“Un truco de magia, están aquí pero no están aquí.”
Going from a bus traveling to a resort in Cancún, Mexico to the memory of racing out of Chetumal 100 kilometers away, Christine Quintana’s Espejos: Clean lays out its fundamentals: we are here, but not here. Adriana, the hardworking manager of the housekeepers at a resort, seeks to stay clean of her history in Chetumal by living in her work in Cancún. Sarah, the self-proclaimed family disaster, tries to fulfill the duties as her sister’s maid of honor and fight down the secret she’s been carrying for years. Together in the illusionary paradise of a Mexican resort, both women perform the magic Adriana notes all resort workers perform: making the lives of others prettier, cleaner, while they remain invisible.
The invisible is what propelled playwright Christine Quintana into this play. Quintana noted that few and far between are the plays where women can speak without interruption. Fewer still are shows that allow women to speak complicated truths about trauma without having to relive this trauma on stage. “How bad does it have to be before you just embrace this person and their trauma,” Quintana asked, and continues asking through this play.
By showing the characters’ trauma to exist in the ‘here but not here’ of these women’s histories, Quintana shifts from depicting trauma to depicting life lived after. As director Elena Araoz says it, “what’s of interest is not seeing the past, but how the past impacts their present.” Adriana and Sarah’s respective presents are messy, difficult, and full of attempts to outrun their past. In this non-linear and non-literal state of coping, the reality of what these women are facing is outside what the other can see.
In an interview during its 2022 premiere in East Vancouver Quintana noted “none of us can ever know what’s happening with someone else and how they are responding.” Sarah’s drive to help comes from a place of goodwill, but also a projected need to avoid repeating the regrets of her past. Adriana works hard to honor the life she chose in Cancún, but also to avoid the life she left in Chetumal and any reminders of it. Both collide in the midst of their attempt to outrun their problems, but oceans separate them from understanding. For now, both work their hardest to exist in their present: still here, but not here.
—Divinia Shorter