The sand I know best rings Lake Michigan and gives me a place to put my beach chair on a summer afternoon. The sand in Teatro Línea de Sombra’s Amarillo is life, death, and oblivion. Filling the stage over the course of the Mexican troupe’s powerful 70-minute piece, it signifies the Chihuahuan Desert, the border territory through which thousands of undocumented immigrants trek each year hoping to reach the United States.
Later on he differentiates into Pedro, a teenager known for his pig-butchering skills, who comes to a birthday party, slaughters the roasting pig, and wins the heart of the birthday girl’s sister—all this and more handled in lyrical yet unpretentious passages of dance or near dance, often backed by the mesmeric, wonderfully unexpected throat singing of Jesús Cuevas. But Pedro joins the nameless/multinamed masses who head for Amarillo claiming that they’ll return. As Luís Alberto Urrea did in his best-known novel, Into the Beautiful North (2009), Amarillo makes a point of evoking the dislocation and forced adaptation caused by so many men leaving home. The women of the cast (Alicia Laguna, María Luna, Vianey Salinas, and Antígona González) find work to feed their families and write letters asking the U.S. government to deport their husbands. They wait and get sick of waiting. In one awful passage, we hear an actual letter from a woman who works with Art Camp. “When you left for Chicago, I was pregnant,” she writes. “I gave birth by myself, at the Tecapulco Health Center. That day you called me and told me that you’d be back soon, but it was the last time I heard from you. . . . This is not a farewell letter. . . . It is a letter to say that I work too much and see my daughter too little, but our home is standing without you . . . “
Through 10/29: Wed-Fri 8 PM, Sat 2:30 and 8:30 PM, Sun 2:30 PM Chicago Shakespeare Theater, Navy Pier 800 E. Grand 312-595-5600chicagoshakes.com $25-$42
