Mexican Psychotic

Mexican Psychotic centers on the life of “outsider artist” Martín Ramirez: a Mexican worker and self-taught visual artist. Its staging mimics a silent film, with omniscient third-person narration and dialogue appearing as text projected onto a screen behind the actors. Scenes that recount the history of Ramirez’s life are interspersed with surreal, allegorical episodes and historical anecdotes whose protagonists include Mexican revolutionaries and animals that populate Ramirez’s drawings. These formal features each echo aspects of Ramirez’s biography that are featured in the play’s narrative: his silence while interned, his exposure to Hollywood films, and the mythologization of his biography by professionals who commercialized and promoted his art. The alienation effects they produce underscore the play’s thematic concern with the misrepresentation and marginalization of proletarian histories within dominant historical (including art historical) narratives.