Latinidades 4: ‘La Razón Blindada’ @ Cara Mia Theatre
Graphic courtesy of 24th Street Theatre, Los Angeles
—Teresa Marrero
In the Dallas Latino Cultural Center’s Black Box space, two men sit on wooden chairs with casters. They can’t stand, can’t leave, can’t stop talking. Yet through the alchemy of imagination, they build a world vast enough to defy prison walls.
That’s the paradox at the heart of La Razón Blindada (subtitled Armored Reason: Absurd Resistance in a Cell of Imagination), written and directed by Argentine playwright Arístides Vargas and produced by Los Angeles’ 24th Street Theatre. Performed in Spanish with English supertitles, this taut, lyrical piece (running 80 minutes) transforms confinement into resistance. The play opened in Madrid in 2005. I saw it in 2017 at the Los Angeles Encuentro, a festival. Seeing it again years later just made me appreciate it even more.
“When reality becomes unbearable, the imagination must rise—armored, absurd, and unbroken.”
Inspired by real events during Argentina’s 1970s military dictatorship, the play channels the ingenious survival strategies of political prisoners. Every Sunday at 3:00 p.m., two inmates who are prohibited from standing or speaking freely recreate the adventures of Don Quixote de la Mancha. From that act of storytelling under terror, Vargas builds a meditation on freedom, memory, and imagination as political refuge.
The setting is austere: two, sometimes three tables—also on casters—two chairs, and two men: De la Mancha (Jesús Castaños-Chama) and Panza (Tony Durán). The play opens with a huge projection of a desert-like landscape (design by Miguel Nuñez). The lighting (Gerson Guerra and Dan Weingarten) generates a sense of enclosure, with circular and square spotlights that feel like imprisonment. Sudden changes to the stark white overall lighting freeze the action when the two men intuit that a guard approaches. Costumes remain unchanged throughout (José Rosales is the designer), while absurdity comes from the props: as one example, a bassinet functions as De la Mancha´s head armor! The sound design (Arístides Vargas) is minimalist; what matters are the spoken words.
“Absurdity here is not escape—it’s survival.”
Castaños-Cháma’s De la Mancha is manic and magnetic, his eyes aflame with impossible conviction. Durán’s Panza grounds him with humor and quiet loyalty, a mirror of sanity reflecting madness. Together, they form a rhythm of opposites—dreamer and realist, spirit and flesh—locked in a dance of survival. They create an internal mindscape that follows its own reasoning. Castaños-Chama´s Quixote speeds language at a lighting pace past all sensible logic. Durán´s Panza tries to instill some sense into various situations, but caves into De la Mancha, similarly to their interpersonal dynamics in Cervates´classic 17th-century work. Panza outdoes himself playing multiple roles that range from Dulcinea (the imagined lover) to Rosinante (the horse) and Toribio (the greyhound dog), among others. The riff on the relationship between the dog´s perspective on being named ¨Man´s Best Friend¨ and the reality of a dog´s life is nothing short of brilliant. The flying dragon scene, staged with three linked tables and the two men on the chairs, is so vibrant and full of energy that in my mind´s eye, they were flying.
“When reason is armored, words become weapons.”
The language is dense, poetic, and darkly funny. Vargas weaves colloquial wit with lyrical abstraction, transforming political trauma into verbal music. In Spanish, the title itself carries layered meaning: “reason” as logic or cause, “blindada” as armored, shielded. The phrase becomes a metaphor for endurance.
The play’s absurdist aesthetic recalls Beckett’s Waiting for Godot: repetition, wordplay, and circular logic as metaphors for paralysis under authoritarianism. However, Vargas’ absurdity is not nihilistic; it is protective, even redemptive.
“The only defense left to the oppressed is the imagination itself.”
When the actors finally fall silent, the moment lands with unbearable weight. The absence of words speaks louder than any dialogue, a tribute to those silenced by the regime, and to those who resist through memory.
24th Street Theatre’s choice to stage this Spanish-language work in Los Angeles underscores its urgency. In a city where multiple languages coexist daily, La Razón Blindada bridges histories and communities. The play asks not only about what it means to remember dictatorship, but how storytelling itself becomes an act of rebellion.
In its simplicity, La Razón Blindada achieves something extraordinary. Two men seated on wooden chairs with casters conjure the vastness of freedom through thought. Their banter, absurd and beautiful, reminds us that laughter, language, and imagination are the last strongholds of the human spirit.
WHEN: October 9-11, 2025 (in Spanish with supertitles)
WHERE: Latino Cultural Center, 2600 Live Oak Street, Dallas
WEB: caramiatheatre.org
Teresa Marrero is Professor of Spanish at the University of North Texas. She specialized in Latin American and Latine Theater in the United States. https://class.unt.edu/people/m-teresa-marrero.html
