‘Your Healing is Killing Me” @ Cara Mía Theater Company (Latinidades Festival 2023)
Photos by Ben Torres
—Teresa Marrero
Virgina Grisse´s Your Healing is Killing Me, the second part of Cara Mía Theatre Company´s Latinidades Festival, tackles a few prickly subjects. A self-proclaimed performance manifesto—and not a play—this one-woman show spares no punches. This is meant literally, as the manifesto includes a series of martial arts moves that are incorporated into the dramatic action.
Through an autobiographical lens the monologue by the queer protagonist (Faylita Hicks), an alter ego of Grisse, points to the failures of our health care system: from San Antonio TX to NYC, in back street and main street remedies for debilitating eczema, the treatments of curanderas (healers), master cleanses, abortion clinics, upscale dermatologists, Marxist artists. And then there’s the lack of care for the physical and psychological toll of family-centered PTSD situations. It is as tragic in parts as it is funny.
This is the second production of this piece that I have seen at Cara Mía. According to artistic director David Lozano, the present scenic design (Lianne Arnold) is more workable as a traveling production. The more nuanced lighting design (Christopher Mount) and sound (Aaron Meicht) also lends a sophisticated air to this iteration of the work.
The major difference is in the seating arrangement. The current production boasts a more theatrical bent, with columns of fluorescent lights upstage that illuminate while the character is counting off various issues. And, while there are a few tables with folks and food seated inside the performance space, the audience now sits mostly offstage in a standard graded seating arrangement. The earlier production I saw had couches and tables within the performance space, with the audience in the middle of the action. Obviously, that cozy set-up made for more intimate, yet perhaps too limited, seating.
Directed by Kendra Ware and performed by Hicks, this current version came across to me as angrier and more urgent. Of course, memory is a tricky thing, but my recollection tells me the earlier show was more humorous. The present one gained in humor towards the end, when the audience registered audible laughs. Another difference is that Hicks, a brown woman possibly identifying as African American, seemed to have some challenges pronouncing the Spanish words.
One of the pluses of any production of Your Healing is Killing Me is the physical presence of a corpulent woman in skin-tight gym outfit (costume design by Ryan Matthieu Smith). There is a major movement towards “taking up space” by women whose bodies do not fit into the present cultural standards of beauty. I say present because historically, aesthetic appreciation of the female body has taken many turns. Witness the famous fertility figure of the Venus of Willendorf. [Look her up.] Hicks did come across as beautiful and charismatic. Here I am not implying any sort of “in spite of.” It is liberating for the audience to see people who may resemble them in shape, size, and color—in all or any of these aspects. Body shaming has no place anywhere, and particularly not on the stage. Kudos for this feminist approach to body image representation.
The third and last presentation of the 2023 Latinidades Festival at the Dallas Latino Cultural Center runs October 12-15 with the one-man Chicano comedy show Barrio Daze, written, directed and performed by Adrian Villegas.
WHEN: October 5-8, 2023
WHERE: Dallas Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak St., Dallas TX
WEB: caramiatheatre.org
