Guillermo Calderón
Escuela (School)

Copresented with the Chicago Humanities Festival

“Calderón is an authentic genius of the theater. In his short, hard, and passionate work . . . various themes come together in something you may not even like, but you can’t say you’ve heard or seen any of it before, which may make you want to hear and see it again.”

—The New Yorker

Escuela (School) dissects the conditions that drive ordinary citizens to take up arms. In the 1980s, during the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, many left-wing Chilean university students underwent secret paramilitary training in people's homes—in response to the ruthless and unyielding tactics of the Chilean police forces. In this play, writer and director Guillermo Calderón finds humor amid the terror by peering over a group of hooded youths meeting in a drab living room to receive homeschooling over several nights. Filled with funny, offbeat points of view as much as dogma, they clumsily learn crawling skills, the proper way to clean a rifle, and macroeconomics in their collective eagerness to overturn a regime. Only their clothes betray class difference. As much as the young feel deceived by one regime, so they may be by the democracy that follows.

Calderón was born in Chile's capital, Santiago, at the height of Salvador Allende's democratically elected left-wing Popular Unity alliance, and came of age under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet; his uncle was killed by Pinochet's security police. He shared his thoughts about our age of political violence with The New York Times: “I grew up with that, and with something that I've put into my other works too, which is domestic life, life between four walls, in a context of violence. You're eating at home, and the news is talking about all the horrible things that have happened, you can hear gunshots, they turn off the electricity, all these things. That contrast between the world outside and the domestic world is something I wanted to do here—shut-in but hearing the gunshots.” Escuela comes full circle to confront the dreams and aspirations that troubling activities in our age are made of. It is Calderón's coda to Neva, his first play and a portrait of Anton Chekhov's widow (the actress Olga Knipper) on the eve of the Russian Revolution, and Diciembre, his play about an imagined war with Peru some time in the future.

Performed in Spanish with English supertitles

• Running time: 1 hour, 40 minutes with no intermission

This production includes loud gunshots using a prop.