'Yamel Cucuy' is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by Mexican folklore

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Set us as preferred The election of 2024 was a major letdown for many performers in “Yamel Cucuy,” which last played in Los Angeles just after President Trump won a second term in office.The very next morning, the cast soldiered on to perform a high school student matinee as part of the Latino Theater Company’s Encuentro festival, a celebration of contemporary Latino theater in the heart of L.A.The mood was morose, among both the cast and the students — but then the Austin-based production company Glass Half Full held an after-show talkback, engaging directly with the high schoolers.

As the name implies, Glass Half Full filters its work through a hopeful lens.Yes, the world is rife with problems — top of mind for many that day was the Trump administration’s assault on immigrants— but “Yamel Cucuy” offers potential solutions, as imaginative as they may be.Two years later, “Yamel Cucuy” is back in L.A.

and as timely as ever.Running through Nov.

1 at the Latino Theater Company, inside the Los Angeles Theatre Center in downtown L.A.’s Historic Core, the play follows a 13-year-old girl named Yamel (Diana Patricia Guizado) who is hunted by immigration agents and haunted by specters from Mexican folklore: the chupacabra, La Llorona, La Lechuza and El Viejo del Costal.It’s a story about borders, among them the frontier between life and death (at one point, Yamel journeys into Mictlan, the Aztec underworld).But it also folds in modern-day horrors, both literally and figuratively.

Yamel is a horror fan, bingeing scary movies in the apartment she shares with her older brother (Gustavo Martinez) and aunt (Minerva Villa) as she waits for them to get home after school.“As a director, I thought: What horror movies do is provoke that fear in you,” said Caroline Reck, who also co-wrote the play.“I don’t w...