A long, long time ago—the ‘90s—in a Walmart far, far away, Erica, our Hero of Ages Lost, pushes her shopping cart—that most sacred ancient vessel of capitalism—through the aisles of a memory play. american (tele)visions is an explosive collision between the American Dream and the American Nightmare—the story of an undocumented Mexican family.

With singular wit and pathos, NYTW Tow Playwright-in-Residence Victor I. Cazares creates an epic multiverse where time is fluid and the characters are refracted through literal televisions, imagined video games, endless Walmart aisles, and a double-wide torn in two. NYTW Usual Suspect Rubén Polendo, founding artistic director of Theater Mitu, directs the multi-media production which includes live performance, live camera feeds and pre-recorded video.

A co-production with New York Theatre Workshop

Houses hold histories, memories, and secrets—whether small or large, whether rented or owned—our homes are a vital part of who we are. In a moment of mass migration and displacement, Theater Mitu upends Anton Chekhov’s 1903 text The Cherry Orchard to explore how families across the globe must again and again find ways to redefine the idea of home. Interjecting Nobuhiko Obayashi’s 1977 cult horror film HOUSE, text from company conducted interviews, and live music, this technology driven work creates a detailed portrait of what we value, what haunts us, and what gives us the courage to move forward.

Held hostage by their past, a family grapples with failure, worth and a world closing in around them. In this hyper-theatrical production, human beings become objects, music carries the memory of days long gone, and a life is reduced to a mortgage.

Theater Mitu’s staging of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman  explores a landscape of unrealized hopes and asks what happens when you are written out of the American Dream.

Imagine Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been buried in a mass grave with its predecessors, Saxo Grammaticus’ Amleth, Belleforest’s Hamlet and the originating Scandinavian mythologies of this epic (known as the UR-Hamlet). Among all of these buried bodies of text live the memories of death, madness, revenge, compassion, and love that plague the human existence. Now imagine Theater Mitu unearths this grave.

Resisting a traditional staging of Hamlet, Theater Mitu investigates these remains as material that amplifies, explores and wrestles with what it is to be born, to truly live and to die. Part installation, part theater, part rock concert— the piece both harmonizes with and revolts against Hamlet’s narratives, languages and histories. Theater Mitu challenges the boundaries between classical adaptation and contemporary performance with this site-specific, hyper-theatricalized production.

As globalization moved forward in this past decade, blurring and yet accentuating national borderlands, one city – Cd. Juárez – emerged in 2008 as the “Murder Capital of the World.” Directly across the Mexican-American border, El Paso,TX has branded itself as the “Safest Large City in America.” Led by Juárez-born-and-raised Founding Artistic Director Rubén Polendo, and drawn by the vortex of questions within and around Cd. Juárez, Theater Mitu’s company members traveled to the region five times in 2012 and 2013, conducting research and interviewing citizens on both sides of the border. “JUÁREZ: A Documentary Mythology,” based on an archive of hundreds of hours of interviews, has emerged as an exploration of this border community’s memories from the past, both recent and distant, and hopes for the future, near and far.

Heart Piece is an international performance project in collaboration with renowned Mongolian vocal artist Nominjin and Theater Mitu that explores the many expressions of love in the differing cultural climates of America and Mongolia.  As Mongolia transforms due to unprecedented profit from mining windfall, ideas of the “American dream” encourages its citizens to continually reinvent themselves, for better and for worse. Thus creating a tectonic shift in ancient belief systems that have historically stabilized this landscape.  The changes affect gender, family roles, marriage, work roles; but at the core, it affects beliefs around the subject of love. Theater Mitu is interested in asking, what becomes of love and the human heart in such unstable cultural landscapes? How do superstitions, beliefs, and traditions survive amidst such rapid change? The answers to these questions serve as the foundation for this performance project.

HEARTPIECE is the first international performance collaboration with Mitu actors and a foreign collaborator. Inspired by East German writer Heiner Müeller’s theater text Herzstück (Heart Piece), and incorporating compositional theories of Mongolian Long Song, American love songs, and rigorous physicality, this expressionistic piece creates a vivid panorama of love across borders.

The culmination of this project premiered at the Black Box Theater in the capital city of Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia.  It then traveled to Mongolia’s second-largest city, Erdenet, with support from the US State Department.