AZAMEMNO – (full length in progress) Set in El Salvador, AZAMEMNO is a re-interpretation of Agamemnon. Set in the present times, it juxtaposes modern MS-13 gang violence with pre-Columbian Lenca rites of passage. The citizen community of El Salvador address their indigineity, the body as a tool for post-colonial reaction, marking the performative body with tattoos, Latino bodies engaging in this re-interpretation is a political act of performing Agamemnon through the Latin American experience.
CORO OF MS-13 MOTHERS – We are tired of crying but still we cry.
Over glass cased coffins.
Ninos,
Why don’t you listen?
You grew in our wombs, and came through us.
Ay, Dios don’t you hear us?
We are weary of throwing dirt on these senseless graves.
Who the hell invited your hommies to the funeral?
You all killed him.
You enable and destroy each other.
I wiped shit off my child’s ass.
And held my nipple to his animal mouth.
They sucked on us for life.
Babies clinging to the edge of coffins.
(The women continue their frantic search for their child’s grave.)
CORO OF MS-13 CHILDREN – Soy parte de la familia now.
We’ll hold up machetes, guns and bottles
To defend our brothers.
They say we will be shot, stabbed, and that we will have to Matar jente.
They say that our fathers fought in the
Civil War
And now we fight another war.
War refugees turned gang members
—
ANTONIO- Here is Abuelita thinking she has
Completed humans,
So she sits down to rest because
Cono estaba cansada and
In flies the eagle.
Who in my opinion fucked things up.
He decides to nest on people’s heads and
Leaves strings inside our brains
That create dreams, our deep thoughts and overall bendito Angst that all humans have.
If I was Abuelita I would of had that
Eagle fly over my head and into the
Sky never to be seen again.
Large ensemble cast
