INTERVIEW: ‘the way she spoke’ gives voice to women silenced by violence
Photo: Kate del Castillo stars in Isaac Gomez’s the way she spoke, directed by Jo Bonney at the Minetta Lane Theatre. Photo courtesy of Joan Marcus / Provided by BBB with permission.
Isaac Gomez’s the way she spoke, now playing at the Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City, is a one-woman show that dives deep into the painful issue of violence against women in the border city of Juárez, Mexico. Kate del Castillo, of Netflix’s La Reina del Sur, stars in the piece, which is told from the perspective of a playwright trying to create a show about these women and the family members they left behind.
Jo Bonney, director of such off-Broadway shows as Eve’s Song and Mlima’s Tale, is at the helm of this production, which is presented by Audible Theater. Performances run through Aug. 18 in the West Village.
“I was actually just contacted by Kate Navin at Audible,” Bonney said in a recent phone interview. “She had been very interested in this play and Isaac’s work for, I think, at least a year beforehand, maybe a little longer. They were waiting for the right moment to do it, and then when they realized they could do it, then they started the search for an actor and a director. So Kate knew my work, and Isaac knew my work. So it just seemed like a good fit.”
When Bonney first read the play, she fell in love with its inherent theatricality. On stage, Castillo doesn’t simply embody the characters, a common trope in one-person shows. Instead, she portrays an actor who has entered a theatrical space to read a play called the way she spoke. The audience takes on the persona of the playwright, presumably Gomez himself, and watches the faux-audition with a scrutinizing eye. As Castillo goes deeper into the play, she begins to morph into the characters she portrays. By the end, it’s almost difficult to separate the play from the play-within-the-play.
“I immediately loved it,” Bonney said. “I got to the end of the play, and I was so moved by it. And, of course, it’s something that I think most of us know a little about, but don’t understand it in terms of its depth and complexity. Isaac was framing this story of Juárez and the women there from his own perspective of being someone who had grown up just on the other side of the border in El Paso and who had family in Juárez, where he had gone all of his life from when he was young and had not realized what he was surrounded by and what he was seeing. To take that journey as the playwright in the piece and to put it in the body of an actress who is also discovering it as she reads it, I just thought it was so inherently theatrical.”
The director added: “Wonderful solo pieces are done in the form where you have one character, and then they morph into the next character, and they morph into the next character, and here are all the men and women of Juárez. But that was not how Isaac chose to frame it, and I thought his unconventional approach was really fresh and interesting.”
Of course, this past week has been a horrifying one for the residents of El Paso, Texas, located across the border from Juárez, Mexico. The violence in the news and the violence detailed in the way she spoke are part of a larger narrative on the fragility of life and the continued tears that are shed over lost family and friends.
Bonney, who was speaking before the tragedy in El Paso, said that Gomez taught her a lot about the issue of violence against women in Juárez.
“Isaac educated me quite a lot in the piece itself,” she said. “I had some knowledge of it, and his investigation and what he conveys in the piece opened me up to all sorts of other dynamics in terms of the story and the history of it and the ongoing awfulness of it really. Then, of course, I hopped online and found as many articles as I could to read and videos and images just to be fully conversant in it, so I could step into the first day of rehearsal and feel that I was fully immersed, which is difficult because this is not a world that you actually want to fully immerse emotionally. It’s painful, but you owe it to the women that you really take on the responsibility of doing a piece like this, I felt.”
Throughout the play, haunting imagery of Juárez is projected on the Minetta Lane’s brick wall. The images, sometimes coming in and out of focus, provide a visual accompaniment to Castillo’s stories and portrayals. Perhaps most haunting of all is an image of lonely crosses marking a hilly open field.
“Early on I spoke to Isaac about imagery because we felt that with the convention of watching an actress working her way through a script and discovering it and transporting to Juárez and then coming back into the world of reading the script, we wanted to really be able to take people there with language and with visuals,” Bonney said. “And Isaac, when he had visited there, had taken a lot of photos, plus obviously there are photos online, but I wanted to lean very heavily into Isaac’s photos because they represented his eye, which is obviously what the actor is also using as if we’re seeing it through his eyes. So that was a decision that was very early on when I first spoke to Isaac, and then it was a matter of how we use the images.”
Bonney and the play’s video artist, Aaron Rhyne, took Gomez’s images and began to broadcast them in the background, but they decided not to make the pictures too vivid, otherwise they would compete with Castillo on stage. Bonney said the background couldn’t become overwhelming to the story being told.
“So the images sort of appeared and disappeared and were in the fabric of the wall in the way our mind works while we’re remembering things and trying to recollect and trying to tell stories,” she said.
Directing a one-person show is vastly different than directing an ensemble piece. For starters, in a play with several cast members, Bonney realizes that the actors lean on one another. In a one-person show, the actor needs the audience (and the director standing in for the audience) to become a scene partner.
“In an ensemble, the cast has each other, so I will have the big picture for them,” she said. “And we will talk about specific moments, but they give each other energy and discover things in terms of how they receive and deliver lines with another body on stage. But when it’s a solo artist, their relationship really is completely with the audience. The audience is a scene partner, so there’s much more discovery.”
That means a solo performer needs to be strong in so many acting qualities, and Bonney said Castillo rises to the challenge to perform this 80-minute piece.
“I just thought she was wonderful,” Bonney said. “She’s such a physical performer. … She doesn’t have to overwork to make it very authentic.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
the way she spoke, directed by Jo Bonney, written by Isaac Gomez and starring Kate del Castillo, plays through Aug. 18 at the Minetta Lane Theatre in the West Village of New York City. The production is part of the Audible Theater initiative. Click here for more information and tickets.
