It’s Saturday and like thousands of people around the world, I am going to the theatre to watch a matinee performance. But this is no ordinary theatre production; there won’t be ice-creams or a glass of wine at the interval, nor any famous actors in the cast. The show I’m going to see will take place inside a men’s high-security prison, in Mexico City’s rundown, sprawling suburb of Iztapalapa.
Santa Martha Acatitla, one of seven prisons in Mexico City, houses around 3,000 inmates convicted of crimes ranging from murder, rape and kidnapping to armed robbery. Every Saturday, the 20 or so members of Santa Martha Acatitla Prison Theatre Company – each serving a sentence of between 20 and 87 years – perform one of their repertoire of three plays to paying members of the public. Today, they will perform El Mago Dioz (“The God Wizard”), a crime-themed version of the Wizard of Oz – with references to the 43 students who disappeared in 2014, and to “El Chapo” Guzmán, the infamous drug lord and two-time prison escapee.
Before we travel to the prison, Javier Cruz greets today’s audience at Foro Shakespeare, an independent theatre that has been running the project for seven years. Cruz spent part of his own 16-year prison sentence in Santa Martha, and has been a member of the theatre company since its inception. No longer an inmate, he now works with its social impact team, which runs programmes that use theatre as a tool to aid reintegration into society.
Saturday is also “visitation day” at the prison, and at the gate we find queues of mothers, wives and children carrying bags of food, clean clothes and blankets, waiting for admittance. The 16 audience members have our photos taken and our official identification is swapped for fluorescent orange lanyards. Then, in single file, we follow armed officials through the recreational area, which is full of inmates, and on to the entrance of the blacked-out hall. Family members of the cast and crew, from toddlers to grandparents, plus a handful of inmates, join us to watch the performance.
Once everyone is settled, our armed escort leaves. Within a couple of minutes, the three men I am sitting with have jumped out of their seats – they are in on the act, too – and men in balaclavas are pushing our seats-on-wheels into the eye of the tornado.
For the next hour, Dorotheo, Toto, the Tin Man (a lawyer), Cowardly Lion (a member of the federal police) and Scarecrow (an actor looking for his big break, as well as his brain) lead us along the familiar yellow brick road. The company members have made every costume, as well as constructed and painted the rotating sets; other prisoners (who are not part of the theatre company) operate the lights, and a live prison band accompanies the action.
The actor Itari Marta, artistic director of Foro Shakespeare, founded the project after being invited to give acting workshops by some inmates who had heard about her work in the female prison next door. The company now has three plays: Panic Cabaret, based on a work by Chilean auteur Alejandro Jodorowsky; Shakespeare’s Richard II Version 3.0, and now The Wizard God. Each has been designed with a specific objective.
“First, with Panic Cabaret we examined the individual, we reflected on ourselves, asked ‘Who are we?’ and ‘Where are we?’” Marta explains. “Then, with Richard III, we reviewed our actions: ‘Why are we here?’ ‘What are our inner motivations for what we’ve done or continue doing?’ Now, with Wizard God we question our place within society, and society’s pressure on us and the decisions we make within it.”
With one of the highest rates of imprisonment in Latin America, 220 of Mexico’s 420 penal centres are overpopulated. Capacity in Mexico City’s prisons is running at 184.7%, with one of the highest numbers of inmates per capita at 466 per 100,000 residents.
Several factors are behind the high rates of incarceration. The Mexican penal code calls for 96% of crimes to receive prison terms; pre-trial detention accounts for 41.3% of the nationwide prison population; and a rise in organised crime and drug-related violence has led to a marked increase in incarceration rates. In Mexico City, 35.2% of those arrested are repeat offenders – the highest proportion in the country.
Mexican authorities have interpreted the high number of arrests, detentions and incarcerations as a measure of the system’s effectiveness, but Cruz describes the consequences of this overcrowding: “I have seen, in some youth detention centres, 40 young men in cells of five by three metres, where they have to tie themselves up with blankets to the walls because there isn’t enough space on the floor to sleep.”
“In prison, there is a chronic lack of resources,” says Marta. “Items the inmates need – such as sheets, blankets, clothes and shoes – should be provided by the institution, but they are not. You have to pay for everything in jail, but very few have the money. For this reason, there is no real rehabilitation: if you are in jail as the breadwinner of your family, you have to earn the money while inside, and so many turn to organised crime, because they either need to provide for their families or pay for what they need.
“If you want to see Mexico through a microscope, you go to its prisons. There, you will also understand what is happening outside.”
Photograph: Luis Iborra
José Carlos Balaguer, coordinator of Foro Shakespeare’s social impact projects, explains: “All the money coming in from the box office is used to pay the salaries of the company members inside, and those now outside who are running it. This means they don’t have to resort to crime in order to make a living, or even to survive. They can also reduce their sentence; this project counts as hours of work, education and social service.”
Marta and her team expect full commitment from those who join the company. In addition to their Saturday performances, the actors rehearse three times a week. “We are not doing charitable work. We go in expecting their full commitment to the project, and for them to be disciplined,” says Balaguer.
“It wasn’t easy to acknowledge being re-educated; back then, I spent every day working to get high,” says Cruz. “I remember Itari on her own, facing 11 men who were completely off their face. I was smoking weed in the corner, someone else inhaling glue, another on speed, it was a mess. But she didn’t leave after a couple of months like the others, and after a while we realised that she meant business: we had to clean up our act in order to carry on.”
“They asked me when [the project] will finish, who is paying for me to be there, when I will stop coming,” Marta says. “But I promised them that I would work with them, and I will. They have my word, and the promise of Foro Shakespeare.”
She describes the prisoners’ first encounters with their audience after a performance. “Dignity smells very good. Their wives and children have seen them filled with self-respect, and it’s very moving. They have a desire for dignity and they get it from the audience and theatre itself – but we expect absolute discipline and rigour in return.”
“One of the things [the actors] most value is the Q&A session after every show, because they get to speak to lots of different people from outside who have come especially to see their work,” Balaguer says. “We also see a huge change in the audience: they arrive looking very unsure, even scared, but by the end of the show they have been moved to tears, there has been a connection, and they have confronted their prejudices.
“So far, more than 1,300 people have been to see the shows inside the prison, and we have created 20 jobs for the prisoners inside. Five of the eight from the group who have left prison now work with us at the new cultural centre, the 77, where they are creating similar projects for youth offenders.”
Foro Shakespeare has effectively created one company inside the prison and a second outside it. “I was released on a Wednesday, and on Thursday I was at the door of the Foro ready to work and learn more,” says Cruz. “Foro has been like a bridge for us – for many of the inmates, they know there is the option of a positive future when they leave jail.
“Theatre reciprocates as much as you put into it,” he adds. “In my case, it has reciprocated with my liberty, my partner, a job and the family that I had lost.”
Balaguer needs £2,000 a year to run the project, but funds have been tough to find. Even so, he is still aiming to expand the project to other prisons.
“Mexico has the capacity and structure to turn this into a public policy for the whole country,” he says. “I have worked in prisons in other places like Algeria, where the structure doesn’t exist – but in Mexico there is an Institute for Social Reinsertion. They need to fund these type of projects, but they lack the interest in actually doing it.”
Back in the auditorium, Dorotheo delivers a final, poignant monologue in which he rejects the wizard’s offer of a mansion and a luxury car filled with money, and confesses that his deepest wish is to return home to a life with his mother and two sons.
Then, once the applause dies down, tears flow as the actor embraces one of his own sons, who is present, and his mother, whom he hasn’t seen for some time. As if speaking for everyone, the actor and inmate César David explains, “In this company, we have cried a lot. We are real men – but here we find it safe enough to show our feelings. We cry like children.”
Camilla Brett is an arts and culture consultant based in Mexico City. She directs and produces theatre and recently founded Prospero Teatro Mexico
