Listen to the Mothers

This is material that Ruskin knows well. She has always made annual trips to Argentina, but it wasn’t until later in life that she realized what was happening there. Because she comes from one of Argentina’s more affluent families, she was at first oblivious, but like the lead character in I Hear, Ruskin didn’t stay silent for long. “I actually really became politically aware from Chilean acquaintances that protested their government,” says Ruskin, who admits that it sometimes takes a personal connection for people to become proactive.

Ruskin, now the artistic director of ASA Productions, writes in their newsletter: “I Hear began five years ago as an assignment for a professional performers collective I belonged to. We were asked to submit a ten-minute play on the theme of water. As we were driving up to Connecticut for a visit, the thought that spit was a form of water literally popped into my brain. In 1980, when I was 16, I wrote a poem while in Argentina about the repression and the disappeared called, Oigo (I Hear in English). The last line of that poem is: ‘Freedom drowning in the spit of a tyrant’…In the next 20 minutes I wrote a rough draft of my ten-minute play.” When asked how dangerous was it to write such a poem in 1980, Adina laughs and says, “I never had it published! In fact, I didn’t show it to anybody.”

In mounting the show, what was important to Ruskin had to become important to the cast. She made sure that they fully researched everything to do with the story, including a cast viewing of the Argentine movie about the kidnappings called The Official Story and the reading of The Lexicon of Terror and Circle of Life.

Although the characters in the play were fictitious, everything about them had to be real. In 1986, while on a three-month visit in Argentina, Ruskin conducted a series of interviews with young people who shared their stories. She later interviewed survivors here in the U.S. The stories in I Hear are an amalgamation of those stories, as well as her own.

At the conclusion of the play, the curtains open to reveal a “wall of memories”–a mural of hundreds of pictures of the nearly 30,000 missing. Ruskin was given permission to copy them from the Mother’s website, with one caveat: that they use no names. “They said that they shouldn’t be separated, they were all of Argentina’s children.”

Adina Ruskin and ASA Productions have high hopes of an extended commercial run, but only so that they may share these stories with as many people as possible. As one of the characters in the play says to another, and as Ruskin echoes to me later on, “You can’t bury grief without a story.”