The Brooklyn Rail

Early on in Teatro La Re-sentida’s Oasis of Impunity, a performer stands naked in a pathway of light. Gentle waiting-room music, reminiscent of a surf-rock lullaby, plays as another performer crouches behind them with a bowl and proceeds to wash their genitals. What might in other circumstances be an act of care—bathing another person—is hard to watch, and yet, given what is to come, only really the beginning of such unsettling dissonance. The fear on the first performer’s cringing face and choked cries overwhelms the senses as their bodily violations mount.

The performer begins to pull out their own teeth with a pair of pliers. I take in the scene mostly through sidelong glances but can’t avoid the magnified shadow trembling on the back wall of the New York University’s Skirball theater or the spray of blood and calcified tissue hitting the floor. If I weren’t writing notes in the dark, I would most certainly use my hands to muffle the crunching sound effects.

A lengthy program note by director Marco Layera names the unrest on the streets of Santiago, Chile, in October 2019—that began as protests against the rise in public transportation costs and quickly escalated into what Amnesty International has described as a “social crisis in Chile that left people dead, injured and maimed due to the disproportionate use of force by the Carabineros”¹ and that Bloomberg has interpreted as “the worst civil unrest since the end of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990”²— as a seed for this work. Layera, who was educated in criminal law before founding La Re-sentida (The Resentful) in 2008, elaborates on some of the research questions about state violence that underpinned this work. But he also warns against viewing it as a direct response. Instead, he posits a more oblique approach to working with very real and troubling inspiration, one that this intrepid cast makes incredibly visceral. He writes, “Oasis of Impunity is an artistic rehearsal that owes nothing to reality, [but] nevertheless, is committed to it.”

At times, this method was disorienting in its lack of explicit historical markers or grounding context. Yet it was precisely this slipperiness that made it more amenable to filling in the blanks. More than once, a disturbing image reminded me of the many forms of physical brutality both colonialism and the US military-industrial complex has wrought.

Throughout, dehumanization, disembodiment, and dismemberment function as conceptual guides.

In Sebastián Escalona and Cristian Reyes’s scenic design, the stage is spare except for a large, empty vitrine and a creepy painting of a ghost figure, a white sheet draped over the head and holes cut over the eyes. This hollowed out museum becomes a place where time warps and the past and present overlap in the display and preservation of gratuitous violence. When the floodlights shine in our faces, it is also a none-too-subtle, structural reminder that we are implicated as spectators.

Voices are disconnected from bodies whenever the performers “speak.” Andrés Quezada’s sound design includes an ominous cut-and-paste collage of recorded speech, manipulated in service of anonymity. The performers lip-sync the material in an animatronic effect both terrible and prescient.

A long, generic speech on a constitution—presumably the Chilean constitution, which dates back to Pinochet’s government and has been the subject of many revision efforts, the most recent of which was rejected by voters in December 2023—delivered in English with Spanish supertitles by a towering wrestler, transposes the droning voice of the state on the might of a man-crusher. Wearing white trunks and a wig and taking up the better part of the vitrine, the wrestler is the only performer differentiated from the ensemble into a singular role. The response to his monologue is a kind of swift fealty I may never be able to unsee: instead of kissing a ring, each member of the ensemble (including the performer most recently battered, joining in the end of the line) steps forward into that stifling space, naked and alone, to endure locking lips with him.

At the end of the piece, this kind of ventriloquism elicits apathy instead when the panicked pleas of a security guard, in Spanish with English supertitles, resound like an emergency call re-enactment. “Do something cowards!” he screams. We would be the ones to respond, to stop a party of demonic revelers from trampling him, but stranded as we are in the role of the audience… we don’t.

Meanwhile, the highly choreographed ensemble is a many-headed monster, the sum of its parts grotesque when it swarms the stage. Several of the performers have professional dance backgrounds, and their physical fluency is put to disconcerting use. The disjointed, staccato gestures—which contort limbs into strange relationships with torsos and heads—conjure zombies, twitching out of an automatic impulse, just as the smooth muscles of the bowels contract without thought or as skin can live a day past a body’s last breath. They march, parade, and attack in a variety of matching uniforms, from metallic leotards to preppy chinos to infantilizing pinafores. Inexplicably, they also wear pointy prosthetic ears that, if nothing else, keep reality at the desired distance.

But there are also times when the mob feels more human, and there is the sickening sense that their bodies are being torqued by some unseen actor, forced to convulse against their individual wills. Nowhere is this ambiguity more horrifying than in the punishing solos interspersed throughout the group sections. Beyond the tooth extraction, nude performers pull their penis and scrotum as far apart as possible, tear their hair from the root, writhe on the floor as if enduring electrocution. In a recurring motif, they lift their arms overhead like a reigning champ, bloodied but undaunted, before rejoining the ensemble to terrorize someone else in the next scene. That all this gross manipulation avoids the overwrought is a testament to both the complete commitment of the performers and the work’s refusal to reconcile the perpetrators from the victims.

In lieu of catharsis, we are trapped in a long section of rising action that leaves some of the performers incapacitated. A nearly dead man is undressed and flung about the ensemble as their plaything. Costumed as schoolchildren, the ensemble holds him upside down, waves his arms to blow kisses, and folds him in half for a bow. The lights flash on and off to let us know these pranks are captured as photos, not unlike when US soldiers posed with hooded detainees at Bagram air base. Eventually, they stuff his thoroughly abused body under the back panel of the floor. One of his lead tormentors then morphs into a lamenting woman in the following group scene. Unable to mourn her loved one, she is separated from a casket and subject to much of the same treatment by the pack of kids. Her exposed body is flipped over a shoulder, and she is jostled down stairs and into the audience. The front rows become her body’s dumping ground.

A strange carnival of masked characters comes on to color over the memory of what we have just seen, even as an unnecessary monologue admonishes us with reminders like “I’ll be grateful for your applause but it won’t change” and “no one stops this party.” When the lights come up and the curtain calls begin, the cast is no longer intact. In a grim fact, a few of the performers, including the recently discarded woman, never reappear for our praise.

1. “Four Years on from the Social Unrest in Chile, Impunity Persists,” Amnesty International, October 17, 2023, https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2023/10/chile-four-years-social-unrest-impunity/.
2. “Bloomberg: ‘Santiago Despierta En La Devastación,’” El Mostrador, October 19, 2019, https://www.elmostrador.cl/dia/2019/10/19/bloomberg-santiago-despierta-en-la-devastacion/.