Brutal reality on Mexican stage

Headless bodies are being dumped in the streets of Michoacan. Bodiless heads are washing up on Acapulco’s rancid beaches. Hit men brazenly snuff out police chiefs in broad daylight. Journalists are being murdered and “disappeared” along a bloody trail stretching from Veracruz to Tijuana.

In short, the timing couldn’t be more apropos for Alejandro Roman’s new play, “Mastercard,” a lyrically written psychological portrait of four hard-boiled bit players in Mexico’s brutal and escalating drug wars.

Already this year, by some newspaper estimates, as many as 1,000 Mexicans have died in drug-related killings. Every day politicians, editorial writers and anxious citizens demand that something be done to end the violence. Yet only a handful of serious novelists, playwrights or filmmakers in Mexico have touched this toxic subject.

Then there’s Roman, a 32-year-old playwright and theater director from Cuernavaca, who already has scripted not one but three probing, heavily researched dramas about the narco-trafficking crisis.

“I believe that each social occurrence throughout the history of humanity is the starting point for very interesting artistic movements,” Roman said over a lunch conversation in Spanish recently with “Mastercard” cast members Guillermo Navarro and Mara Cardenas. “What’s important for one, as an artist, is to paint a portrait of this, for the people, and not to end up in an indifferent manner in the collective conscience, faced with all this bloody destruction.”

“Mastercard,” a one-act piece that runs a brisk 80 minutes and which Roman also directed, is playing Sunday afternoons through June at the La Capilla theater in the Coyoacan district. The 56-seat black box theater has served for decades as a haven for provocative, experimental work in a city whose theatrical tastes lean more toward broad political satires and sex farces.

“Mastercard” differs in substance and style from the lurid, romanticized treatment of drug traffickers that prevails in many telenovelas and narcocorrido music (folk songs that center on the drug trade).

Avoiding a straight narrative line, the play slips backward and forward in time while recounting the events surrounding a cocaine shipment en route through the central Mexican states of Morelos and Guerrero. The main characters -- Claudia (Cardenas), Miguel (Humberto Romero) and Marco (Aldo Tabone) -- lay out the main plot strands, which are interwoven with themes of loyalty and betrayal.

A fourth character, Mario (Navarro), appears onstage as a bloodied corpse, chiming in with beyond-the-grave recriminations against his former partners in crime, in tones that are alternately mocking and despairing. Expressionistic lighting and ambient music signal mood swings and punctuate narrative shifts.

Raised in the provinces, Roman took an early interest in the colorful regional dialect and customs of northern and western Mexico, the heart of the country’s illegal narcotics trade. “It’s fascinating, it enchants me, the north,” Roman says, “because the people are more open, more upfront, more transparent and more uninhibited.”

He first broached the subject of the drug trade in his prize-winning 2004 drama, “Suite 777,” which centers on the mythic figure of Joaquin “El Chapo” Guzman, kingpin of the dreaded Sinaloa cartel, who escaped from a Mexican prison in 2001 and is believed still to be at large.

Working under the guidance of Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, a veteran Mexico City playwright and dramaturge, Roman completed two more narco-themed works: “La Misa del Gallo” (The Requiem of the Rooster), which deals with last year’s assassination of the narcocorrido singer Valentin Elizalde, a.k.a. “The Golden Rooster”; and “Cielo Rojo” (Red Sky), inspired by an incident last year in which gang members stormed into a Michoacan dance hall and emptied a bag containing five severed heads onto the floor.

Roman believes that many contemporary Mexican playwrights are more concerned with charting the angst of young, middle-class urban couples than in exploring their society’s darker labyrinths. These playwrights, he says, are “trying to imitate Sam Shepard, David Mamet, Sarah Kane” -- stylistically but without sharing those playwrights’ level of social engagement -- rather than developing an authentic Mexican voice of their own.

“The great majority of artists are mistaken in that they don’t realize that the local is the universal,” continues Roman, an affable conversationalist with a quick sense of humor that balances his passionate beliefs. “Contemporary artists are very fixated on what pretends to be part of the global, forgetting the local. So it becomes very snobby, very elitist, very much copying the avant-garde of other currents.”

The play’s title refers not only to the way that narcos use credit cards to “cut” lines of cocaine, it also alludes to the idea of a consumer-driven global political system in which people live high on the hog for now but pay a steep price later.

That mentality, along with the intoxicating power of holding a firearm, has driven many poor, otherwise powerless Mexicans to enter into the narcotics trade, aping the drug lords’ taste in flashy clothes and big cars. Accustomed all their lives to being scorned and abused, they enjoy the rush of suddenly feeling envied and feared.

Though it doesn’t rationalize such criminal behavior, “Mastercard” insists that audiences try to understand what gives rise to it. For example, Cardenas says that when she first moved to Mexico City she would hear rumors within her extended social network about this or that young woman who’d become involved in narco-trafficking. Typically, she says, these were tall, blond, well-turned-out young women who didn’t fit the narco stereotype, making it easier for them to pick up suitcases stashed with drugs at airport drops.

Cardenas says that her character, Claudia, is somewhat of this ilk of Mexicans who aspire to a middle-class lifestyle but have given up trying to acquire it through legitimate means.

“Claudia is a single girl that is from a broken family, who is lazy, because this is very habitual in Mexico; it’s the culture of ‘I’ll find a husband or someone to maintain me,’ ” Cardenas says. “A narco-trafficker definitely prefers to spend five, six, 10 years of his life in danger than 40, 50 years in misery or in mediocrity.”

But like the withdrawal symptoms that follow the heady rush of cocaine, the buzz that comes with sudden wealth and power has a way of backfiring. “Mastercard” attempts to bring that truth home not through gratuitous moralizing but through the kind of visceral human connection that live theater, in tough times, can provide.

reed.johnson@latimes.com