Content area

Full text

Deborah Saivetz

''The mission of theatre is not to tell stories, but to create worlds.''

''Six women purifying and punishing themselves, rotting away, tortured by both memory and forgetting, opening and closing doors in dreams and in reality. Fallen angels yearning to belong. A toilet, steel bars, a telephone, radio, television, refrigerator, sink ... and water ... drops that fall to kill time, to keep time locked in the mind, deep inside, like Cronus devouring his children, fighting off the seconds, minutes, hours, days, the number on the roll call, the date of visiting day, everything is a number, God is a number. Drops of water fall, time passes ... this is confinement ... my death happens ... passes ... slowly.''

--Mariía Morett

Genesis

    Mujeres en el encierro (Women in Confinement) was inspired by Mariía Morett'sexperiences teaching acting and directing plays in the women's prisons of Mexico City. From 1993 to 1994, she worked as a theatre instructor in the Reclusorio Preventiv Femenil Norte and the Penitenciarií a de Mujeres de Tepepan, and was able to learn much about the female inmates through the stories they told about themselves. Morettrecalls,

We would speak about all kinds of things--even sexual things--and we would be weeping because there is so much repression in there. The women loved rehearsing. It was a privilege for them to rehearse because they could be out of their cells. I never asked them directly about their lives because I thought



p.18


that was rude. They were my students. So I never said ''why are you here?'' But sometimes I knew. And sometimes I invented or filled in. I tried to write some things...ideas ...fragments...artifacts.

Morettbegan writing Mujeres en el encierro the following year, after receiving the 1995-96 ''Jovenes Creadores (Young Creators)'' grant from the Mexican National Fund for Culture and the Arts (FONCA) to develop a play about women in prison. Over the next two years she conducted extensive research in conjunction with the Mexican Commission on Human Rights, both inside and outside the country's penal system. An important part of this research was a series of first-person interviews that she conducted with current and former prison inmates:

I began talking with a woman who was...

Show less