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Reviews

• Sister Dianna Ortiz travelled as a missionary in the early 1980s to the highlands of Guatemala, where she taught Mayan children to read and write. On November 2, 1989, Sister Dianna was sitting in the garden of her convent when she heard a man behind her say, in Spanish, "Hello, my love. We have some things to discuss."

  She was abducted by this man, who together with others transported her to a jail where she was brutally tortured. One of her torturers –their boss, in fact – was a North American, probably associated with the US government in some capacity. Miraculously, Sister Dianna escaped by leaping from a car in which she was being transported.

  The Inter-American Commission on Human Rights reported in its findings that: "Sister Ortiz was placed under surveillance and threatened, then kidnapped and tortured, and that agents of the government of Guatemala were responsible for these crimes. . . ."

  Ana Castillo, moved beyond grief and anger, wrote these plays to document Sister Dianna's story.

• World Literature TodayJuly/August 2006

  An author of rare talent and restless spirit, Ana Castillo rises once again to the occasion with the writing of two new one-act plays published under the title Psst . . . . I Have Something to Tell You, Mi Amor. In this collection, Castillo taps plentiful artistic and activist wells to give aesthetic and visceral dimension to the real psychic and bodily violence endured by New Mexico-born and -raised Sister Dianna Ortiz while living and teaching in Guatemala in the late 1980s. Abducted, tortured and raped by Guatemalan soldiers and officials (those directly supported by the U.S. government), Castillo seeks to shout [for Ortiz], as she prefaces the collection, "louder than her memory, / louder than the unheard cries / of 200,000 disappeared, / buried alive in pits, / thrown alive from planes, / butchered and bayonneted / defenseless and blindfolded / in the name of democracy."

  Picking up twelve years after Ortiz's trauma, the first play unfolds in the "nether space of the perpetual torture chamber" of Ortiz's mind. With minimalist stage setting and shadowed mood lighting in place, the audience encounters a series of "Others" -- Mother Superior, a mestiza lover, her mother, a journalist, and others -- who act as mirrors and prisms that reflect Ortiz's complex psyche, which yearns for refuge from parading images of her traumatic remembrances. In the second play, Castillo introduces the audience to a series of charcters that exist independent of Ortiz's mind: wtihout any subjective mediation, the Hispano father character appears, recalling being swindled out of his lands, for example. However, as the play unfolds, the line between real and imaginary blurs once again: the treatment center's janitor morphs into the Guatemalan torturer, José, for example.

  To varying degrees and with powerful effect, Castillo gives shape to plays that blur lines between the real and unreal, the subjectively experienced and objectively measurable. This not only creates plays that seduce then jolt audiences awake but reflects the very blurring of lines between real and unreal, fact and fiction, to which Ortiz herself was victim. According to the official report, she was not tortured at all; the 111 burns on her back were the handiwork of a jealous lover. And the blurring of lines between past and present times and geographic spaces allows Castillo to suggest that greed and violence are omnipresent and so, too, are those who suffer at the hands of this greed and violence.

  In the Brechtian mode, Castillo leaves little room for misinterpretation; however, her need to tell edges on the didactic, leaving little room for the audience to infer meaning from dramatic showing. Of course, Castillo isn't out to please her audience here. Ultimately, the plays capture well the erotic perversions of power and that strained sense of discomfort of an individual suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder. Undeniably, Castillo is most poignant when she complicates her characterization: to put food on his children's plates, the campesino becomes a soldier who then takes the life of a woman like Ortiz; Ortiz's ultimate refusal to play the victim: "All the things you and your men did to me? The burns. My nipples nearly bitten off. I stunk of you for so long. I reeked of your semen, your sweat, your shit-fetid assholes, your pubic hair, like nettles digging against my skin."

  Ana Castillo affirms the small victories of those like Ortiz and yet reminds that ther eis much artistic and activist work to be done if we are to put an end to the continued savaging of people worldwide.