Killing of a Gentleman Defender

In some rooms he’s Martin. In others he’s Martín. Hired by a well-funded arts institution on Chicago’s Northside to create a show with Chicago youth about violence on the Southside, Marteen finds himself torn not only by the pronunciation of his name, but by the conflicting needs of the institution and the young people it believes its “serving,” and by a city in a death struggle with its own divided self. Reaching into his own history, he unearths, with his young ensemble, the story of the 1994 murder of soccer star Andres Escobar in Medellín, Colombia, hoping a past-tense allegory of violence in a deeply divided, faraway city will illuminate violence in the deeply divided Chicago of today. Carlos Murillo’s brilliant, rigorous play is haunted and haunting, its meticulously rendered ghosts layered one atop another like history, like lace.