LOS ANGELES—Latino Theater Company brings Chicago’s Water People Theater back to this city for a three-week run of The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon. This play had a brief success with six performances as part of last season’s Encuentro national Latiné theater festival, but fell under the critical radar with the wealth of other offerings in such a short span.
Written by acclaimed Venezuelan playwright, actress, and human rights advocate Rebeca Alemán and directed by Iraida Tapias, the drama opened May 3, with performances through May 25. Staged in English, with smatterings of Spanish throughout, all performances feature translated supertitles.
The premise of The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon is a 2019 incident somewhere in Latin America (but from internal information about the Native Nahua language, it is obviously Mexico). Playwright Rebeca Alemán stars as Paulina, a human rights journalist and advocate for victims of femicide and for Indigenous communities threatened by land grabs. After surviving a vicious attack—a gunshot to the head—that left her in a coma, Paulina struggles to regain her memory. With fellow journalist Rodrigo (Eric K. Roberts) at her side, she must painstakingly piece together the truth in order to demand justice. It was well known among her colleagues that she was on the verge of a major breakthrough in the story and was poised to name important names. Based on true events, this is a powerful and poetically stirring drama that confronts the relentless violation of human rights against journalists who strive to report the truth in a country steeped in corruption, where cruelty and impunity from the law are routine. This taut 90-minute show without intermission exposes the lengths to which oppressive, oligarchic regimes will go to suppress the truth and preserve ruling-class prerogative.
Already in the United States, we have seen the machinations set in motion to curtail freedom of the press—suspension of public funding, expensive lawsuits against truthtellers, punishment for disobeying the President, killing unflattering stories, swamping the newsfield with lies and distortions which demand time-consuming refutation, cutting staff, and much more. Attacks against journalists, physical and verbal, have been part of the American subculture for centuries, and occur somewhere in the world at least once a week. Murders of journalists in Gaza have been rampant in an attempt to squash reliable accounts coming out of the genocidal Israeli slaughter.
“The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon emerged from a profound need to raise my voice and draw attention to femicide and violence against journalists,” says Alemán. “The harrowing true stories of Miroslava Breach and Anabel Flores, two Mexican journalists brutally silenced for speaking truth and seeking justice, inspired me.” Significantly, the playwright names Paulina’s daughter Anabel.
The production premiered in 2019 at the Chicago International Theater Festival, receiving its off-Broadway premiere in July 2024 at New York’s Teatro Repertorio Español, where it was performed in Spanish with English supertitles.
The play opens with Paulina in a bed, where her faithful Últimas Noticias newspaper colleague Rodrigo (Eric K. Roberts) is painstakingly coaching her back to her former self, or as close as her severe wound will allow. When we meet her, she is completely inarticulate and can barely recognize the letters of the alphabet that Rodrigo shows her on flashcards. Rodrigo’s devotion to her recovery is in part based on the fact that Paulina’s reporter notebook, which would reveal information on the criminals who ordered the attempted assassination, has gone missing, and he has to gradually coax her memory back.
Aside from the timely issue of recovering the truth that only she knows, the play is a vivid display of the process of rebuilding memory after a traumatic loss, patiently reconnecting severed synapses in the brain through the magic of plasticity. Paulina graduates to recognizing her own name, her family members’ names, identifying famous paintings and individuals in photographs, remembering certain Nahua words she had been learning, all the way up to recalling the story she was working on before the attack. Recall of the Nahua word “metzli” for “moon” lends itself to the title of the play.
Paulina has also written poetry and memorized a number of beloved poems by other writers in Spanish. Part of her restoration of cerebral acuity is the recitation of these verses that have sustained her throughout her life. At one point, Rodrigo reminds her that she had won a prize on World Press Freedom Day, and she wisely retorts, “a prize that shouldn’t exist.”
This piece of theatre is as much about Rodrigo and his need to dedicate the greater portion of his time to Paulina’s recovery, so much urgency he feels to bring her back to normalcy, and suffering her insults, ingratitude, and incomprehension at almost every stage. As a two-hander, the play is a suspenseful, emotional tit-for-tat with incalculable social implications for their country and people.
The creative team includes scenic designer Marisabel Muñoz, lighting designer Alejandro Melendez, and costume designer José Manuel Díaz. Sound is designed by Tapias and Maydi Díaz, and projections are designed by Stephanie Rodrigues, Marisabel Muñoz, and Carlos Marcano. The production manager is May Fei. Notably, the projections of newspapers are of U.S. English-language publications, a conscious choice, no doubt, subtly warning American audiences that we may be facing the same challenges to a free press as in other countries short on democratic norms.
The Delicate Tears of the Waning Moon plays on Thurs., Fri. and Sat. at 8 p.m. and Sun. at 4 p.m. through May 25. The Los Angeles Theatre Center is located at 514 S. Spring St., Los Angeles, 90013. Parking is available for $8 with box office validation at the Los Angeles Garage Associate Parking structure, 545 S. Main St. (between 5th and 6th Streets, just behind the theater). For more information and to purchase tickets, call (213) 489-0994 or go to the company website.
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