Theatre Review: The Way She Spoke Leaves Me In Absolute Tears
In the same way love is boundless, so is evil. Hence, when you fall into an oppressed category, like womanhood, these two battling forces threaten to either destroy your life or completely elevate it. You’ll never have a greater opportunity to appreciate and grow wiser to the beauty of life than when you face its horrendous, even fatal aspects. Kate Del Castillo’s The Way She Spoke approaches the strangeness of this paradoxical truth through the disappeared and brutally murdered women of Cuidad Juarez.
Similar to the scores of Native American women that have been disappeared, raped, or murdered in our own USA, Cuidad Juarez has a similar mystery that no one wants to solve. Is it the the feds? Is is the gangs? Is it both? These are questions each character Kate portrays ask, but never as much as “Why? Why me? Why my child, God?” Del Castillo is absolutely amazing as an actress going over to her friend’s, Isaac Gomez, whom is the writer of the play, to practice lines. As she delves further into his manuscript, she interrupts, to ask if this is truly real and was, what she was reading, his experience. Unfortunately….. yes.
“the way she spoke”: In Conversation with Kate del Castillo and Isaac Gomez
Imagine finding out your three-year old was raped, torn to pieces, and left in a garbage. How about if you found out the man that killed your daughter wore her nipples as a necklace while he freely walks the same streets you do? How about knowing your daughter was kidnapped, assaulted, and killed only because the best friend that sold her as a slave was killed, as well? Violence is inescapable in this play, of which Kate, at times interpreting her friend Isaac, makes clear that the disappeared women HAUNT Ciudad Juarez. There is no justice nor relied for their families’ pain, which is they play becomes so fascinating and oddly empowering of the human spirit. It is a strange, unwanted resilience to know you have utterly lost what is most precious to you, your child, and there is nothing to come of it beyond the realization that you could survive the worst of life.
I cringed, cried, and wanted to explode in my quiet search for explanations and resolutions as the faces of real women who died adorned the walls behind Kate, or as she read out loud the brutality of their deaths, of which some were so viciously torn by their attackers that they could not be identified. What is remarkable about Jo Bonney’s direction is that she, subtly, makes you empathize with victims in the terrifying realization of how their life grew forgotten. They were young girls and teenagers, practically children, living in a poor town where men saw them as sex objects, even when they were babies. They, seemingly, grew up to die, and, as a viewer, you launch into your own fears of being forgotten or not having “enough time” to see a come true… like them.
From the pink crosses that adorn certain fields or the work-bus routes where women will be stopped and taken,The Way She Spoke makes death a constant, ticking clock, of which Del Castillo’s performance embodies her fearful relentlessness. At 75 minutes, your mind reels with questions about information you did not expect to learn. I knew the play was about women disappearing in Ciudad Juarez, but they were not simply disappeared, they were erased as if their life did not matter until a man took it. The Way She Spoke is playing at Minetta Lane Theatre until August 18. Click Here To Buy Tickets.
