Play tells Guatemalan women's stories

Volunteering for the Presbyterian Church in a poor community in southwestern Guatemala in 2003, Jennifer Kepler would invite local women to literacy classes, but many turned her down.

“Either their husbands wouldn’t let them come, or they didn’t think they could actually learn to read,” said the 33-year-old Kepler, who worked in Viente de Octubre, named for the country’s October Revolution in 1944. “But it’s difficult for women to do anything outside the home in the community where I lived. They wash all their clothes by hand for a family of 12. They have to go to the market daily to get food they need because they don’t have refrigerators.”

Charity Thompson, 29, a colleague of Kepler’s working in the town of San Juan Ixcoy in northwestern Guatemala, said, “I was out walking with some women, and there was a door to a house open, and inside we saw a man beating a woman. I was horrified and told them so, but my hosts said this was completely normal and thought my reaction was funny.”
Now the two have co-authored a play based on their
experiences, “Strangers/Extranjeras,” which will be at The Rudyard Kipling for seven shows beginning Wednesday, June 10.

A 90-minute drama written in English and Spanish, it involves the powerful friendship between two main characters, a Mayan village woman and an idealistic volunteer from the United States, and how they persevere in an environment of poverty and heartbreaking subjugation of women.
Kepler and Thompson said the Guatemalan women with whom they worked were routinely denied access to education and the liberty to work outside the home or express themselves emotionally.

“Strangers/Extranjeras” is supported by Kentucky Foundation for Women, Presbyterian Women’s Thank Offering of the Presbyterian Church USA, and Community Foundation of Louisville.

Opening night includes a fundraising dinner, live entertainment and audience discussion with actors and staff.

The play is produced by Looking for Lilith Theatre Company, a nonprofit Louisville ensemble committed to examining the world from a female perspective. It is named for the mysterious biblical figure Lilith, a strong woman who suffered for being assertive in a man’s world.
The authors are both involved with the theater — Kepler as community outreach director and Thompson as an arts associate — and both spent time volunteering in Guatemala as part of the theater’s Faith Stories Project, an initiative that uses experiences of native women in the Presbyterian Church to create empowering, self-esteem-building theater.
Kepler’s reports to churches in the United States about her 2003 experience helped inspire the Faith Stories Project, and Looking for Lilith artists returned to Guatemala in 2005, 2006 and 2007, conducting theater workshops among native women who shared their stories.

“There’s a lot in the play about the challenges of people from different cultures to become friends,” Kepler said. “In one scene, the volunteer is trying to learn to wash dishes, and there’s a particular way to do it to preserve the clean water. But she doesn’t know how and the ‘host mother’ yells at her.”

Thompson said, “We worked on the play for almost five years, but essentially it’s about the friendships that Jennifer and I formed. It’s about women from the U.S. and women from Guatemala learning the good things about each other’s cultures.”

The authors are both involved with the theater — Kepler as community outreach director and Thompson as an arts associate — and both spent time volunteering in Guatemala as part of the theater’s Faith Stories Project, an initiative that uses experiences of native women in the Presbyterian Church to create empowering, self-esteem-building theater.
Kepler’s reports to churches in the United States about her 2003 experience helped inspire the Faith Stories Project, and Looking for Lilith artists returned to Guatemala in 2005, 2006 and 2007, conducting theater workshops among native women who shared their stories.

“There’s a lot in the play about the challenges of people from different cultures to become friends,” Kepler said. “In one scene, the volunteer is trying to learn to wash dishes, and there’s a particular way to do it to preserve the clean water. But she doesn’t know how and the ‘host mother’ yells at her.”

Thompson said, “We worked on the play for almost five years, but essentially it’s about the friendships that Jennifer and I formed. It’s about women from the U.S. and women from Guatemala learning the good things about each other’s cultures.”