The Incredible Disappearing Woman
Written By Coco Fusco

The play takes place in 1998 in a museum diorama just before the opening of a landmark retrospective exhibition. The "live" characters are three Latin American women exiled in the United States who are members of the custodial staff of the museum. Among the "virtual" characters in the video projections that the stage characters interact with on stage are curators and docents, visiting artists and museum guests.

The three Latin American refugees in the play encounter the vestiges of an American male artist's performance from twenty years before. That male artist had gone to Mexico in search of a dead woman to have sex with her and document his act as art. All he was able to do to record his act was to make an audiotape. That tape is now accompanied by a diorama of the morgue where he once found himself, with a mannequin standing in for the corpse.

The women's job is to tidy up the room before the opening but they find themselves drawn into the work. Each one has a personal story of an experience of having "played dead" to survive, and each one of those experiences led to the women's having crossed the border into the US. They decide that one of them will replace the mannequin to meet the artist when he returns for his opening, and then spend the rest of the play rehearsing the role of the dead woman for the others so that they can decide who is most suited for the encounter.

The Incredible Disappearing Woman is based on a true story of an American artist who claims to have made an audio tape of his having sex with a Mexican corpse. The three female characters are composites I developed as a result of several years of research and travel in Latin America. These personae are based on the true stories of several Mexican maquiladora workers, devout "marianistas" (adherents to the Latin Catholic cult of female martyrdom), and victims of political repression and torture during the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile. Through their stories of being silenced, "disappeared" and effaced from their homelands, I hope to show how the political agency of Latin women is repressed by the family, the Church, the state and neoliberal economic forces.

The Incredible Disappearing Woman will be premiered in June 2003.