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A new play from Culture Clash, based in part on actual events in Marathon Texas .
July-October at the Festival in Ashland, Oregon.
Synopsis: Mexican national Juan José is preparing to take a U.S. citizenship exam the following morning. Listening to the radio and poring over his Citizen’s Almanac of U.S. history, he falls asleep. The voices on the radio and the official version of the historical facts spin in his head. They blend with his fears, doubts and knowledge of an alternate version of history to create the fever-dream that forms the play’s structure. In the fever-dream, as Juan José reads quotes from his Citizen’s Almanac, he is transported to the center of historical events, where he encounters figures—both important and little-known—who played key roles. The fever-dream is stylistically diverse—impressionistic, fantastical and realistic; it incorporates drama, heightened storytelling, sketch comedy—even a radio play. The action leaps from moment to moment, from the signing of the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (which ceded much of pre-war Mexico to the United States), to a makeshift hospital in Marathon Texas run by a courageous African-American woman during the 1918 Spanish influenza, to Manzanar Relocation Center during World War II, where a Mexican-American teenager volunteered to be interned with his friends, to the funeral of a union dockworker in San Francisco killed by police in the 1930s. Through his move through time, Juan José encounters individual moments of courage, the fight for justice and progress, and both the best and the worst of American character. After more adventures, including one on a raft with the Marielito refugees who came in the 1980s from Cuba, Juan José finds himself in danger. As a radio broadcasts a report of anti-Mexican immigrant pogroms, he is surrounded by menacing figures. A voice asks Juan José to name the 13 original colonies. The lights fade as he takes his test. |
