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Mexico's best living playwrights and much can be expected from them.

At the same time, an enterprising Loyalist exile, one Alvaro Custodio, started staging the great classic plays of Spain's Golden Age in the small art cinema of the French Institute. The success was two-fold: it established the basic tradition of the language through the representation of Lope de Vega, Calderón, Rojas and Guillén de Castro, and it proved the invaluable school of a new type of disciplined young performers, foremost of whom have been Ofelia Guilmain and Ignacio López Tarso. Custodio also took

[[image: photo of  two women on stage, man in background]]
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Rita Macedo and Ofelia Guilmain rehearse The Maids with director José Luis Ibáñez.
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his classical troupe to out-of-the-way villages and set his actors roaring alexandrines against a backdrop of baroque church façades.

The Mexican government's Social Security Institute took the hint. It plowed its enormous resources into the building of ultra-modern theatres all over the country and set itself the task, slow yet fruitful, of offering great plays at popular prices, with a repertory that runs from Aeschylus to Robert Bolt. 

But perhaps the most important event of all was the appearance, in 1956, of a truly revolutionary group called Puesía en Voz Alta. Supported by the Cultural Department of the National University, this experimental, closely-knit unit of writers, directors, designers and performers laid the first stone of a new theatre that truly translated the younger generation's desire to be freed from the shackles of chauvinism, dourness and didactic ramblings. It deliberately stressed playfulness, humor and a unitary conception of theatrical elements at the service of the spoken word. 

Its two directors, Héctor Mendoza and José Luis Ibáñez, brought fresh imagination to the Mexican stage, splendidly supported by their designers, the surrealist sorceress Leonora Carrington and the Faun-like painter Juan Soriano. Medieval Spanish poems were regarded as musical comedy. Calderón's sacramental plays were given their modern tone and significance, Neveux, Tardieu and Ionesco were introduced, Lorca's magnificent short pieces were undusted and two new authors made debuts: famed poet Octavio Paz with a weirdly magical version of Hawthorne's Rappaccini's Daughter and Elena Garro with the only theatrical equivalent of Mexico's candy skulls: A Solid Home - namely, the family vault in a cemetary. Poesía en Voz Alta reached its apex - and appropriately, its death - with Ibáñez's 1960 production of Jean Genet's The Maids.

Defiantly staged in one of Mexico City's larger commercial theatres, usually devoted to frisky boudoir comedies, it attracted large audiences that quite innocently believed they were to witness a traditional comedy about the servant problem. But Ofelia Guilmain and Rita Macedo as the maids and Mercedes Pascual as the lady of the house promptly chilled the spines and struck the cheeks of the insulted audience. With Genet, Ibáñez and Soriano had finally ripped the curtain that separated conformist audiences from diabolical image of
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[[image - upper right corner, woman sits in water. upper left corner, logo with a crown and signature. below them, several beauty products in boxes]]
"White Shoulders"
Bath Drops
Powdered White Shoulders
Luxury Soap

Transcription Notes:
moved "them-" at end of first page to next transcription page, to avoid breaking words over pages