Photo via Milwaukee Rep - milwaukeerep.com
Espejos: Clean at Milwaukee Rep
'Espejos: Clean' promotional graphic.
This week I had the opportunity to sit down with Juliette Carrillo, director of Espejos: Clean, a bilingual two-woman show opening April 8 at the Milwaukee Rep. The play written by Christine Quintana, and was first produced in 2022 at South Coast Repertory in Costa Mesa, CA. It follows the experiences of two women whose lives intersect at a resort in Cancún, Mexico.
Carrillo was at the premiere production’s opening night, as she had worked with Quintana before on the world premiere of Anywhere But Here with the Playwrights Theatre Center in Vancouver in 2020.
“I usually do world premieres,” Carrillo told me, “but I love this play so much that I really wanted to do it—to find my own way into it. I’m very excited about the cast, as it’s a very different kind of casting than the production that I saw. The actors are phenomenal. Their work is very courageous; they’re diving into difficult topics.”
Dylan Brown, an NYC-based actress making her debut at the Rep, plays Sarah, a guest staying at the resort for her bride-to-be sister’s destination wedding. Regina Carregha, also NYC-based but originally from Cancún itself, plays Adriana, manager of the resort’s housekeeping staff.
Hidden Lives
Both characters, Sarah and Adriana, have parts of themselves and parts of their lives they wish to keep packed away—tightly—and both are equally stubborn in their own right. “They avoid being present,” Carrillo admits when I ask her what her favorite and least favorite traits are about the women. Meanwhile, Sarah, she says, “has a very dry sense of humor,” and her favorite thing about Adriana is “her passion—her emotional passion and drive.”
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They have both experienced trauma in their lives, and we, the audience, meet them at a turning point. When the play starts, both characters have been and are ready to continue operating and navigating their lives on top of this trauma, but a thunderstorm finds a funny way of forcing together these two women from separate worlds.
“Espejo,” Carrillo tells me, “means ‘mirror.’ So they are mirrors of each other, and the experiences they go through help them purge this trauma, this secret buried thing.” Hence the second half of the play’s title: “clean.”
“Perhaps,” I ask, “They are also finding ways to clean their own mirrors, to see themselves more clearly?”
“Yes!” she agrees. “When they encounter each other, they’re forced to have it come up and look at it and experience it. One of the lines that’s a theme is: ‘I see you,’ or ‘I see her.’”
Closed Captions
So what’s to be done for those of us like me, who are only fluent in one of the play’s two languages—English or Spanish? Well, fear not! All performances will have closed captions: English-language subtitles for the Spanish, and Spanish-language subtitles for the English.
“I want audiences to surrender to the experience of the language,” Carrillo says. “Christine is an incredibly poetic writer. She understands how to communicate using language in a sophisticated and profound way. It’s also a very sensual play; we have real water on stage, we have real dirt on stage. I’m very interested in the senses, so to have the audience experience the same emotional ride the characters go on…and come out clean.”
A cathartic, powerfully led two-woman show that explores trauma, language, and how they shape our experiences and interactions? I’ll see you all there.
Performances are April 9-May 11, Tuesdays-Sundays, in the Milwaukee Rep’s Stiemke Studio, 108 E. Wells St. Contains descriptions of domestic violence and sexual assault. For information or tickets, contact the Box Office at: 414-224-9490 or visit: milwaukeerep.com.
