Ni Una Más

La Ruta – Steppenwolf Theatre

I’ve started and discarded at least three drafts of this review. I can’t figure out how to introduce the reader smoothly to my point. So I’m giving up, and I’m just diving in: I’m angry. Outraged. The kind of directionless rage that makes your stomach knot and your face feel hot. And after you see Steppenwolf’s world premiere, La Ruta, which I am telling you now you absolutely must, you will be too.

La Ruta tells the true stories of the women working in the American factories just over the Mexican border from El Paso, in the town of Ciudad Juárez. Between 1993 and 2003, hundreds of women and girls were murdered or went missing from Ciudad Juárez. It opens with two women sitting at a bus stop. One, Yolanda, is waiting for her daughter, Brenda, to get off the bus, the titular ‘la ruta,’ from the factory’s night shift. The other, Marisela, her friend, is passing out flyers with her daughter Marisol’s picture on them. Marisol has been missing for several months and after a lack of help from the police, she’s taken to searching on her own. The last bus for the night pulls up and leaves, and Brenda isn’t on it. The play is both the story of Yolanda’s search for Brenda, and of the world that at best is indifferent to their suffering, and at worst, actively causes it.

The staging of the play is minimal but serves the story well. Transitions and time placements are handled by projections on the walls. The walls themselves are covered in missing posters for other girls. In front of and just below the stage are a series of pink crosses representing the murdered and missing women, like the ones the activist group Ni Una Más (Not One More) placed in Mexico to draw attention to this crisis. Some bear names, others simply “desconocida” or “unknown” because their remains could not be identified.

The actresses that tell this story are nothing short of phenomenal. I don’t know from where one draws the strength to tell these stories eight times a week. Sandra Delgado anchors the show as Yolanda. Her life goes into a kind of suspended animation when her daughter goes missing and Delgado perfectly portrays the simultaneous need to know the truth but terror at what it might be. Karen Rodriguez plays Ivonne, one of Brenda’s coworker’s at the factory, and the last person to see her before she disappeared. Yolanda suspects that Ivonne knows more than she is telling. Rodriguez’s performance is amazing and a look into the hideous choices the world forces these women to make.

I’ve mentioned before in my reviews here that my day job involves working as an attorney with survivors of domestic violence. My work has brought me into frequent contact with our society’s apathetic response to violence against women. To do that work, I’ve developed some pretty thick callouses. Part of what I found so compelling about this play was how deftly it bypassed them. The presentation of these women’s stories was deeply personal, unvarnished, and haunting.

Part of the anger I mentioned at the start of the review is not just the horror at what happened, but at the sense of futility at trying to stop it. It’s not just the men committing these crimes, it’s the world that continues to let them do it. It’s the world that ignores it’s even happening. Playwright Isaac Gomez changed the names of the women he talked to about their experiences in writing this play, but the stories themselves are true. Listening to these women and their stories feels like the least, and I mean that literally, the least we can do.

Highly Recommended

Review by Kevin Curran

Presented December 13-January 27 by Steppenwolf Theatre, 1650 N. Halsted Ave., Chicago.

Tickets are available in person at the box office, by calling 312-335-1650 or by visiting www.steppenwolf.org.

Additional information about this and other area productions can be found at www.theatreinchicago.com.