Escuela
Opening Night: January 13, 2016
Closing: January 17, 2016
Theater: The Public Theater
Chile, 1987. A group of young left-wing activists gather in a drab living room to receive paramilitary instruction aimed at overthrowing the military dictatorship. Wearing ski masks to conceal their identity from each other, they teach their respective skills: using a gun, political theory, clandestine organizational methods. With subtle humor and penetrating insight, “Escuela” illustrates the struggle and yearning of a lost generation prepared to use any means necessary to achieve justice and freedom.
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January 15, 2016
A chalkboard is not the most cheering sight to behold upon entering a theater. Nor is a slide projector. Both are on view, aptly enough, alas, in “Escuela,” a dull, didactic drama written and directed by the noted Chilean playwright Guillermo Calderón. The title translates as “School,” and we are indeed in a classroom of sorts, but one in which the subjects are not grammar and trigonometry but how to shoot a handgun and how to construct and detonate a bomb properly. The five “students” in this informal class in guerrilla warfare and its ideological underpinnings are all nascent revolutionaries burning to overthrow the ruthless military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the strongman who toppled the socialist government of Salvador Allende and ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990. (The United States’ covert backing of Pinochet is among the more egregiously ignoble episodes in our country’s international
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