International playwright explores social themes
Award-winning playwright, poet, essayist, critic, and theatre director Hugo Salcedo visited the College of Arts & Sciences as a Distinguished Visiting Scholar from March 3-14, 2008.
Salcedo, of the border city Tijuana, Mexico, is a professor at the Universidad Autonoma de Baja California. With the assistance of student translators, he spoke in numerous classes during his visit.
Professor Moreno’s class studied the playwright’s most famous play, El viaje de los cantors/The Crossing, which earned Salcedo the “Tirso de Molina” for the best Spanish language play of the year. Students gave a dramatic public reading of the play on March 11, 2008 at the C. Walsh Theatre, directed by alumna Colleen Rua.
Students Alisa Cherkasova, Katiuska Cruz, Adrienne Fitzgerald, Margery Furman, Caitlin Greco, Steve McCreary, Kathleen Pena, Robert Terrero, Stanley Thermora and English professor Jeremy Solomons acted out the tragic story of 18 Mexicans trying to cross the U.S. border illegally only to meet with their death trapped in a railroad boxcar. Slides playing behind the actors on stage showed scenes of the border dangers: a barbed wire fence, a U.S. border patrol officer with rifle, a helicopter’s searchlights, a scorpion, a human skull in the desert, a map of the Mexico-U.S. border, a collection of crosses, a church.
Following the performance, Salcedo gave a talk, “Manifestaciones políticas en algunos pasajes de la literatura dramática de México/Political Signs Observed in Some Passages of Mexican Literary Dramaturgy,” translated by students Yanitza Medina and Karen Hernandez.
“Mexican theater has many pages still to write about the new faces of violence, drug cartels, kidnappings, and extortions,” said Salcedo. “I reaffirm the phrase: “There is something rotten in the national politics of Mexico” because never before did dramatic literature have so many ideas to write. Never before did the act of staring at an empty computer screen have the possibility of writing topics of utmost occurrence. Other playwrights did it and new ones will continue doing it.”
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