Sexo, Pudor y Lagrimas / Sex, Shame and Tears

The dysfunctional sex lives of six urban dwellers living in Mexico City in the 90’s makes great fodder for comedy in Sexo, Pudor y Làgrimas, the newest production from Teatro de la Luna.
Translated in English as “Sex, Shame and Tears”, the Mexican tragicomedy centers on the unhealthy dynamics of two mismatched couples who live across from each other in the same apartment building, and the game-changing sequence of events that transpire when they each have attractive houseguests crash on the same weekend.

Directed by Mario Marcel (formerly of the GALA Hispanic Theatre), Teatro de la Luna’s production of Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas is a candid, hysterical, though sometimes overbearing look at the on-going battle of the sexes.

“The new woman is a fountain of male impotence, a cause for castration and divorce,” laments Carlos (Alfredo Sanchez), who sits home and meditates all day while his photographer girlfriend Ana (Yovinca Arredondo) is out making bank.

Despite impromptu lapdances and her undying devotion, Carlos just can’t get arouse for Ana, which becomes the source of their conflict. When cool, Casanova-type Tomàs, a mutual friend of the couple, comes to visit the couple, it’s only a matter of minutes until he sweeps the sex-starved girlfriend off her feet—and finds himself needing another place to stay.

But instead of giving Carlos the satisfaction, Ana elects to stay across the hall at the neighbors, who are going through their own relationships crises. Andrea (Marcelo Ferlito Walder) is the trophy girlfriend of the older Miguel (Juan Pablo Vacatello), and their relationship is the train wreck that would occur if Lena Dunham was born in Mexico and in the nineties, and hooked up with a Don Draper-type born a few decades too late.  Their fights aren’t the stuff of everyday couple tiffs, but a full-blown out culture war.

When Maria (Lillya Ilnistky), the globe-trotting ex-girlfriend of Miguel arrives to stay, what happens next is hard to believe, but delightful to witness. The men and the women separate for a weekend of heavy drinking and pot smoking, sharing wisdom and insights on the opposite sex, but mostly sharing miseries.

Even if you think Girls is revolutionary or just love to hate-watch it, you’ll find yourself initially feeling the same “scene of a car-wreck” type of attraction to the lonely, conflicted youths of Sexo, Pudor y Làgrimas — but it feels different, and for good reason. It’s easy to look down at clueless, entitled twenty-something Brooklyn hipsters and their search for meaning. But when lines just as laughably self-aggrandizing come out of an older, less privileged cohort of Mexican Gen-Xers riding on the tail-end of male economic advantage in their own countries, it’s hard to dismiss it as a mere quarter-life crisis.

For director Mario Marcel, an Argentinean who directed theatre across South America during the height of political corruption in the seventies, the play represents a generation who inherited everything good, as well as everything bad, in a very difficult moment of change in society. Writes Marcel in the play’s program, “In many cases these young people were denied the time and clarity needed to enjoy their beautiful youth.”

– In Spanish with English surtitles . for ages 15 and up.

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Sexo, Pudor y Lágrimas by Antonio Serrano . directed by Mario Marcel . Produced by Teatro de la Luna . Reviewed by  Amrita Khalid .