Mérida Theater Festival Closes With a Gender-Flipped ‘Hamlet’

A contemporary retelling of Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” that hands the story over to Ophelia closed out Mérida’s 12th Teatro de la Rendija Festival, capping a run that’s put gender roles and violence against women at the center of the stage.

“Sobre Ofelia, una flor,” written by Fernanda del Monte and directed by Alberto Ontiveros, relocates Shakespeare’s tragedy to northern Mexico, though the play makes clear it could unfold almost anywhere in the country. Rather than the passive figure of the original text, this Ophelia, played by Fe Rangel, gets a voice of her own. She sings banda music, speaks her mind bluntly, and refuses the role of tragic victim that the story usually hands her.

The production, staged for the final time last night by Gorguz Teatro, doesn’t let Hamlet (José Olivares) or his friend Horacio (Emmanuel Pichardo Caballero) off easy either. Both characters are stripped of their heroic sheen on stage, their contradictions laid bare as revenge turns them, in the script’s words, into little more than predators.

That framing gives the play a wider resonance beyond its Shakespearean source. At one point, Hamlet — Ophelia’s onetime lover and eventual executioner — leaves a flower on her grave and reflects: “We see the news, we see the deaths, we see the mothers, we see the bones, and here we are, you and I, so calm, talking.” It’s a line that ties Ophelia’s fate to Mexico’s own reckoning with disappearances and violence against women.

Ophelia gets the closing word, too, refusing the redemption arc often written for the men who wrong women like her. “The truth is, I’m afraid you’ll make me come back,” she sings. “Don’t promise you’ll change, because you want to return to my arms.”

Sunday’s show at Teatro de la Rendija’s Sede A was the play’s final performance as part of Iberoamérica en Escena, the international arm of this year’s festival.

The play arrived at a moment when Mérida’s performance scene has increasingly leaned into work that blurs the line between fiction and lived experience, and La Rendija — the company behind the venue hosting tonight’s show — has built its three-decade reputation on exactly that kind of boundary-pushing theater.

With reporting from Por Esto!