Event

Materiales del Edificio

The play "Materiales de El edificio" takes place in the hours prior to the demolition of a building located in a Chicago Northwest neighborhood. The manager, Herminia, decides to stay in the building for those last hours. She is an Argentinian immigrant who arrived in Chicago in the 80s to live with her mother in the same building and to write fiction. Herminia spends the last hours of the building recalling the stories of half a dozen tenants, immigrants from Latin America, Palestine, and Poland, and the story of a bedbug. A fictional character she created accompanies her. This character interacts with the tenants as well as with Herminia, although everyone including himself knows he does not exist. The only character that does not come specifically from the memories of Herminia or that of her mother or great aunt, who also in the past managed the building, is an Indigenous woman who roams the building. The story depicts the life of a frustrated writer and contemplates the history of Chicago and where those memories and our own will eventually reside. The play is mostly in Spanish and English, with some phrases in Arabic and phrases in Polish.
The script, developed by Raúl Dorantes, incorporates seven short stories by Chicago based authors Alejandro Ferrer, Mark Litwicki, Fernando Olszanski, Yazan Bata, Stanislaw Jaroszek, and Dorantes himself. Assisting in the development and editing of the script were Febronio Zatarain, Antonio del Toro, Franky Piña and Emily Masó.

Based on 7 short stories written by Chicago writers
DIRECTOR: THE ENSEMBLE

CAST: PAULA AGUIRRE, JUANJO LÓPEZ, CAROLINA ESCRICH HOCHMAN, ANDREA LEGUIZAMON, ARMANDO REYES, ARMANDO VILLEGAS, CLAUDIA URBANO, JOSE ROCHEL, MIGUEL MARZANA