This roll call of violence is the climax of Isaac Gomez’s one-woman play “the way she spoke,” at the Minetta Lane Theater, but he doesn’t require the performer to read it all the way through.
“She should stop when she needs to stop,” he writes in a merciful author’s note, and when Kate del Castillo reached that point the other night, her cheeks were wet with tears.
Directed by Jo Bonney, “the way she spoke” is an aching, outraged work of vigil, protest and inquiry — albeit one whose human drama remains at a strange remove in this frustrating Audible Theater production.
An act of bearing witness, the play is the story of Gomez’s quest to understand the epidemic of murders and disappearances of women that raged for years in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, and that he says has not stopped. He grew up just across the border, in El Paso, Texas.
As Gomez did, the playwright-narrator in “the way she spoke” travels to Juárez to interview locals for their stories — a mother whose daughter disappeared, a man convicted of multiple murders, the driver of a bus that took women to work in the area factories. The narrator’s trip — to a city he discovers to be more dangerous and fearful than he grasped as a boy — forms the spine of this structurally ambitious play.
But the dominant voice doesn’t belong to any of the people of Juárez. It belongs to the playwright-narrator.
The performance opens with an actress arriving in an empty theater to read a script, from start to finish, for its author, her old friend. His play demands that she embody him and the various people he encounters in Juárez. The actress character is meant sometimes to be herself, sometimes to be only haltingly familiar with the script and sometimes to disappear into its roles.
This is immensely challenging, and possibly not as sensible as using at least one more actor would be. Del Castillo, an accomplished screen actress and a Telemundo star, seems miscast here, unable to slip into the skin of her many characters.
Drawing from too narrow a range of physical mannerisms, she alters her accent but doesn’t do much else vocally to distinguish among roles, which can make it hard to follow along. That’s especially unfortunate because Audible plans to record this production for release as an audio play.
At least the live audiences have the advantage of visual cues — though this production makes some baffling use of Aaron Rhyne’s projections, which would convey more potent atmosphere if they didn’t blend into the stage’s bare brick walls.
Because the characters never feel fully inhabited, it’s difficult to believe in them, and that’s a particular problem when the play is an act of testimony.
In an interview with the playwright, a tormented mother implores him to pass along a message, which she intends for anyone who knows who has taken her city’s many missing daughters.
“Have pity on the families suffering,” she says. “Give them back.”
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Additional Information:
‘the way she spoke’
Through Aug. 18 at Minetta Lane Theater, Manhattan; minettalanenyc.com. Running time: 1 hour 20 minutes.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.