Sobreviví al Apocalipsis Zombi

Written from the inside out

The full title is a joke that collapses under its own length: Sobreviví al apocalipsis zombi y lo único que traje fue esta perra obra — I survived the zombie apocalypse and all I brought back was this wretched play. Behind it sits a one-performer piece from Mexico City in which Lucía, a young artist, shelters in her mother's house when an outbreak begins. Her younger sister, Estrella, starts to suspect that their mother's husband is quietly turning into one of the dead. Then Estrella disappears, and Lucía has to decide what surviving actually requires.

The work is written and performed by Renée Sabina, who co-directs it with Minah Cerviño, and it is produced by Mazapán Producciones. It was developed with backing from the SACPC Creadores Escénicos programme in 2022, and the material comes out of Sabina's own family history, reworked rather than reported — the festival copy that introduced it to audiences in 2024 described a journey through personal history handled with humour and tenderness, naming Mariana Enriquez and Mary Shelley as reference points. Both are useful markers: Enriquez for domestic horror written from a woman's vantage, Shelley for the monster somebody in the house has made.

The title does a lot of work before the lights go up. It borrows the shape of a souvenir T-shirt slogan and drops an apocalypse where the holiday should be, which sets the register — catastrophe treated as something a person comes home from with a bad gift and a story. The piece is filed as a monologue and as comedy, and it is funny in places, but the genre machinery is load-bearing rather than decorative.

October 2024: the Invasión Zombie season

Its best-documented outing came inside a month-long season at Teatro La Capilla in Coyoacán called Invasión Zombie. The festival ran from 1 to 30 October 2024 and gathered four young dramatists around one conceit: the zombie as a way of talking about the quieter horrors of modern life, with the programme notes pointing at female oppression, gender violence, depression and institutional corruption. Sabina's solo opened her strand on 6 October in the Sala Novo, La Capilla's smaller room. Sofía Gabriel's Mamá zombie played on 1 October; Manya Loría's Carne de cañón and Rocío antes del fin del mundo and Aarón Zamora's Zombie shared 23 and 30 October. Tickets went through Boletópolis.

The 2024 run was billed as a reestreno rather than a premiere, so the piece had already had at least one life before it, and its entry in the Cartelera de Teatro CDMX database dates from 2023. What the festival added was a frame: not a novelty horror slot, but a curated argument that several writers were reaching for the same monster at the same time.

Three women and the man in the house

A review published on 8 October 2024, two days after the La Capilla opening, gives the clearest account of what happens on stage. Sabina carries three women — Lucía, the sister and the mother — with the stepfather present as the pressure the three of them live under rather than as a fourth body. The reviewer read the piece as being about how hard the relationships between a mother, a daughter and above all two sisters become when all three are permanently subordinate to a man who is not, in the end, family. The same account describes a narrative that moves outward through the suburban edges of the country, and a tonal range taking in laughter, tears, anger and sincere stretches of reflection.

That is the mechanism. The outbreak outside is never the threat the play is interested in; the transformation that matters is happening indoors, slowly, in front of people who have reasons not to name it. Published descriptions of the work are explicit about the metaphor — everyday and gender-based violence lurking inside the home — which is unusually direct for something sold under a comedy heading, and it explains why the horror and the jokes sit inside the same scenes instead of alternating.

Where it stands at the end of October 2026

The most recent performances were not at La Capilla. The piece spent its last weekend at Foro A Poco No, the 43-seat cabaret room at República de Cuba 49 in the Centro Histórico, with functions on Friday 23 October 2026 at 8pm, Saturday 24 October at 7pm, and a third and final performance on Sunday 25 October for which the two main listings give different start times. Tickets were 235 pesos. Cartelera de Teatro CDMX now lists the production as out of repertory with 25 October 2026 as the closing date, and nothing is on sale anywhere.

A return is not currently scheduled. When Teatro La Capilla published the results of its 2026 programming call — 50 works selected for artistic quality, solidity of proposal and commitment to the independent scene — this one was not among them, so the stage that gave it a month-long frame in 2024 is not the obvious next home. No listing announces a further season, a run outside Mexico City or a filmed version.

That leaves the piece in the condition much independent Mexican work occupies between runs: finished, reviewed well enough to be worth restaging, and dependent on a venue, a festival or a grant round to exist again. The 2022 development money and the 2024 festival both came from that kind of structure, which makes the next programming call a better thing to watch than any announcement from the production itself.

A show built for 43 seats

The scale explains the pattern. This is a piece for one performer in rooms holding a few dozen people, so it can appear for a single weekend, vanish, and come back two years later without a company having to be reassembled. At 235 pesos it also sat at the cheap end of the city's independent theatre: in the same month, La Capilla was asking 250 pesos for Odio a los putos mexicanos, 350 for Perras and El Plan, and 400 for Masa Madre and Tierra Baldía.

Foro A Poco No is a cabaret venue first, and the October slot fits its habit. The room followed the zombie monologue with Necrópolis Cabaret: Hay muertos todo el año on 29 and 30 October 2026, also at 235 pesos, before moving on to Échame a mí la culpa (y todo lo que quieras) across November at 258.50. A solo horror-comedy about the man in the house belongs on that bill in a way it would not on a larger stage.

What is not published anywhere is the running time. Neither the venue listing nor the city's theatre database gives a duration, and neither mentions an interval; for a single-performer monologue in a 43-seat room the practical answer is one unbroken sitting, but the number itself is not on record.