La Mano: Tales of the End of the World

Based on a new published narrative anthology by Aravind Enrique Adyanthaya, La Mano centers on three stories of chaos, babel and beauty. In “Julia and the Jogger of Cemeteries,” an eight-year old girl who fervently believes in the end of the world is confronted by a jogger who runs through cemeteries thinking that the tombstones are as infinite as the world itself. In “Slaughterhouse,” the encounter of a mature man with a much younger man who implausibly affirms that they had studied together in grade school serves as a starting point for an exploration of memory and exquisite violence as they walk through phantasmagorical towns on a Caribbean island. Finally, “Readings from the Apocalypse” meta-theatrically presents a stage director who feels the century has not yet ended and tries to use matter (animate and inanimate) to achieve a staging of that point before the end.