PANEL DISCUSSION WITH CARRANZA AND GUEST SCHOLARS

An adaptation of Bertolt Brecht’s one-act play The Jewish Wife (1937), Carranza’s version follows an undocumented man’s last night, at home with his spouse in Los Angeles, before leaving for the border to avoid deportation.

The original play from which Carranza’s work is adapted comes, is part of a series of playlets Bertolt Brecht wrote in the 1930s, which were later compiled under the title Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. These short plays employ techniques of epic theatre in a deadpan critique antisemitism in Nazi Germany.

Like Brecht’s Organum for the Theatre, each new staging of The Mexican Husband is in itself a living work, transforming the buried insidious racism tied to our complacency into a call to arms.

The Mexican Husband was first performed on July 7, 2018 at Deslave, a contemporary art space in Tijuana, México run by artists Mauricio Muñoz and Andrew Roberts. A subsequent public reading of the play took place on October 17, 2019 at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, BC in celebration of the play’s publication with Blank Cheque Press. This first printing of the play has since sold-out. A second printing is in the works with Taller California in San Diego. Carranza last conducted a staged reading of the play on February 12, 2020 as part of the Kamias Triennial for Contemporary Art in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines.