The Mexican Husband by Fabiola Carranza

Opening Reception: Saturday, September 17, 5–9:30 pm  with Live Performance at 7pm

Exhibition dates: September 17 – October 22, 2022 

Gallery hours: 10am–2pm on Fridays and Saturdays, and by appointment

Join Vinegar on Saturday, September 17 for a staged reading of a play by Southern California-based artist and writer Fabiola Carranza, The Mexican Husband. An adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's one-act play The Jewish Wife (1937), Carranza’s version follows an undocumented man's last night, at home with his spouse in Los Angeles, before leaving for the border to avoid deportation. 

The original play from which Carranza's work is adapted is part of a series of playlets Bertolt Brecht wrote in the 1930s, which were later compiled under the title Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. These short plays employ techniques of epic theatre in a deadpan critique antisemitism in Nazi Germany. 

Like Brecht’s Organum for the Theatre, each new staging of The Mexican Husband is in itself a living work, transforming the buried insidious racism tied to our complacency into a call to arms.

The Mexican Husband was first performed on July 7, 2018 at Deslave, a contemporary art space in Tijuana, México run by artists Mauricio Muñoz and Andrew Roberts. A subsequent public reading of the play took place on October 17, 2019 at Artspeak Gallery in Vancouver, BC in celebration of the play’s publication with Blank Cheque Press. This first printing of the play has since sold-out. A second printing is in the works with Taller California in San Diego. Carranza has printed facsimiles of the first edition as part of her exhibition at Vinegar. She last conducted a staged reading of the play on February 12, 2020 as part of the Kamias Triennial for Contemporary Art in Quezon City, Metro Manila, Philippines.

Cast for September 17 Performance at Vinegar:

THE WIFE — Eric-Lamar Burts
THE HUSBAND — Laura Bullock
STAGE DIRECTION — Carlton V Bell II

Fabiola Carranza's art and writing examine visual, cultural, and personal phenomena. She is an art-practice concentration PhD student specializing in Critical Gender Studies at UC San Diego. Carranza has participated in exhibitions at Plug In Institute for Contemporary Art (Winnipeg), the National Gallery of Costa Rica (San José) and the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver). Her first public art commission, Seven Signs, was on view at Waterfront Park in Seattle in 2016, and her first play The Mexican Husband was published by Blank Cheque Press in 2019.