“No carnival without cruelty,” a man dressed much like the horror movie character Freddy Krueger screams desperately in Spanish, trapped in a glass cube crowded with others who are grotesquely masked and costumed. It is the last scene – and among the tamest – in “Oasis of Impunity” (“Oasis de la Impunidad”), a disturbing theater piece by Chilean company Teatro la Re-Sentida (which is translated as Theater of the Resentful) that is In New York for just two days at NYU Skirball, on tour after a celebrated debut in Berlin in 2022.
The show, largely a dance theater piece with minimal dialogue, is billed in the program as a choreographic reflection on state violence inspired by a recent period of unrest in Chile. In 2019, a subway fare hike in Santiago, the capital city, provoked massive street protests and riots. The government responded with a state of emergency, deploying the Chilean Army and police, which resulted in large-scale arrests, dozens of deaths, thousands of injuries, and accusations of severe human rights violations.
Subsequently, we’re told, Marco Layera and La-Resentida, the company he founded sixteen years ago and still leads, conducted in effect a research project, gathering together hundreds of Chileans, some of them survivors of the police crackdown.
The result, “Oasis of Impunity,” is a series of scenes that often feel like an assault – on the senses, on my sensibilities, sometimes on the actors’ dignity — without explicitly illuminating the history that led to it, or the issues it claims to raise. Layera has conceded that the show “owes nothing to reality.” It is abstracted cruelty.
At the same time, there is undeniably a powerful theatrical intelligence at work, an intricacy of metaphor at play.
Take the first scene in the play. At first, all we see is a framed picture of a ghost. A man in uniform then comes on stage, apparently a museum guard. He tells us (in Spanish with English supertitles) the rules of the place, such as that there should be no cell phone use. But the man’s shadow suddenly looms large and menacing, his voice takes on a distorted monstrous tone, and the rules expand to: no expression of emotion in a scandalous manner, no crying without pain – and then he demonstrates, and it’s frightening.
The man in the uniform has become a member of (or metaphor for) the security forces, and the museum with the picture of the ghost suggests how the Pinochet dictatorship, which ended three decades ago, still haunts the people of Chile.
I had this pointed out to me by a Chilean student named Tomás Luna, whom I happened to sit next to. He is spending a semester in the U.S. studying theater, and told me he has seen “ Oasis de la Impunidad’ five times. He interpreted another moment for me in the piece, when haze filled the stage and industrial strength stage lights were turned on the audience. The sound that accompanied these effects, he said, were recorded directly from the 2019 demonstrations.
How would anybody know this, I asked. They don’t have to, he replied; anybody who’s ever been to any kind of protest demonstration would find it evocative.
Many of the abstract scenes are indeed evocative, offering a kind of puzzle that one can readily solve.
In one, the seven-member cast, wearing an acrobat’s skimpy outfits and elfish ears, dance in rigid lockstep behind a banner. Are they in a parade, or in a military squadron? That we ask that question – that we can’t tell the difference — seems to be the point, an allusion to the militarization of civilian society.
But then there are the scenes that resist our effort to detect symbolism and nuance. We’re too busy just trying to stomach them. A man stands naked before us, staring and shivering. Somebody comes out on stage with a bowl of water, stoops down in-between the man’s legs, and starts methodically wiping his genitals. This is just the first time we see the naked man, who eventually becomes a naked body, slung around casually in scene after scene.
We’re clearly meant to be unsettled; but are we unsettled more by the state-sponsored violence, abuse of power, and threats to democracy that “Oasis of Impunity” is meant to evoke, or by the theatrical choices it makes to try to do so?
Oasis of Impunity
NYU Skirball through March 9
Running time: 75 minutes
Tickets: $50 – $81
Direction and dramaturgy: Marco Layera
Dramaturgists: Elisa Leroy, Martín Valdés-Stauber
Assistant of Direction: Humberto Adriano Espinoza and Katherine Maureira
Choreographies: Teatro La Re-Sentida
Production: Victoria Iglesias
Scenic Design: Sebastián Escalona and Cristian Reyes
Technical Management: Karl Heinz Sateler
Sound Design: Andrés Quezada
Cast: Carolina de la Maza, Pedro Muñoz, Diego Acuña, Carolina Fredes, Imanol Ibarra, Nicolás Cancino, Lucas Carter, Mónica Casanueva.
