bearing witness.  Raising hell.

How, then, to do this without going "soviet"?  Enter Homeward Bound.

Homeward Bound is a play about domestic violence -- more accurately, the intersection of immigration (the "big" picture) and domestic abuse (the "small" picture), since the play deals with a young Mexican woman who marries an American citizen who, after he brings her to the United States, refuse to make her "legal" and uses her illegality to oppress and violate her.  I co-wrote and co-produced it with my partner, Maria Beatriz Alvarez, who is a social worker at one of the "known" hospitals in Boston.  (It just finished a four-performance run as a benefit for a domestic violence agency.)

The pulse that prompted the play grew out of work that Maria does with families who, by all measures, are below the lowest rung on the social ladder: they are the floor upon which everyone unthinkingly walks and gives no second thought. The case involved a young woman, with children, who was "exported" to the United States by an American citizen who later refused to honor any of his promises to make her "legal" and then used that illegality against her. We wanted to write a play that honored this particular person and her suffering. But we also wanted to write a play that brought this common situation "above the radar" and showed that such abuse was not only a matter of individual pathologies but also pathological systems of nationalism and inequality. And we wanted to write a play that people would find aesthetically pleasing and not the equivalent of penance -- we wanted to turn the issue into art.

Here is what we did. First, we crafted a single story of a single woman.  The audience meets fifteen-year old Juanita, from Mexico, on the day of her "quinceañera," her cultural translation from a girl into a women, as Mother and Father instruct her about her future life. Two years later she meets Hank Armstrong from Nebraska (Mother had Juanita at the same age and is in fear for her daughter's life).  Smitten with the charming young man, Juanita marries him. (And he is charming, which is part of what confuses Juanita: how he says what he says masks what he truthfully intends, so that she is tricked into believing something that is not true -- the classic double-bind of abuse.) Hank brings her to his home but refuses to file the papers that will document her, in effect making her a prisoner.  He also speaks Spanish but refuses to allow her to learn English, thus exercising another dimension of control over her life. She does escape from the situation, and her path crosses with Cristina Lefcadia, whom we meet earlier in the play: she is the executive director of Asistencia, Inc., an agency that works with battered immigrant women. Cristina is involved in her own fight to beat back the efforts of Representative William Bartlett (who represents the forces that shape the political landscape that Juanita and Cristina have to travel) to dissolve the "immigration regime," as he calls it, including protections for battered immigrant women included in the 1994 Violence Against Women Act.

At the end of the play Juanita, Cristina, and Mother gather to recite a poem that declares that the violence will stop only when our hearts are purged of anger and shame and "love rises to life over the dry bones of death [el amor sube a la vida sobre los huesos secos de la muerte]."

Staging

From the beginning we wanted to create in Homeward Bound what the novelist John Gardner called "the continuous dream" so that the audience could focus without distraction on Juanita's journey. We wanted to create this dream by layering under and over and interlacing throughout the play echoes of the main narrative in other "vocabularies" so that audience would not only "get" the story through the "realistic" guise of action and dialogue but also on the lower frequencies of their hearts, their skin, their intuitions, their feelings.

So we staged the piece to have the actors onstage for the full 90 minutes, making all costume changes in view of the audience. Scene changes were kept simple by bringing on only a few props to indicate time and place, and we choreographed them to flow quickly out of one scene and into the next, covered by music. In this way, the scene changes themselves became part of the action of the play rather than its interruption.

Cultural References

With the staging set, we looked at other lexicons we would use to anchor and universalize Juanita's story. First we looked for cultural references we could employ. One important cultural resonance was the "quinceañera," a celebration in Spanish-speaking countries of a girl's fifteenth birthday where she ritually makes the transition from "girl" to "woman."  The quinceañera is marbled with heavy lessons about the proper role of a woman and her appropriate relation to a man, and for Juanita it was the first official communique from her father about how she must live her life in the shadow of the Blessed Virgin Mary and never do anything to bring shame on herself or her family. In the course of the scene where Father delivers this sermon, we also see his abusive treatment of Mother and the disconnect between the call to honor and the oppressive daily grinding-down of Mother's spirit.

Because Juanita was Mexican, we also employed the vibrating symbolism of Los Dias de Los Muertos, the Days of the Dead. Los Dias is an interesting combine of symbols because it blends Christian and Aztec traditions.  The Aztecs believed that the monarch butterflies, who migrate from the north to central Mexico every year, bring back the souls of the dead on their wings. Petals from the cempazuchil, the marigolds, are laid out in crosses (the four directions) to help the butterflies find their way.  Catholicism added its own version of the cross and folk traditions brought in the candy skulls, the pan de muerto, the ofrenda (altar) set up to honor the souls of the dead. Los Dias is ripe with redemptive energies, and the symbolism blooms at a moment in the play when Mother's spirit comes to offer to lost and unguided Juanita a remembrance of Los Dias as a way for Juanita to find a path and a voice.

Mexican history also echoes in Juanita's relationship with Hank. Hank is "NAFTA'd," as he calls it, working in an American subsidiary located in Mexico. The economic system lands him there, not any impulse on his part to explore the world, and this system is simply another avatar of the imperialism that drove the gringos into old Mexico in the 1840s to "liberate" it from Spain.  Hank's abuse of Juanita is a cognate of this history: the American, bribed by his mid-Western mythologies, conquers one more territory as his "right." In the courtship scene between Hank and Juanita, Hank jokes that siestas are Mexico's "crucial geopolitical mistake" and that Juanita should "yield to the superior force of Yankee imperialism," but it is only a half-joke because embedded in Hank's genealogy is the unquestioned belief that the norteamericanos are superior in every way that counts.

We also wanted to tell Juanita's story wordlessly, in "dumb-show," so to speak, and to do this we used dance, color, what we called a "visual monologue," and the dramatic power of the shawl.

Dance

In the quinceañera the girl must dance the vals (a waltz) with one of the older men, often her father or an uncle.  In the vals, the woman must never lead -- that is the man's province. And if she tries to lead, she can expect a reprimand.  In the "quinceañera" scene, Father instructs Juanita about the proper way to dance the vals, and the doubleness of the message is clear: "I will hold you and guide you and you will be safe as long as you follow and smile."

Five tango sequences occur in the play.  (Tango is specifically Argentinean, but its amalgam of passion and violence makes it perfect for telling a story about what happens when the former morphs into the latter.)  In the first two, Juanita dances with the "Dream Man" (which is Hank wearing the traditional chambergo, a kind of fedora, and a scarf.)  We see the telenovela innocence of Juanita and her hopes for gentleness and love. The third tango happens while Juanita tells Mother about meeting Hank; it reprises the first tango so that the audience can see the connection between the dream and the actual.  The fourth tango is now with Hank as Hank, and in it Mother interacts, trying to take Juanita back (she has such horrible misgivings about Juanita's connection with this man, this gringo).  The fifth tango is the "marriage" tango.
Each tango (except for the third) is choreographed to shift the emotional pitch from passion to possession, and taken together they mirror the arc of the relationship and reiterate the dominant themes of the play.  However, because it is dance, because it is sculpture in motion and not words, the audience gets to "hear" the play in a different way, through their sensibilities and intuitions, not through their academic ears.

Color

As for color, Los Dias has a color "code" which we reiterated throughout: pink (for celebration), purple (for pain), and white (for hope).  In the quinceañera scene, Juanita's vanity is draped in a pink tablecloth, and she wears a white dress. In the scene where Juanita tells Mother about Hank, the tablecloth is lilac (between celebration and pain).  Each tango scene had its own color. The two "dream" tangos had pink and lilac (complemented by a scarf of the same color worn by Hank.)  The "marriage" tango used white. In one of the scenes of abuse, Juanita wears a purple robe.  In these and many other ways we tried to use color to signal the story to the audience as well.

Visual Monologue

In the scene where Juanita reveals to Cristina what Hank has done, Juanita offers Cristina her story through a "visual monologue."  Mother brings out a table on which rests a stainless steel bowl, a paring knife, a cleaver, a cutting board, and a white towel; in the bowl is a large ripe tomato.  Juanita "tells" the story by first coring the top of the tomato, cutting it in half, gutting one half and squeezing its contents into the bowl, and then doing the same with the second half.  She carefully wipes off the implements and her hands, and then sits; Mother takes away the table. We wanted the audience to feel as if they had just watched surgery on the human heart.

The Shawl

The vocabulary of the shawl is spoken in almost every scene: Cristina has a red one, Mother a white one, and Juanita a blue one. As Cristina says to Juanita, "My mother gave me a shawl, when I was eleven....A shawl is an amazing thing, no? I never wanted to lose its warm sheltering weight off my shoulders.  The way it draped over my arms, tapped my young spine as I walked. So many things in a shawl, no? It made me feel wise." We wanted to make them literal "threads" throughout the play that, over and over again, bind, punctuate, protect, defend.  For instance, in the "courting" scene between Juanita and Hank, the shawl acts as a hyphen between the two, connecting but also lashing, releasing but also capturing. The shawl "speaks" predictively of all the ways Hank will subdue Juanita and Juanita will struggle to escape. 

In the final scene (there have been previous references to pictures of old Mexican women standing firm and strong wrapped in their shawls), the three women come together to address the audience directly, both through their words and their shawls.  Cristina has just moved out of a scene where, as a guest on a talk show, she got into a shouting match with Congressman Bartlett about his immigration "deform." Though she addresses Juanita, she speaks into the audience.  Here is an excerpt.

CRISTINA:  Juanita, I talked. I got my mouth around the official language and spit it out. Bile at first, but I did it. I talked and the passion spilled back into my words, the passion that keeps me in this fight.  Played the game out to the end so that the barbarians -- that barbarian -- would not win again.  I did it for you. For Luisa Ortiz. For the campesina.  For all of us.

[CRISTINA puts her shawl over head, as if in mourning. As she speaks, MOTHER joins her, also wearing her shawl as if in mourning.]

CRISTINA:  As I spoke, I saw him lift his smiling face up to the light, and it struck me that death wears such a fashionable smile as it grinds all our souls -- all our souls, all of us -- into an obedient dust.

[As MOTHER begins to talk, JUANITA joins them, also wearing her shawl as if in mourning.]

MOTHER:  Because the barbarian is not a man even if it wears a man's face.

JUANITA:   The barbarian is the anger and shame woven through all our hearts.

CRISTINA:  From doubt and violation --

JUANITA:   From unhappiness and vast oppression --

MOTHER:  From dreams denied and truth dismembered --

JUANITA:   From our mortal flesh as brief and cheap as morning dew.

CRISTINA:  (She brings her shawl to her shoulders.)  No more must any of us --

MOTHER:  (She brings her shawl to her shoulders.)  Man, woman, or child --

JUANITA:   (She brings her shawl to her shoulders.)  Walk the dry road of fear with a voiceless heart.

ALL:   Because only we can turn the burden into song.

JUANITA:   It can be now.

CRISTINA:  It can be here.

MOTHER:  It can be us.

ALL:   Yes.

[As each says her line, she will take off her shawl and hold it out in front of her. They will link hands while holding the shawls.]

MOTHER:  Because love --

JUANITA:   Because love --

CRISTINA:  Rises to life --

MOTHER:  Rises to life --

JUANITA:   Over the dry bones of death.

MOTHER:  Over the dry bones of death.

ALL:   El amor sube a la vida sobre los huesos secos de la muerte.

[In one coördinated movement, they wrap the shawls around their shoulders and present a line of strong women.  The light remains on the three of them, then bumps to black.]

Through all these "echoes" (and many others we would have done if we had had the money), we pushed the story, the "issue," the "politics," so that audience would be unable to walk away saying that they left in the same state in which they entered.  But we did it in a way that did not sermonize them into guilty feelings or task them for existential conditions or even exhort them to take counter-actions. Instead, we wanted to reach their hearts and spirits so that any action springing out of watching this play, whether it was "activism" or simply replaying it because they could not get the story out of their heads, came from a place of balance and nurturing, not anger or blaming (or at least not only from there). The proselytizing, the educating, the lobbying -- the play has its part in all of this, but it is not these things: it has its own artistic sea to sail, its own way to grab an audience by the eyes and keep them from wanting to use the bathroom.

Did we succeed?  I think so. People are still talking about it, suggestions about other conferences which might use the script have flown in, it has been solicited by a couple of theatre companies with "social" missions: it will have a life of its own.  Will it change the world, even a small slice of it?  Wrong question. Homeward Bound, like the monarch butterfly, carries a soul on its wings, but it travels in league with millions of others similarly laden. It is that multiple and fluxing journey that matters most. If Homeward Bound stands out for its brief moment and gathers its fame (after all, we are not immune to the perks and levers of recognition), that is fine.  But when the sky darkens with a host of returning souls, all bent on forcing life to spin out its fullness in fairness to all, that is the sight that makes the heart thrive and the mind take flight and keeps our fingers on the keyboard so that the next play, and the one after that, and all which will come, flow out in electrons jazzed with love and a fierce desire to see things done right.

Michael Bettencourt is a
writer, playwright, director
who lives and works in Boston

 © 2000 Michael Bettencourt ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

July 2000

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