The Crying Woman/La Llorona, is a cross-cultural drama about a young American businessman from Houston who is assigned by his company to open an American
fast food restaurant, for Mexican food, in Mexico City.
He and his pregnant wife, a college professor, relocate to Mexico City and move into the home of a struggling architect, a Mexican national of Spanish descent, forced to rent his family's centuries-old hacienda to make ends meet to support his own young family. The hacienda is visited by La Llorona, a spirit who sings her song of sadness in hopes of rescuing the two couples from danger.
The Crying Woman/La Llorona is a two-act play (three women; three men) with music. The story of the play interweaves, metaphorically, the legend of La Llorona
(The Crying Woman), with the lives of the two couples as they struggle to establish a common ground of cultural understanding during a time of economic uncertainty and personal crisis in their respective lives.
The character of La Llorona (a 16th-century Aztec woman), inhabits the stage as a spirit; in her song, she laments the deaths of her two sons, born of her union with the Spanish conquistador, Cortes, while singing her tale of tragedy and warnings of danger to the two couples.
Through its theme and story, the play addresses a wide range of issues: the dangers of miscommunication and cross-cultural misunderstanding; the importance of traditions; the need for recognition of and respect for the values of differing cultures; the destructiveness of economic and cultural imperialism; the distinction between the need for assimilation and the preservation of cultural integrity; the tension between the expression of individual personality and the need for personal recognition as it comes in conflict with interpersonal commitments and to the importance of solidifying the bonds of marital integrity. Although the themes and issues of The Crying Woman/La Llorona are uniquely serious, the play offers a texture that is often quite hilarious and also very moving. In the end, The Crying Woman/La Llorona is a drama of character and circumstance that evolves to an extremely painful, and quite unexpected, climax.
The play is authored by Kathleen Anderson Culebro, an American playwright of Mexican and American heritage. We have been working with Kathleen for the past 18 months to develop the play to its fullest potential and intend to produce the play in an Off Broadway production next year. An initial staged reading, presented in August 2002 at Repertorio Español, has been followed by four additional developmental read-throughs, co-incident with on-site research in Mexico City and Texas; the play is now essentially complete and ready to be actualized in full production.
