The Ghosts of Lote Bravo is haunting, at the expense of nuance

If ignorance is bliss, awareness is bleak. That’s a lesson worth learning from Hilary Bettis’ The Ghosts of Lote Bravo, staged vibrantly on the Unicorn Theatre’s Levin Stage. The rolling world premiere delivers a sensitive mass eulogy for the hundreds of women and girls murdered in Mexico’s Ciudad Juárez since the early 1990s. But, as most eulogies must, it sands down complex lives in somber deference to its subjects.

The play is set in the slums of Juárez, where Juanda Cantu struggles to provide for her family after her husband’s killing. Although she works long hours at a ruthless maquiladora (serging the edges of American flag T-shirts), there’s never enough. In a fit of desperation, Juanda sends her 16-year-old daughter, Raquel, to find a “waitressing” job, the subtext of which is too grim for either of them to name. Raquel soon disappears, as so many girls in Juárez have before.

Most of the play’s dramatic action unfolds in flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks), leading up to Raquel’s disappearance. Although Juanda prays to the Virgin Mary for signs of her daughter, she finds answers instead in La Santa Muerte, a folk saint venerated by criminals. 

What unfolds is unflinchingly bleak, but director Ian R. Crawford steers his cast toward moments of tenderness and transcendence. As Juanda, Vanessa A. Davis endures a marathon of abuse and suffering without succumbing to melodrama. Fueled by faith and shame (a quintessentially Catholic cocktail), she greets corrupt police, tight-lipped strangers and La Santa Muerte herself with defiance and a dwindling hint of pride.

As Raquel, Rebecca Muñoz effortlessly expresses the raw tension between adolescent innocence and an adult burn for independence and respect. And as El Reloj, a teenage gangster who falls for her, Justin Barron gives a layered reading of Mexican machismo (and the stifled ambitions and vulnerability beneath).

The two police characters are less successful. Franciso Javier Villegas is a gifted performer, but he struggles to motivate Officer Castillo’s erratic behavior. Bradley J. Thomas has an even tougher time as Officer Lopez, whose lines start to feel like manic Mad Libs. Bettis’ attempt to motivate his behavior comes too late in the play to pay off meaningfully.

It’s perhaps telling that the play’s most dynamic, three-dimensional character is the supernatural Santa Muerte. Meredith Wolfe is at her finest here, sustaining saintly gravitas while shooting lousy tequila and tearing into Juanda with foul-mouthed disdain. Her every entrance injects welcome acid into the mix, aided by hair-raising sound cues from David Kiehl and an awesome — in the true sense of that word — silhouette from costume designer Georgianna Londré Buchanan.

Scenic designer Alexander LaFrance chips in with a set revealing as many surprises as an advent calendar. Totable oil drums and fold-out windows transform the stage into several distinct playing areas. Lighting designer Alex Perry captures the alternately vibrant and violent colors of the striated Mexican sunset. And projections designer Emily Swenson makes an immense contribution with landscape projections of pink crosses, the symbol for female homicides in the region. The crosses scroll dizzily, endlessly, across the set walls, creating a paradoxical sense of movement and stagnation.

But the Unicorn’s acting and design prove ultimately more nuanced than the script. Bettis doesn’t humanize her characters so much as mythologize them to the point of condescension. Juanda alone is afforded palpable internal struggles and contradictions. Raquel is incessantly compared to a bull in a matador’s ring, fighting desperately for survival against unfair odds. El Reloj has a metaphorical counterpart of his own as well as a theme song; he struggles no less heroically when required. By the end of the play, the lovers look like children in a UNICEF ad, performing noble suffering to privileged audiences.

That commitment reaches an absurd peak in the play’s finale, when a character is forced to kill someone he loves. Rather than reaching for the gun on his hip, he grabs a knife and stabs the poor sap in the stomach. The character has no reason to want his victim to suffer — but Bettis plays for easy pathos anyway.

The Ghosts of Lote Bravo is effective in snapping our attention to an under-reported tragedy. But in its simple treatment of the lives at stake, it winds up appealing more to our pity than to our shared humanity.

The Ghosts of Lote Bravo
Through May 8
at the Unicorn Theatre, Levin Stage,
3828 Main
816-531-7529
unicorntheatre.org