Jose Melian as The Coffee Don
CAFÉ (full length) Workshop production at Columbia Stages, directed by Elena Araoz. Workshop reading of the play CAFE with The Sol Project @Primary Stages directed by Melissa Crespo.
- Almazan performed CAFÉ excerpts at The Kennedy Center with the KCACTF National Festival.
- CAFE is the recipient of the Kennedy Center’s Latinidad Award.
- (Luisa) monologue from CAFÉ is part of a collection of work titled, “The Best Women’s Stage Monologues 2015″ – more HERE
Media Page HERE
A sip of coffee. An act the world enjoys one cup at a time. What is the real price of coffee? From the lens of a Mayan Teller, we follow the Maquin family from the ancient world to the present as they struggle to maintain their coffee farm. Set on the mystical Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, generations of the Maquin women dare to stay with the earth; fighting to secure a future as the Mayan calendar ends and a new world begins.
“CAFE draws upon my own family’s history with coffee farming. While teaching a ritual theatre retreat on Lake Atitlan in Guatemala, I was haunted by the questions I witnessed first-hand, the political and social challenges facing small coffee farmers of the region.” – Raquel Almazan
MAYAN TELLER – The dust will rise as civilizations once did
Ash will fall as ways of life always do
Where are all those lost graves?
The Mayan Temples themselves house spirits that won’t die
Archeologists search for meaning under every stone
They chisel with fine tools through the rubble of the Forgotten
—
LUISA – It’s my blood, the Mayans, the juice of the berries from these trees. You can taste the earth in our cafe. The ash that lingers in the sky, falling softly and invisibly almost into the air, onto our bodies, into the ground. It is not just us that plant these beans. Those that came before us. That continue us. They feed these grounds. They give birth to these trees. Why don’t you have the Europeans pay for that?
Don pours coffee from the flask into the cup.
GOVERNMENT OFFICIAL – I dream of trees. Thousands of them. I see them growing, and budding, pushing through the earth. A dream. Of millions of trees growing faster than we can count them. The fruit on the trees, are our unborn children.
LUISA – What about the children that die in our wombs, hungry, under formed, stillborn under the rule of this —
7 actors minimum