Latino Theatre in Chicago: Carlos Murillo

Posted on Sunday, November 13

It is an exciting time for Hispanic theatre and performance in Chicago. Through the hard work and innovative efforts of talented playwrights, directors, actors, teachers, and dancers, a kind of Latino renaissance of Chicago theatre and performance is slowly taking place.

In this series of articles, we want to shine a spotlight on some of these dedicated artists in an attempt to put together a broad mosaic of Latino Theatre in Chicago. In the course of each article, we’ll get to know where they’ve been, what they’re up to, and where they would like theatre to go next.

To read the first installment in the series click here

Reality is much bigger than our own narrative horizons
by Alexander Perry

Carlos Murillo is an internationally produced playwright who lives in Chicago with his wife Lisa Portes and their two children. Murillo boasts an impressive body of work, with plays like Dark Play (or Stories for Boys), A Human Interest Story (Or the Gory Details and All), and Diagram of a Paper Airplane all being produced around the country and the world. When not writing plays, he is an extraordinary teacher and heads the Playwriting Department at the DePaul University Theatre School.

Students know Murillo as a warm and insightful professor, adept at getting to the heart of an artist’s work whether it is a play’s script or an actor’s performance. Beyond this incredible kindness, however, there is a spark of mischief and incisive intellect in his eyes. Carlos Murillo is probably the smartest man in the room, but tempers this intelligence with humor and kindness.

He brings the same dynamic of compassion, mischief, and intellect to his work.

While Murillo’s plays could be called “messy,” a more apt description might be to call them poetically complex. They are “messy, but it is a highly, highly controlled mess.” His plays are the methodical, incisive work of a dramatist like Euripides or Sophocles that combine tragic realism with poetic eloquence. It is a unique kind of realism that Murillo currently pursues. “It was prevalent a few years ago that theatre needed to do something that film and television couldn’t.” Theatre ceded realism to film and television. Perhaps this was a mistake. Film- with its bigger-than-life screens and special effects- engages fantasy spectacularly. Television does long-form narrative better than any other performative medium. Murillo believes theatre can do realism- an expansive realism where reality is bigger than the sum of its narrative bits- best.

It is this evocative sense that “there is a before and after in the world of the play” which remains unseen during the performance that gives his plays such a boundless quality and so thoroughly captures his audience’s imagination “Reality is much bigger than our own narrative horizons.” The world of Murillo’s plays seem to expand beyond their text, even beyond their performance. His scripts are made immense in their linguistic eloquence- a patchwork of interconnected worlds that stretch beyond their own narrative horizons. Some narrative strands resolve themselves, others do not. It is often the audience’s task to finish the picture. There is no such thing as a passive observer in Murillo’s productions.

Characters in his plays often are confronted (and transfigured) by extraordinary, often horrific events. These heightened breaking points provide Murillo’s audiences a chance to peek into their poetic inner lives (and maybe see something of themselves mirrored in them). Each character seems to have their own poetics and narrative horizon. “If you really listen to people, they speak in poetry.” Murillo’s characters are indelibly unique- from the cadence and rhythm of their speech and thoughts, to the sometimes surprising reactions they make. While Murillo’s theatrical world may be vast and callous, he treats each character with compassion and empathy.

Into this melange of poetics, tragedy, and compassion, there is often a biting, dark sense of humor that emerges. Audiences can either laugh along or be crushed by the sometimes unsettling events of his work. Experiencing his plays is often a litmus of the audience’s sensibilities- sometimes people laugh along, other times they soberly watch the tragedy unfold. Usually, however, there is at least one morbid individual laughing the entire time.

“It’s not like I’m consciously trying to be funny. I guess it just comes thematically from whatever is happening in the world of the play. And you can’t really predict how an audience is going to react. But if you’re watching the show and after five times you really aren’t getting the reaction you intended, you have to go back to the text and say ‘maybe this isn’t really funny’ and make some adjustments. But I kind of like that non-uniform reaction.”

“I remember when we did Dark Play at Humana, there is a definite point in the play where it turns, because everyone is thinking it is a comedy for the first thirty or so pages. You have this kid who is messing with people, and it is a little bit glib, intentionally. But at this certain point he does something, and you are suddenly aware of the serious consequences of what he is doing. I remember watching that production and some people kept laughing after that. I mean, there is still some funny stuff going on, but it is cast in a much darker lens- I remember seeing people looking at each other like- ‘why are you laughing at this? This is not funny at all.’ I like that.”

Whether laughing or crying, the audience is sure to be engaged. Murillo’s plays are hard to tether down to a single genre- they seem to defy classification. “It’s less thinking about it in terms of genre and more how you viscerally respond to something. I’ll find myself laughing at something but when I look back, I wonder- why are you laughing at that, it’s a horrible thing that happened. It’s one kind of coping mechanism. If you present to the audience stuff that doesn’t dictate how they should respond to it, I think you’ll get a very true reaction. I think people will respond to it very immediately.”

Amongst his many works, Dark Play has seemed to gain the most traction, getting productions all over the world and in the United States. From Hungary and Germany, to Poland and Slovakia, to being almost a staple in college campuses around the United States, his play about virtual identity and electronic communication has stuck a chord in the zeitgeist. It has been interesting to see such widely different productions around the world.

“Each production has their own things going on, but it’s hard to stray too far from what’s actually in the text. Sometimes you see productions that have a visual for every description, and others that are more bare. You have this relationship with every play, where at some point it’s not yours anymore, it’s like your teenage kid going off to college: ‘I’m going to major in economics,’ ‘fine, I guess, go and live your life.’ One of things I love is when you have no involvement with something that you wrote, it’s really rewarding to go and see it, that this thing means enough to someone that they want to put such hard work into it. Especially with young theatre artists.”

His commitment to working with young theatre artists is palpable. At the DePaul Theatre School, Murillo teaches playwriting and works with MFA directors and actors. Some of his most fruitful collaborative experiences have been with these students.

“We’ve all got some sort of transformational theatrical event whether its a rehearsal process or a show that helps define your theatrical sensibilities or worldview and I think as you get older, those become more and more rare. I have great professional experiences, but the bandwidth of how those things can actually define you is small, but when you are dealing with young people at the beginning, they are like ‘oh, I didn’t know you could do that.’ That sense of what is possible- that’s really exciting. So it’s really gratifying that Dark Play is done in so many colleges when people are having their formative experiences on what theatre can be.”

As for why Dark Play has struck a chord and seems to be produced frequently, “I think it’s accessible in a way that my other plays that have similar themes aren’t quite as readily- it’s actually very classically structured, with a very clearly defined dramatic question.” This January, Dark Play is coming home and finally having its Chicago premiere with Collaboraction Theatre. “I’m very excited.”

In Collaboraction Theatre’s words, Dark Play (or Stories for Boys) “follows a teenage boy’s foray into the virtual world. His fictional internet identity begins as a harmless game, but the game takes on a frightening reality when real emotion overtakes his online relationship. When Nick’s virtual world collides with the real world, his fantasies of love, intimacy, obsession and betrayal spiral into consequences that lead him to the brink of death.”

It runs from January 12th to February 26th at the Flat Iron Arts Building, 1575 N. Milwaukee Ave.