Theatre is coming with more frequency into an evolution tunnel marked by an interest in integrating different disciplines and creating new scenic experiences. This is the case of Casa Calabaza,
born from the need for enquiring into the territories of the marginalization trough the penitentiary dramaturgy. With Casa Calabaza, the director Isael Almanza tries to delve into the traffic of emotions enclosed in the house from which the author narrates, to tell how the family broke down until murder. The mis-en- scène reflects a harsh social reality, such as the disintegration of the family core, and demystifies the social prejudice that men and women in reclusion suffer from.
Casa Calabaza seeks for another way of experiencing and feeling the theatrical experience. A first class playwright, Maye Moreno, inmate at the Santa Marta Acatitla Prison, and a director, Isael Almanza, allow these series of quests that constitute a universe with no rhetoric or pyrotechnics.
Casa Calabaza is a mis-en- scène that you won’t remain indifferent to.

Casa Calabaza is a play written by María Elena Moreno Márquez, also known as Maye, a woman doing time for the 28 years sentence she has been convicted to at the Santa María Acatitla Prison. This is an autobiographic work in which the author narrates her life from her childhood to the moment in which she is taken by the authorities after having committed matricide. In the play four Mayes will be introduced, dislocated in different times but in constant conflict, and we will witness how her lifetime marked the tragic end.

From more than 25 years, the National Program of Penitentiary Theatre has worked as a incentive compensation program that encourages theatrical production, supported by the Secretaría de Gobernación as well as the Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes and addressed to the whole penitentiary population in the country. Throughout more than two decades, inmates have produced hundreds of dramatic texts. However, this is the first time in history that one of these plays has been taken to a professional and independent stage in Mexico City. The Casa Calabaza mis-en-scène took place at an artistic-journalistic research laboratory from the history of the penitentiary theatre and the research and enquire of the dramatic texts written by inmates in several states of the Mexican Republic.

My work as director has been based in the direct enquiry between story and characters-actors whom which I have worked in the stagings: Las Bodas by Luisa Josefina Hernández, Confesión by Rodolfo Guillen, Looper by Verónica Maldonado and Heimweh by Myriam Orva.
The research and the personal poetics in which I constantly work on are based on the self, on the biography of the dramatist or the biography of the performers and makers, accomplishing an exposition of personal elements. Therefore, “relato testimonial de Casa Calabaza [Casa Calabaza testimonial account]” is a riddle as well as an equation in order to suggest this creative search, enquiring in the personal elements and putting them into a dialogue within the fiction, in a manner that the intimate story will be unified with the dramatic story.
For Casa Calabaza I suggest other theatrical mechanisms, such as the coexistence with the spectator as testimonial and narrative axis that dialogue with the fiction. The project comes from the playwright María Elena Moreno Márquez, also known as Maye Moreno, inmate at the Femenil Santa Martha Acatitla Prison, and it fully respects her dramaturgy as story and account.
This mis-en-scènes is part of a topic in which I am piercing those experiences and those lost memories and how people relate with it or how do I relate with them.

Isael Almanza

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Isael Almanza, biography