Eyes for Consuela

Actors Theatre of Houston presents Sam Shepard’s Eyes for Consuela, a stage adaptation of The Blue Bouquet by Octavio Paz. The play begins with a disheveled, middle-aged Henry waking from a nightmare into the dreamlike reality of remote Mexico, a torpid limbo. Henry is a lost soul from the American middle-class who has abandoned his wife in snowbound Michigan and finds himself alone in a vine-shrouded “hotel” among lizards, snakes, and ghosts. He wanders the underbrush, and is confronted by a menacing figure bearing a machete and a slender knife which he plans to use to cut the eyes out of Henry’s head and present them as a penitent offering of “a bouquet of blue eyes” to the bewitching Consuela. There’s just one problem…Henry’s eyes are brown, or are they? In a duel of pathos, humor, cruelty, and metaphor, each man examines what has taken him from the woman he loves and what desperate sacrifice must be made in order to reunite him with her.