Source Festival

FULL-LENGTH PLAY: An interview about The Making of a Modern Folk Hero with Dramaturg Maura Krause and Playwright Martín Zimmerman

Did a vision of the pudgy Mexican hero of the people known as Superbarrio inspire you to write this play? 

It wasn’t Superbarrio himself so much as the story of his creation that inspired the play. I read this story in the book Mexican Enough by Stephanie Elizondo Griest, which I’d received as a birthday present from my girlfriend/partner. Thereafter, I did some research about Superbarrio, but I didn’t want to delve too deep, because this isn’t a play about Superbarrio, and the world it inhabits is supposed to be the slightest bit heightened, absurd, fantastical. So the idea for the play came as a “what if”. What if the politician creating the superhero and the man portraying the superhero had different needs and agendas? This, as far as I understand it, has not been the case with Superbarrio, so I didn’t want to get too bogged down in the details of Superbarrio while writing the play. That said, much as I intended the play to be somewhat heightened and of another world, real events over the past several months have come to make the world of the play look more realistic than it seemed only a year ago. I’m referring to some of the spontaneous uprisings aided by technology in the Middle East. The world is strange that way. How reality can come to resemble a fantasy you’ve created just when you least expect it.

Is it even possible to explain the anatomy of a really great tweet? 

It is totally possible and has been done in several publications. Most notably in a New Yorker blog post entitled “Hash” by Susan Orlean. It’s a wonderful post about the anatomy and evolution of the hashtag. So, in an oblique way, it’s also about the anatomy of a tweet. I highly recommend it. It talks about how the hashtag allows the author of a tweet to take on more than one voice. Voice A and Voice B. Text and subtext. It’s a consummately theatrical form if you think about it.

Who’s a better folk hero, Davy Crockett or Guy Fawkes?

Oooh. Great question. In so far as either of them is a folk hero, I’m going to have to go with Guido Fawkes. I never understood why so few people refer to Guido by his adopted name, which, in terms of its musicality, is far superior to the more British-sounding “Guy.” But that’s another question for another day. At the risk of sounding blasphemous to the state of Texas (which I loved living in for 3 years), I really don’t think Davey Crockett is a hero. While the men at the Alamo chose to stay and fight knowing they would die (which is either valiant or stupid depending on your point of view) they were ultimately fighting for slavery. Quite literally. The Republic of Texas was founded because Mexico had outlawed slavery in Texas and the U.S. citizens who had moved there wanted to continue holding slaves. So the men at the Alamo were fighting for the liberty to rob other people of theirs. Which is not to say Guido Fawkes was any better. He was ultimately an incompetent and a terrorist, but I think the phenomenon of Guido Fawkes is more deserving of the “folk hero” moniker because, with Fawkes, the whole doesn’t really equal the sum of its parts, does it? With Davey Crockett you can at least understand why someone might mistakenly think he’s a hero. Whereas I’m not exactly sure why anyone would revere Fawkes. And isn’t that the epitome of a “folk” hero? Someone who in their own right might be rather unspectacular, but whom time and distance lends a strange reverence?