The Therapist by Gabriela Yepes Translated by Gigi Guizado

How do you look the enemy in the eye?
A human rights lawyer, accustomed to solving unwanted
cases, receives an unusual proposal: to organise a yoga
workshop for the leaders of Peru’s most notorious
terrorist groups. The men are serving life sentences in a
maximum-security prison since their arrest in the early
1990s. All prisoners have the right to rehabilitation. But
how do you teach wellbeing skills to the perpetrators of
the bloodiest civil conflict in contemporary Peruvian
history? Can those responsible for such suffering be
changed? To address these questions, the therapist
confronts a group of now aged, fragile-looking men,
who remain invisible on stage. The sheer act of standing
there, with the audience as witness, strengthens her
resolve to confront her own family history. The Therapist
is above all a settling of accounts with past demons. The
play takes us back in time through our protagonist’s early
years, marked by abandonment and solitude. A time
when violence stalked the country, as well as home.