The English-language premiere of "Yanga" is at its best when the action shifts to taut, intense exchanges between characters. These scenes make the brutality and human cost of slavery feel visceral.
At other times, the play takes a more impressionistic tack, outlining historical events in early 17th-century New Spain that led to the hard-fought founding of one of the first free Black towns in the Americas.
Much of that history has been lost, liberating the production by Cara Mia Theatre and Soul Rep Theatre Company to explore broad themes around a non-linear storyline. The sister Dallas troupes collaborated on the production with Mexico City’s Mulato Teatro, which premiered the play in Spanish in 2018.
Directed by Soul Rep’s Anyika McMillan-Herod, "Yanga" opened last weekend in the intimate black box theater at the Latino Cultural Center, where Cara Mia is a resident company.
The title character, Gaspar Yanga, was at the center of the rebellion. Rumored to be descended from West African royalty, he and 500 followers escaped the sugar plantations of Veracruz around 1570 and established a settlement in the highlands outside Córdoba.
There they lived largely undisturbed for 40 years before their raids on nearby haciendas and the trade route to Mexico City grabbed the Spanish Empire’s attention. After much bloodshed, a deal to give the town its freedom was negotiated.
"Yanga" playwright Jaime Chabaud, co-founder of Mulato Teatro, is a poetic, textually dense writer. His fiery Shakespearean flourishes, in a translation by Tomás Ayala-Torres, give the actors a lot to work with.
While the entire cast serves the script well, the performances by Sydney Hewitt as Santiaga, Yanga’s strong yet sensitive wife-to-be, and Rodney Garza as Don Pedro, her ranting, racist owner, stand out. They get the most dramatic material and are more than up to the task.
The vertical, minimalist set is effective: two wooden staircases, accented with netting, that rise up to a landing often occupied by Yanga (Henry Okigbo) and his men as they fret and plot. Okigbo is convincing as a revolutionary politician who realizes he will have to compromise.
The play opens with a long monologue by Santiaga that’s a little difficult to take in all at once. But it sets the tone, the character’s anger and desperation landing hard in Hewitt’s nuanced performance. As the audience learns more about Santiaga’s untenable predicament, sympathy for her grows.
However grotesque, Garza’s delusional Don Pedro is also caught between contradictory feelings. Garza makes you feel both sorry for and repulsed by this monstrous character. "Yanga" keeps reminding the audience that Don Pedro is part of a system of violent behavior that defined the institution of slavery.
"Yanga" moves in a kind of loop, at first backward in time before becoming more or less chronological. The play isn’t concerned with how things exactly unfolded, which is sensible considering the lack of historical information. We don’t know, for instance, if the Spanish government’s agreement was with Yanga, who would’ve been quite old, or his son.
Occasionally it’s possible to lose track of events. Chabaud relays a lot of exposition through the Narrator (Frida Espinosa Müller). But these details matter in creating a narrative that digs beneath the black-and-white, good vs. evil surface.
"Yanga" is most successful when it makes history feel personal, when flawed characters confront one another with their ideas and emotions. It’s a riveting look at the brutality of a world not so far in the past, one that still affects our own.
Details
Through March 3 at 2600 Live Oak St. $12-$20.caramiatheatre.org.soulrep.org.
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