Weaving Their Tapestry of Murder and Mayhem Locals Recount Violence in ‘Juárez: A Documentary Mythology’
Laura Collins-HughesSeptember 11, 2014: He is a dashing man, charming us in scraps of old home movies and the stories his son tells. The New York director Rubén Polendo has made a theater piece examining his violence-ridden hometown, Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and this man, who still lives there, is his father. “Mijo,” Mr. Polendo’s father tells him, “all this is very real. It’s sad, and it’s difficult. And it’s not a story, or a play, or a myth. It’s the life of a city.” That mutable life, just across the river from El Paso, Tex., is the subject of Theater Mitu’s Juárez: A Documentary Mythology, a scrupulously respectful interview-based show staged at Rattlestick Playwrights Theater as part of the Theater: Village festival. Mr. Polendo grew up in Juárez in the 1970s and ’80s. Only later did it become a place “of drug smugglings, killings, corruption and violence,” he says. It was known for a time as the murder capital of the world. “I needed to understand what had happened to the city,” he says in a voice-over. So he and the theater company went to inquire.
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