Last night, camera in tow, I attended my first Spanish language play. The play, called “Entre Nos” (between us), was an hour-long dialogue between two women who happened to sit by each other in a park. One was a homemaker and mother of two boys, looking bedraggled and tired in a worn mumu and large, coke-bottle glasses. The other was a short-tempered, haughty, and stressed-out business woman dressed in a suit that seemed more like a straight jacket. The crux of the play was the realization by both women of the many things they had in common: hobbies, concerns, their sex lives, etc. In the beginning of the play, the business woman very blatantly looked down upon the homemaker as not having a “real” job and being out of touch with the times. But as the play continued, it became obvious that she was near the point of a nervous breakdown and that deep down, she was not all that different from the homemaker in her sloppy clothes.
I found it very fascinating how both women were portrayed. The one seemed to be a ditzy, “simple” woman with no life outside of her husband and children. The other character, her opposite, was portrayed as a woman trying her hardest to fit into a man’s world and failing miserably because in actuality, she was no different from the housewife: she was a woman.
The play was humorous and garnered lots of laughs from the audience, but held a distinct message beneath the comedy—that of the role of women in Costa Rican society. The role of the housewife was looked down upon and subject to some mockery, however the role of the business woman was also treated with mockery, as that of someone trying to enter a world where they do not belong. The things that these women had in common—their concerns about their health, body image, and sexual relationships—bound them to their femininity and prevented them from being able to fully succeed in the men’s world, even if they tried, as the business woman did.
I left the theater wondering whether any of the Tica women felt debased.
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