About the Project
Digna, focuses on resistance. The play is based on the life of Digna Ochoa, a brilliant Mexican human rights lawyer who paid with her life. After receiving death threats for years, she was shot execution-style in her Mexico City law office. A note was left by her body threatening other attorneys with the same. Digna in the play has returned from beyond the grave to speak about resistance. Drawing on her own life for examples, she explains that resistance requires naming things for yourself; flipping the story the powerful have written for you, and refusing to be what you look like—to them.
The mass disappearance of 43 university students in Mexico has spurred Digna’s return from the dead. The response of the international community to that case—the worst atrocity in Mexico in decades—will determine the country’s human rights landscape in the future. So far, the Mexican government and army have suffered no discernible consequences. The United States’ funding of the Mexican army continues at record levels, although evidence implicates the army in the boys’ disappearance and probable murder.
A sense of futility gradually overtakes Digna as she delivers her lecture on resistance. Although she tries to be stick to her subject, burbling under the surface is a sense of hopelessness and self-doubt. She brings her talk to an early close and leaves the stage. Then she returns; she has forgotten her scarf. Once on stage again, she hesitates. Esperar, she notes, means both” to wait” and “to hope.” In Spanish, if you’re waiting around for something, you’re hoping, and you may as well admit it. She doesn’t dare to hope that what she could tell us would make a difference. But she decides to finish her talk, just to defy silence. Just to resist.
Learn More at actingartists.com/digna
Production Team
