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OUR LADY OF THE UNDERPASS. By Tanya Saracho. Directed by Sandra Marquez. 16th Street Theater and Teatro Vista, Berwyn, Chicago. 11 April 2010.
The sound of the freeway stayed with me as I settled into the fifty-seat auditorium of the 16th Street Theater. Piped into the house as part of the sound design and removed from the context of unwieldy traffic, the buzz of passing cars created an unexpected calming effect. The commute into the city was hectic as usual. The radio news spoke of the Vatican sex scandal and I anticipated drawing some ironic connections between the trouble in Rome and the play. After all, it was performed five years after an image of the Virgin Mary was recognized on a Chicago underpass following the loss of Pope John Paul II and the commission of Pope Benedict XVI. Commuter Obdulia Delgado had no way of knowing that what she perceived as an image of the Virgin would create gridlock in public debate as religious pilgrims, predominantly from Latino and Polish immigrant communities, erected a roadside shrine that, quite literally, stopped traffic.
A performance in and of itself, this original shrine and its followers were formally commemorated in Teatro Vista's staging of Tanya Saracho's Our Lady of the Underpass. Based on interviews with visitors to the site, Saracho's "theatre of testimony" exemplified what performance scholar Jack Santino describes as a "performative commemorative." If, as Santino argues, roadside memorials mark a loss or death within a community, so too did Teatro Vista's production memorialize the underpass shrine, now eclipsed under palimpsestic layers of graffiti. Furthermore, the play served as a backdrop for the expression of more personal, political, and cultural absences marked by the shrine. For example, with the erection of the memorial, immigrant Catholic communities left their cultural mark on a cityscape that had increasingly ignored them through gentrification. Through the testimonies of the site's visitors, Saracho restored immigrant voices that she considered to have "politically and socially . . . gone voiceless." Similarly, as the only Equity Latino theatre...