En la tierra de los corderos

Origins: a story born of a viral clip and a national conversation

Alexis Casas Eleno traces the spark for En la tierra de los corderos to 2012 and a widely shared video: Australian schoolboy Casey Heynes turning on a bully. In a 2017 interview conducted for a UNAM thesis, Casas recalls the incident triggering a self-examination of the dynamics of victim, perpetrator and onlooker, and a desire to write a play that refused easy catharsis. He speaks of the text as a turning point in his craft, with an epilogue of confessional monologues that he fought to keep, and a taut, unsentimental tone to match the theme.

The play first moved from page to rehearsal room in Toluca. According to a UAEM study of the original production, En la tierra de los corderos was worked up across two Toluca seasons from September 2017 to June 2018 before a third, short Mexico City run. Those early efforts established the template: four teenage characters in a compressed time-frame, a black-box aesthetic, and a focus on performance choices rather than heavy scenography.

The text itself was published in 2018 by UAEM and Paso de Gato (Cuadernos de Dramaturgia Mexicana, no. 75), consolidating its place in contemporary Mexican theatre repertoires. That same cycle of development and recognition included support noted by reviewers from Casa de las Artes de San Agustín (Oaxaca) in 2016 and a finals berth for the Premio Nacional de Dramaturgia Joven Gerardo Mancebo del Castillo, which helped push the piece into a professional frame.

What the work is: four teenagers, a kidnapping, and a shrinking moral distance

Casas’s scenario is simple and loaded. Three classmates—Carmen, Sandra and Ulises—have endured humiliation and assaults from a fourth, René. When they engineer his kidnapping, masked as animals and seething with fear and bravado, power inverts and the line between the harmed and the harmful starts to blur. A 2018 Mexico City review at Teatro La Capilla described a stage often stripped to near-darkness, lighting used to score psychological beats, and a sound design that tightens the screws; masks (rat, bear and tiger) give the teens a bestial cover and complicate our reading of them. Those elements, the reviewer argued, let Casas’s text do the heaviest lifting while acting carried the rest.

Eight years on, the play’s description remains stark. For the September 2026 run the city’s cultural portal billed it as a piece that “does not offer easy answers” and uses “hidden faces” and an “aesthetic of darkness” to force an uncomfortable reckoning. La Jornada’s 30 August 2026 feature put the dramaturgical point plainly: the production makes the audience watch as “victims and victimisers begin to dissolve into one another”, and invites a kind of investigative attention—“the public becomes a sort of police”—as those on stage betray each other and themselves.

How they got here: from Toluca to La Capilla and back out on the road

The Toluca laboratory of 2017–2018 gave way to three concrete steps that have shaped the play’s present standing. First, the La Capilla season in Coyoacán in May–June 2018 brought the work into the capital’s independent-theatre bloodstream, with a review praising Enrique Aguilar’s tight direction and the lighting-and-sound grammar as congruent with the text’s severity. Second, publication by UAEM/Paso de Gato in 2018 put an authoritative script into circulation, used in subsequent stagings and teaching contexts. Third, in 2025, director Brian Smythe Mendoza and Compañía Espejo de Hueso began touring a new adaptation oriented to “jóvenes audiencias”, picking up state-backed producing support.

That 2025 staging was visible in Durango on 8 November at the Teatro de la Juventud, with a cast led by Noemí Mendiola, Josselyn Palacios and Raymundo Rodríguez, and a familiar creative spine: Smythe as adaptor/director and lighting designer, Erik Martínez on set, Alejandro Mier on sound, and Anna Herrera on wardrobe. The project appears in the federal Results for Production Projects 2025 under Durango, naming Smythe as responsible lead—an administrative line that helps explain the piece’s mobility across state circuits into 2026.

Who’s making it now: the Espejo de Hueso team and their brief

The September 2026 Mexico City performances at Foro A Poco No, administered by the Sistema de Teatros de la Ciudad de México, were again led by Smythe Mendoza for Compañía Espejo de Hueso. La Jornada’s preview set out the team: Mendiola, Palacios and Smythe on stage; Martínez (scenography/photography), Mier (sound design), Herrera (costume), with acting advice from Enrique Longoria, technical advice from José Ángel Soto and music from Leonel Olvera. The paper also noted Smythe’s own writing credits (El silencio de Júpiter; Baño de niñas) and his experience as an actor across more than 30 works, while flagging the production’s deliberate pitch to young audiences.

Casting details underline where this iteration sits in the project’s lifecycle. Palacios’s role in 2026 marked her debut as an actor, as reported by La Jornada, a reminder that the show doubles as a proving ground for performers taking on morally exposed material. Mendiola’s path through work for children and early-years audiences, performance art and theatre gives the trio range; Smythe’s dual placement as director-performer makes the staging’s severity feel chosen rather than incidental.

Right now: dates, venue and terms of engagement

En la tierra de los corderos ran at Foro A Poco No from Thursday 3 to Sunday 6 September 2026. Public listings and the cultural portal aligned on the schedule: Thursday–Friday at 20:00, Saturday at 19:00, Sunday at 18:00. Ticketing was handled through the venue and Ticketmaster’s Mexico site, where the production appeared on the venue page’s events-of-the-weekend list on 4–6 September. Mexicoescultura’s activity page slotted each performance into two-hour windows, reflecting the programme timings.

Foro A Poco No matters to how the work reads in the room. It is a compact, city-run black box tucked onto República de Cuba 49 in the Centro Histórico. Academic documentation on the venue describes a space that seats 50–70 under normal conditions, with three rake levels and a simple technical grid; the scale suits the show’s close-quarters tension and the sense that the audience are placed face-to-face with adolescents doing harm. The theatre’s civic mandate to host alternative and youth-facing work also aligns with the company’s stated aim.

What it feels like live: immersion by inches, and a moral trap

On this Espejo de Hueso staging, the show begins before the lights. Event guides describe an ambient sound bed audible as audiences approach, and a performer who steps forward in the foyer to give instructions before inviting entry. Once inside, spectators are folded into the setup as ‘silent witnesses’. The characters look them in the eye and even address them, but never break the fiction to enrol them; the device holds the spectators at the edge of complicity. It matches La Jornada’s description of an audience piecing together clues as the teenagers’ pact begins to split.

On stage, the 2018 review remains a reliable map for design logic that endures in 2025–2026: masks that dehumanise and protect, a deliberately bare set that shifts attention to behaviour, and lighting and sound that shape a ‘no-exit’ mood rather than decorate it. Smythe’s team keeps faith with that grammar. The 2025 Durango report also confirms the animal-mask imagery (bear, tiger, rat) and the production’s readiness to present ugly choices without softening them for school-age viewers. In Mexico City the two-hour scheduling blocks and the absence of interval reported in listings support the impression of a single, tightening arc rather than a segmented evening.

Spoken reactions in the 2018 cycle emphasised the piece’s willingness to show teenagers as contradictory and frightening, and to deny the idea that retribution heals. In 2026, institutional previews adopt a similar tone: En la tierra de los corderos is presented less as a ‘problem play’ with an instructional message than as a framed moral trap in which young characters and the people watching them are asked to account for themselves.