Plasman in theater marginalization of leprosy patients

“Verdecruz or the last lazarettos” brings together in a theatrical piece the heartbreaking testimonies of leprosy patients -today better called Hansen’s disease- who were segregated for the rest of their days in ghettos in Ecuador and Colombia. Some of these men and women arrived there as children, forever torn from their families, stigmatized, and ultimately mercilessly abandoned.

Six actors each embody a diversity of real characters, who turn the statistics of disease, death and confinement in leper colonies into life stories, into a portrait of the human condition, illuminated by fragments of texts from Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault.

Directed by Mario Espinosa and with dramaturgy by Ingrid Bravo, “Verdecruz or the last lazarettos” is based on the documentary work of Beatriz Miranda Galarza, PhD in Disability Studies from the University of Leeds and coordinator of the Critical Studies area of ​​”disability” at 17, Institute for Critical Studies. His research led to the publication of the book “Our history is not a lie, living with leprosy in Ecuador”.

The volume recovers experiences like that of Bolívar Salcedo, who from his bed tells his story with Corinita, his partner, who died a few days ago. They met, fell in love and married in the former Verdecruz leprosy hospital in Quito, Ecuador, today the Gonzalo González hospital.

For the staging, Espinosa experimented, in an innovative way in Mexico, with the Verbatim technique, closer to documentary theater: this consists of the actors using headphones to listen, from their cell phones, recordings with the testimonies of the surviving elders collected by Miranda Galarza. While the recording runs, the actors and actresses reproduce the voices they hear, with the exact words, with their accents, language winks and their different timbres; traits that give unusual power and vivacity to the speech.

For Mario Espinosa, this technique turns the actors into a kind of medium. The testimonies reveal a dark chapter in the history of medicine, in which experimental treatments are part of hidden records, having used methods that ignored the suffering of the sick.

This production, in which actors and actresses graduated from the University Theater Center (CUT) of the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) participate, was released in 2022 and will have a single staging within the framework of the XXXIV International Colloquium “For a Critical Management of Culture. Management as Production”, organized by 17, Institute for Critical Studies.

The appointment is on Saturday, January 28, at 3:30 p.m., in the Caja Negra Space of the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center. Admission is free, with limited space.

The International Colloquium “For a Critical Management of Culture. Management as Production” is held from January 23 to 28 at the Tlatelolco University Cultural Center, with free admission, with the purpose of analyzing, from a critical perspective, cultural practice as a “productive” action, capable of generate social transformations, with the participation of experts from various countries.