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Luchadora play, Theatre Nuevo, Mustard Seed Theater, St. Louis, Missouri. June 2018. |
June 2018
When I saw the promo for the play,
Luchadora, it was a must-go-see for me. A connection between my current home in Ferguson and my most recent home in El Paso, by way of
my new guilty pleasure, lucha libre.
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Luchadora play, Theatre Nuevo, Mustard Seed Theater, St. Louis, Missouri. June 2018. |
It is high praise, indeed, for me to tell you that the play kept my attention for both of the 45-minute acts.
The main theme is the self-empowerment of girls and women both today and in the Vietnam War era. Where girls and women literally fight, albeit incognito, for their places at the grown-up table of the world.
It's a personal story that a grandmother tells her granddaughter, the former a secret
luchadora and the latter, a hopes-to-be boxer.
It's about keeping secrets from family members who keep you back and from the larger society that would keep you boxed in.
The Spartan set design was clever and effective. Granddaughter and grandmother, in today's time, sat in an upstairs alcove. Grandmother's story played out on center stage. A bridge between the modern-day alcove and a large staircase was a platform for real-time play action and as a mechanism for "unseen" characters to reveal their thoughts or the contents of their letters.
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Luchadora play, Theatre Nuevo, Mustard Seed Theater, St. Louis, Missouri. June 2018. |
The
Mustard Seed Theater, within Fontbonne University, is petite. Very comfortable seats! And they are roomy. Plus each row is sufficiently higher than the one below it to assure all attendees a fine line of sight onto the stage.
Ticket prices are not inexpensive. Fortunately, it appears that plays are accessible to most for at least one performance of each play, when attendees can pay what they can afford if they also bring a canned good for donation to a food pantry.