You, Me, and the Devil haunts with mixed media

It started out as an assignment.

You, Me, and the Devil: Stories from Medellin is based on the true story of Elizabeth Mora, a 20 year-old Colombian journalism student who, having been late for class, got stuck with the last topic available for a school project: narcotics. She became the only person ever granted interviews by drug lord Pablo Escobar.

The play, written and directed by Danya Taymor as her senior thesis, opens with romantic Italian music and a single lace-covered table. The audience expects moon-eyed lovers to enter dancing. Instead Escobar, played by sophomore Ted Caywood, throws the first of his victims onto the table and strangles him. Careful observers will recognize that Caywood turns his convincingly Colombian mustachioed face away from the man, as if he cannot stand to fully watch or comprehend the crime he commits. It is the first hint that this is a story riddled with complicated characters and their tangled emotions and motives. It is a story of almosts—how she was almost raped, almost killed; how he was almost merely a newspaper story or a coffee table book filled with criminals; how we almost misunderstood Colombia as merely a provider of American drugs instead of a country filled with convoluted stories, complex motivations and essential, human emotions.

Taymor uses a palette of various media and materials—from drums to video clips to red ribbons-—keeping the audience wide-eyed at the glorified, theatrical representation of the American vision of the drug trade. These effects, however, are not the only explanation for the successful captivation of the spectators. Taymor draws the audience in, forcing them to decipher a criminal kingpin’s incentive for allowing an inquisitive student to enter his story. Ultimately, the viewer is convinced that anyone would be seduced by the firm-jawed relentlessness in senior Alex Mistretta’s portrayal of Elizabeth Mora. She probes to understand Escobar’s wicked dedication to the drug trade, until she finds, touches and abandons the lone virtue in his twisted character.

Like Elizabeth Mora herself, Danya Taymor reveals a heart that beats audibly from within what began as a project. The intelligent complexity of the play is inspired by Taymor’s own experience in Colombia and her sensitive observation of the people there: a mother who lost her son, a fellow student who escaped an abusive mother through dealing drugs, the mysterious plight of an abandoned salsa dancer in a dimly lit bar. Each is virtuous and striving in his or her own way. These are not the characters from movies fascinated by the machismo of cocaine rings, but the human beings who live under the drug trade’s influence, and who reach helplessly for the loved ones it consumes, kills and disappears.

In a foreign place and situtation, the audience will recognize people struggling to provide for those they love best while doing as little harm as they can. The casualities along the way will haunt nightmares and memories­—theirs and ours.

You, Me, and the Devil: Stories from Medellin will play tonight through Saturday at 8 p.m. in Brody Theater.