by María Irene Fornés
2017

Directed by Elena Araoz

María Irene Fornés (Playwright)
Elena Araoz (Director)
María Cristina Fusté (Artistic Director/ Lighting Designer)
Amy Palen (Associate Producer)
Sarita Fellows (Costume Designer)
Regina García (Scenic Designer)
Nathan Leigh (Composer/Sound Engineer)
Alannah O’Hagan (Production Stage Manager)
Zahydé Pietri (Props Master)
David Anzuelo/ Jesse Geguzis (Fight Choreography)

About Mud:

MUD paints a desolate portrait of toxic affection and rural poverty. It follows Mae, a tenacious, illiterate young woman earnestly pursuing social mobility through education. Caught between Lloyd, her ill, resentful housemate, and Henry, a self-impressed neighbor-turned-lover, Mae struggles to pursue her personal goals while providing for the men who rely on her. Alternating between passion, cynicism and surprising humor, MUD relentlessly explores the cycle of economic oppression and the struggle of caring for one’s own.

We probably don’t need another reminder right now that a compact brain, the miracle of fire, and a few lines of iambic pentameter are pretty much all that separate us from our prehistoric ancestors. But here comes one anyway: Boundless Theatre Company’s revival of María Irene Fornés’s 1983 drama Mud. Looked at one way, the play can be seen as a retelling of homo sapiens’ emergence from the primeval soup and their sobering realization that they’re still pretty soggy. Mae (Nicole Villamil) and Lloyd (Julian Elijah Martinez) share a crude rural home somewhere in the vicinity of abject indigence. Fornés describes their dwelling in her stage directions as “a wooden room which sits on an earth promontory.” The pair of young adults grew up together here, but they’re not brother and sister. We never learn their full history, but we know that Mae’s deceased father had taken Lloyd in as a child. (When asked at one point to describe what her relationship to Lloyd is, Mae cannot find the words, although there has clearly been some sort of sexual relationship between them.) Both children grew up illiterate, but Mae of late has been attempting to learn to read, even while insisting that she does …Read more