Negra, the General's Nurse (Negra, la enfermera del General)

Synopsis

Chile, the present

Negra stands before a bank of microphones, her white apron a stark contrast to the darkness of her past and the blood on her hands. As she attempts to defend the indefensible – her unwavering loyalty to a brutal dictator – we’re plunged into a hallucinatory journey through the sun-scorched Chilean desert, where memory and guilt collide like grains of sand in a relentless storm. Negra’s return to her hometown, ostensibly to care for her ailing father and open a clinic, unravels into a nightmarish reckoning with her role in the regime’s atrocities. As she navigates the treacherous terrain of her past, she becomes entangled with a mysterious miner who promises love and redemption, but may be offering only another form of damnation.

Cayo Álvarez’s play pulsates with the raw, unforgiving energy of the Atacama. Through a series of fragmented scenes that blur the lines between reality and fevered imagination, he explores the corrosive nature of complicity and the desperate human need for absolution. The desert becomes a character in itself – a vast, indifferent witness to the horrors of history and the futile attempts to bury them beneath its shifting sands. Poetic language crashes against brutal imagery, creating a disorienting landscape where truth and delusion dance a macabre cueca. As Negra grapples with her identity as both victim and perpetrator, the play forces us to confront uncomfortable questions about memory, forgiveness, and the long shadow cast by authoritarian regimes.