MEXICO CITY’S Concordia, a restaurant doubling as a playhouse, introduced me to Mexican theatre. As I approached the place, several young people were milling about on the street in front, including a huge ruffian with a black eye. Spotting him, I thought that excursions to the Mexican stage were perhaps not for me. But, suddenly, he pushed open the door and jumped into the restaurant, the others rushing after him. My ruffian and his friends were actors waiting for their cues during the evening’s first performance of Las cosas simples (The Simple Things), a play by a twenty-seven-year-old Mexican, Hector Mendoza.

Inside, watching the second performance, I discovered that mistaking actors for spectators was part of the production’s charm. The play was about life in a diner near a college, and the Concordia looked just like that. The actors performed around a luncheon counter and five tables in front, while the audience munched their supper and followed the play from the other twenty-five tables. At times the actors moved into the audience to borrow a napkin or ask for a match — on one occasion, to kiss a bald patron on the head. The Concordia and Las cosas simples, which evoked a Saroyanesque atmosphere, are not entirely typical of Mexican theatre, but they offered a promise that the Mexican stage bristled with vitality. Several weeks of theatre-going have fulfilled that promise.

Less than ten years ago, Mexico City had only three theatres, offering a smattering of the world’s drama, mostly Spanish classics, rarely anything native. Now there are about thirty theatres, many of them comfortable, well-equipped, modern houses. On any night, I had a choice of fifteen to twenty plays. During 1958, producers offered fifty-five professional shows, thirteen by Mexican playwrights, eight by Spanish and, in translation, ten by French, nine by American and eight by English. Italian and Dutch plays were also performed. A spot check of attendance six years ago revealed the dismal total of 14,000 people attending all the city’s theatres in a three-month period. A recent survey for the same period showed a total “house” of 450,000.

Three factors have triggered this dramatic spurt. A middle class has emerged out of Mexico’s stability in the past few decades, and it is willing to buy tickets for a wide variety of plays: Shakespeare and French bedroom farces, Arthur Miller and young Mexican writers, The House of Bernarda Alba and Make a Million. In the late forties, a pair of producers opened a clean, comfortable, intimate basement theatre, which seated eighty. It attracted the new audience, the idea caught on, and small theatres began popping up throughout the city. And, perhaps most important, at about the same time the government set up the National Institute of Fine Arts, which has built larger theatres, formed an acting school, encouraged young playwrights and mounted some of the country’s most skilled productions.

ACTIVE craftsmen, not political hacks, direct the government’s hand. I had a talk one morning with fifty-five-year-old Salvador Novo, the head of the institute’s theatre department — a tall, affable, nattily-dressed man, who is an active playwright, director and translator, both for government and commercial theatre. Thirty years ago he and other young stage people formed a small, avant-garde theatre that tried to tear Mexico away from its Spanish classic tradition. They failed then, but Novo has not forgotten his youthful experience and, from his government position, he continually encourages young Mexican playwrights and directors to break new ground.

Novo is glibly optimistic about the future of Mexican drama. He believes that two playwrights, thirty-five-year-old Sergio Magana and thirty-four-year-old Emilio Carballido, are good enough to have productions in New York, London or Paris. American plays have had the most influence on Magana and Carballido; they and the other young Mexican writers deal with the social problems of Mexico, not in the manner of social protesters but in the manner of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller. “It is the poetical treatment of vulgar subjects,” Novo said. He added that Mexican playwrights cannot support themselves on plays alone. They teach, act, direct and write for newspapers. On the other hand, the combined demand of theatre, movies and television has created a shortage of actors.

Novo feels that commercial theatre has a severe financial handicap in Mexico City. First of all, there is a government limit on price. No house can charge more than 14 pesos ($1.12) for a ticket. And there has been a steady increase in union wages, for both actors and stagehands. Even by offering two performances a night and keeping the budget for sets low, few producers make a profit. Yet new plays are launched almost every week. Who does the investing? “Crazy people,” Novo answered, “as in theatre everywhere.”

No play of Carballido was on the boards during my trip, but I did catch a revival of Magana’s Los signos del zodiac (The Signs of the Zodiac), which first startled Mexico City audiences eight years ago. Magana’s play was at the Teatro del Bosque, one of a complex of theatres recently built by the government in Chapultepec Park. Besides the Bosque, the group includes the 18,000-seat National Auditorium, a children’s theatre, a school of acting and the Granero, a 200-seat arena theatre, which was offering a brilliant production of N. Richard Nash’s The Rainmaker. The Bosque, which seats a little more than a thousand, has a large proscenium stage and rows of orchestra seats that ramp upward toward the back; there are no balconies. In general, the facades of these theatres are architecturally disappointing. They look bulky, hastily put together, like huge blocks of cement decorated here and there with plate glass and neon marquees. But inside the plants are efficient, comfortable and active.

Los signos del zodiac, which somewhat resembles Elmer Rice’s Street Scene, uncovers the interrelated lives of several neighbors living in one of Mexico City’s patio tenement houses. But the atmosphere is all Tennessee Williams: a caldron of love, youth, poverty, vulgarity, violence and symbolism. The actors performed realistically, without the bombast of the old Spanish theatre. At times they did seem to produce more emotion than would American actors in similar situations, but they were, after all, portraying Latins. Since this was a government show, the budget allowed an elaborate set designed by Julio Prieto. Action took place on several levels in the various cut-out, crowded apartments. All in all, I found the production, directed by Novo, moving and powerful, up to international standards of professional theatre. But a young, middle-class Mexican friend, who accompanied me, complained about the subject matter. “Very crude,” he said. Magana may be moving too fast for some members of his genteel audience.

FOR others he may be moving too slowly. “The Signs of the Zodiac was all right eight years ago,” Juan Jose Gurrola said in a tiny coffee shop one afternoon, “but we need something new now.” Gurrola is a twenty-four-year-old, cherub-faced student of architecture who has attracted attention with his direction of plays for the national university. The university offers theatre courses but has no theatre department; instead, it gives money to drama groups organized by the students themselves. Gurrola, who had had some professional acting experience, talked some of his fellow. architectural students into setting up a group. With university money, they present plays that receive as much notice from the city’s drama critics as do commercial shows. The critic in Excelsior had just described Gurrola’s direction as “antitheatre,” and the pleased young director said that the word classified his work perfectly. He was trying to break down traditional forms and create something new. Something new, he quickly added, for Mexico, not for the rest of the world, which had seen his techniques years before in the works of such playwrights as Ionesco.

Since the university’s new theatre had not been completed, Gurrola’s group was presenting two short plays by twenty-nine-year-old Hector Azar at El Caballito, a small, old, downtown house. La Appassionata told a tragic story in comic, exaggerated tones: a mother kills herself and her impoverished family by poisoning their dinner, thus prompting her oldest son, who had died years before, to return and take everyone home to live with him. Some of Gurrola’s effects included an unbalanced family dinner table that slopes upward so that the father can sit high and face the audience, clown-like make up, a speeded-up recording of La Traviata as background music, and the entrance and exit of the actors through the set’s painted furniture to create the atmosphere of an overcrowded home. Gurrola used a different style for the second play, El alfarero (The Potter), which, by a maze of flashbacks, describes the life of a peasant born of an unwed mother. Veiled in shadow, the set, although naturalistic, comprises props for three scenes: the shack of the peasant, the pulpit of a church and the bedroom of the mother. I found the play dark, heavy-handed and confusing.

Although Gurrola advertised his plays for the general public, the audience had more sweaters than suits; it included almost no one but students. At other theatres, I found that Mexico City playgoers generally are young, middle class and fashionable, very similar to the crowds at New York’s off-Broadway theatres. There are exceptions. The small audience that came to see Fernando Soler in a tepid comedy seemed older than the others, perhaps because Soler, the dean of Mexican actors, had amassed his following over many years. And, surprisingly, the huge crowd at Mi bella dama, the Spanish version of My Fair Lady, had many people of a lower economic class; whole families attended, including sleeping fathers and chattering children. The music of this American show apparently has filtered to all parts of Mexican society.

But the touchstone of Mexican theatre, of course, lies in Mexican plays by Mexican writers, Allan Lewis, a teacher of playwrighting in Mexico City, recently wrote that these writers “have a sort of pre-Renaissance quality... paving the way for a Marlowe or a Ben Jonson.” Lewis’ description fits the atmosphere perfectly, for Mexican theatre has a sense of turbulence and vitality, and even, perhaps, future greatness.

STANLEY MEISLER is a Washington newspaper man and occasional contributor to critical and political journals.