While Ingrid Betancourt, a former senator and anti-corruption activist, was running for President of Colombia in 2002, she was kidnapped by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a Marxist revolutionary terrorist organization, better known as FARC. 

 

This story is a theatrical imagining based on those events.  The idea was first suggested to the playwright, Catherine Filloux, by actress, Kimber Riddle.  Riddle was in Filloux’s play LUZ, which premiered at La MaMa, where Filloux is a resident artist.

 

The Woman narrates this story, through “intrusive memory,” a symptom of PTSD.   She grapples with an ever-present series of moments in her life as the play shifts in time and place via fragmentary scenes in a variety of locations.  The long trauma of the Woman’s captivity is propelled by the conclusion to her story, foreshadowed throughout the play.  Redolent, repeated phrases guide the audience; and the play’s design includes a detailed soundscape, also making the silences impactful. Throughout the play are the Woman’s meditations on why she made her political choices; and a play-within-a-play film noir twist reveals the Woman’s past with Camus, the theater and existentialism.

 

The Man shifts kaleidoscopically between roles including: FARC commanders and guards; the Woman’s deceased father; her children, who are growing up without her; God; and her lover, a fellow hostage.