T. Charles Erickson Photo
Ybañez.
It’s five or six years after a devastating civil war in San Isidro, a fictional town in an unnamed Latin American country. In Seven Spots on the Sun, playwright Martín Zimmerman tells the epic story of a people trying to forge a collective memory of a highly fraught past.
The second thesis show this season at the Yale School of Drama, Seven Spots on the Sun, directed by third-year director Jecamiah M. Ybañez, plays at the Yale Repertory Theatre on Chapel Street from Dec. 13 through 18.
Ybañez knew he wanted to direct the play “after reading no more than five pages” while reading scripts for Woolly Mammoth Theatre in Washington, D.C. He was drawn in, he said, “by the poetic nature” of the play and by its themes. First staged in 2009, Zimmerman’s play, Ybañez said, is “trying to get specific people — Americans — to remember the injustices” perpetrated by the U.S. against several Latin American countries in the 1970s and 1980s.
In Ybañez’s view, our current immigration crisis is largely an outcome of insidious practices that undermined populist governments in Latin America inimical to U.S. interests. While Zimmerman’s play doesn’t reference the U.S. or any global companies directly, the cost to quality of life is very much in evidence, Ybañez said. Zimmerman, who is of Argentine heritage, wrote the play after a trip to Argentina, but Ybañez stressed that the play is not situated in a specific locality, nor is its setting meant to be an isolated place. He sees the play as “not naturalistic, but rather lyrical and mythic. There’s also a plague of biblical proportions that should make us think of Oedipus, and of the sins of the fathers, as well as Moses and deliverance.”
The play’s title refers to a magical moment in which one of the play’s central characters finds himself able to heal children who are suffering from boils that are described as “painful but sweet-smelling.” The question of faith, and of finding atonement for the townsfolk’s actions during the recent war, is a strong theme. Moisés, the character with the healing gift, is a medic, a man of science and an atheist. This isn’t a story of a messianic shaman proclaiming a new faith, however. Moisés is a doubter finding himself confronted with something beyond his ken. There is in the play’s events, Ybañez said, “a sense of a modern urban fable.”
Ybañez explained how the townsfolk play “a kind of chorus” whose task is to express “the voice of the people,” the citizens who will “create history” by “how they remember and talk about events together in public.” Caught up in this, Ybañez said, is “the question of how to incorporate knowledge into identity,” as the townsfolk have to own up to what they know.
“The question of restorative justice,” Ybañez said, becomes an issue in how to handle the war’s aftermath in the face of a general amnesty. If amnesty is not to spell amnesia, the collective memory arrived at will likely settle some scores among the inhabitants. And that, Ybañez said, puts an emphasis on “whose voice is privileged.” The town is in search of what Ybañez called “social balm, a means to understand human existence for the future.” In that sense, the afflicted children are clear symbols of the need to heal the next generation during the perilous times of the play.
Ybañez finds staging the play challenging because of its amorphous quality. He described the play’s structure as “musical,” a “three-part aria.” One component would be the townsfolks’ perspective, another the medic and a nurse, another a couple from the laboring class, Luis and Moníca. Luis joined the military during the war and, in Ybañez’s reading, “became something he didn’t intend.” All the characters, he said, are “in a struggle with duality,” where what they believe or intend is at variance with the times they find themselves living through.
In bringing his conception of the play to the Rep’s stage, Ybañez said he was attracted by the fact that the theater was formerly a church, seeing the building’s architecture as a way to reference the spiritual aspects of the struggles of the town in Zimmerman’s play. The play, for Ybañez, shows how “opposite sides of a civil war” can be “parallel and overlap as they contend with the past,” bringing in the notion of redemption through the stories we tell. Ybañez sees the play as “pushing the bounds of storytelling” and to that end enlisted recent School of Drama graduate Jake Lozano to help devise movements that “use dance to express the story,” and allow actors to articulate some of the non-verbal aspects of the action.
Poetic and mythic, with its eye on the serious divides that cause strife, violence and destruction in societies at war with themselves, Martín Zimmerman’s Seven Spots on the Sun makes us consider how much history we are willing to admit to.
Seven Spots on the Sun runs at the Yale Repertory Theatre, 1120 Chapel St., Dec. 13 through 18. Click here for tickets and more information.
