STAGE WEST: TuYo Theatre's "La Llorona on the Blue Line"

Vanessa Flores Cabrera in "La Llorona on the Blue Line."                          Photo courtesy of TuYo Theatre

            We’re all strangers on a train when we board the three vintage light-rail cars in which TuYo Theatre’s immersive “La Llorona on the Blue Line” is staged. Like functioning railway or trolley cars today none of the retired three comes equipped with seat belts. They should. “La Llorona” has its share of hold-on moments.
            The play comprised of three vignettes is written by Maybelle Reynoso, author of TuYo’s “Pastorela 2.0” produced five years ago. The company’s co-artistic director, Maria Patrice Amon, directs the cast of seven that performs inside the historic, 1880s-built National City Depot that’s run by the San Diego Electric Railway Association.
            The three retired cars date from different periods in San Diego rail transport history and Reynoso’s 15-to-20-minute-long vignettes are set in time accordingly: the first in 1920, the second in 1946, the third in 1982. Only 20 patrons are accommodated for each performance, owing to the limited seats aboard the trains. The actors, speaking both English and Spanish, perform in the aisles, just inches from viewers in some moments.
            Before I dive into “La Llorona,” my own experience Friday night, a chilly and misty one in National City:
            Given a “TuYo Railways” ticket and a program sheet (more on that later), I patiently waited among my fellow “passengers” in the quaint depot environs (really a hidden gem for local history buffs). After a uniformed train clerk (Arturo Medina) with a booming voice informed us that we’d be boarding soon, cast members in costume – pretty easy to distinguish from patrons – began to circulate, including a strange young woman in white and in tears.
            All aboard.
            Reynoso’s script concerns itself with, as Amon told me in an interview I did for the San Diego Union-Tribune, “gender equity and stories of women in the South Bay” and also with the La Llorona mother myth – the weeping woman/grieving mother haunted by her own tragic deeds. In the context of this play the La Llorona figure is redefined, no longer a murderess but a spectral figure exacting justice for imperiled or victimized mothers and, in one case, a potential mother-to-be.
            The frightening and beautiful La Llorona (Vanessa Flores) eerily compels passengers from car to car, flitting like some haunted butterfly. She is the omnipresence throughout the play.
            In the first car, dating from 1920, the “Bath Riots” of El Paso in which migrant Mexican women were deloused with gasoline are evoked as the complicit young Bobby (Julian Ortega Flores) is confronted by a stranger aboard the car over his crimes. As in all three vignettes, the white-clad, mask-wielding La Llorona lurks in the background – until she doesn’t.
            The narrative inside the 1946 car finds a newly pregnant girl (Tash Gomez) looking to her worldly wise older sister (Paloma Carrillo) for answers to her predicament and answers to what love and sex and sin are. The girls’ mother (Vanessa Duron) is having none of it. Again, La Llorona presides … and acts.
            The most harrowing of the three stories unfolds in the 1982 familiar red San Diego Trolley car. The scattered babbling of an intensive-care nurse (Nancy Batres) gives way to the unearthing by a fellow passenger, a mother (Duron), of a dark and unsettling secret that ultimately will send La Llorona into a frenzy. It goes down like a violent exorcism and made me wonder at the time how any patrons could bring a child along to this production – as one did the night I was there.
            When it was over, I longed for more dramatized stories. Even though I felt a little wrung out from the last vignette.
            I’ve ridden the modern-day Blue Line many times, including to and from the border, and no trip was ever like these.
            Now back to that program sheet: Turn over the printed information on cast and credits and there are two maps juxtaposed – the “Map of San Diego MTS Trolley System Now” and the “San Diego Electric Railway Map 1918.” Though the latter is kind of hard to read, it’s clear enough that mass transit was further reaching 100 years ago. One could, for example, take a light-rail train to and from the beach, or back and forth to far-flung parts from the Panama California Exposition grounds in Balboa Park. Today’s San Diego Trolley system is one that has expanded considerably since starting up in 1981, but it’s still lacking. The high price of SoCal real estate and the sheer cost of growing out has apparently limited its reach – look how long it took to get a line out to UCSD.
            But that’s a hot-button subject to be argued elsewhere and by those more knowledgeable and more invested than I.
            Let’s stick with “La Llorona on the Blue Line”” Unnerving at times but not off-putting. Thoughtful, no question. Cautionary, certainly. Mindful of the past, the present and what may lie before us, in reality and in myth.
            “La Llorona on the Blue Line” runs through June 21 at the National City Train Depot. Meanwhile, visit the National City Depot and the museum website at https://www.sdera.org/depot.php