While Ingrid Betancourt, a former senator and anti-corruption activist, was running for President of Colombia in 2002, she was kidnapped by the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, a Marxist revolutionary terrorist organization, better known as FARC.
This story is a theatrical imagining based on those events. The idea was first suggested to the playwright, Catherine Filloux, by actress, Kimber Riddle. Riddle was in Filloux’s play LUZ, which premiered at La MaMa, where Filloux is a resident artist.
The Woman narrates this story, through “intrusive memory,” a symptom of PTSD. She grapples with an ever-present series of moments in her life as the play shifts in time and place via fragmentary scenes in a variety of locations. The long trauma of the Woman’s captivity is propelled by the conclusion to her story, foreshadowed throughout the play. Redolent, repeated phrases guide the audience; and the play’s design includes a detailed soundscape, also making the silences impactful. Throughout the play are the Woman’s meditations on why she made her political choices; and a play-within-a-play film noir twist reveals the Woman’s past with Camus, the theater and existentialism.
The Man shifts kaleidoscopically between roles including: FARC commanders and guards; the Woman’s deceased father; her children, who are growing up without her; God; and her lover, a fellow hostage.
DEVELOPMENT HISTORY
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"TV/Film/Theater U.S. actress Kimber Riddle, also artistic associate with Anna Deavere Smith, brought this project to award-winning playwright Filloux, after Riddle played the lead in Filloux's play about gender-based violence Luz, at La MaMa."
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"The artistic team performed Kidnap Road at the “Art of Peace” Program at the Joan B. Kroc Peace and Justice Theatre in San Diego, California in November 2015; Filloux's last work Selma '65 appeared there"
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PRESS FOR LA MAMA NEW YORK CITY PREMIERE 2017
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“Catherine Filloux’s emotionally and psychologically charged play…offers a poignant anatomy of Betancourt’s psyche as a woman, a politician, and a victim of different ideologies in the crossfire. But more importantly, this shocking story holds a mirror up to how female politicians are treated in the U.S. as well.” - Theatre Is Easy, Ran Xia
“…Kidnap Road while satisfying enough as a theater object in the existential two-hander genre, takes us into disorienting territory.” - Exeunt Magazine, Molly Grogan
“Intelligent, Intense, Edgy, Dizzying, Thought-provoking, Relevant, Great Staging. This is poetic and fluid in its approach to storytelling, often imaginative, beautiful yet jarring." - Show-Score
“With exquisite poetry, Filloux covers Colombian presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt's six years of captivity at the hands of the FARC…a phenomenal night of theater. One of very few instances where story, direction and acting are so well fused and synchronized it is impossible for the audience to ever feel disconnected.” (English Translation) - Sin Censura, Teatro, Hector Luis
“Every moment gives insight to her life and her torture.” - Times Square Chronicles, Virginia Jimenez