La Troupe Mexico

What is La Troupe?

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It’s the first truly bilingual theater company in San Miguel, and from what I can tell, one of the few such companies of its kind in the world. Usually, when people talk about bilingual or multilingual theater, they refer to productions in which more than one language is spoken. Still and all, a single language always seems to dominate. For the 2009 Broadway production of West Side Story, for instance, a few of the songs were sung in Spanish. I myself directed an adaptation of Michael Hollinger’s play Tooth and Claw at the San Miguel Playhouse last March. The play is set in the Galápagos Islands in Ecuador, the majority of characters are Latin Americans, and a lot of the dialog is in Spanish. In my production, we used even more Spanish than in the original play. The play was still predominantly in English, but many Mexican theatergoers came to the San Miguel Playhouse for the first time, while expatriate theatergoers got to see the breadth and scope of Latin American acting talent here.

It was an exhilarating experience for us, and it reinforced our desire to inaugurate La Troupe. Marcela Brondo, who acted in Tooth and Claw, was a driving force in launching the company. She is La Troupe’s creative director.

What makes La Troupe truly bilingual is that its productions are designed to appeal to and be equally well understood by both Spanish-speaking and English-speaking theatergoers. The performances are in Spanish, but we have equipped the San Miguel Playhouse with high-end equipment to project supertitles, and every line of dialog in Spanish is accompanied by a projected English translation. It’s a system that has succeeded very well at opera houses around the world, and the experience is akin to watching a foreign film with subtitles. Except this is live theater.