Powerful Butterflies at Northwestern’s Wirtz

Northwestern University is famous as a theatrical artist training ground, and the Wirtz season is often chosen by what will provide student actors with a meaningful learning experience. A university affiliated drama program can afford to take risks and can devote significant resources to productions that might be too risky for a free standing theatre.  This provides significant benefit for the community: audiences can see budding talents and experience dynamite shows that might be difficult to experience live otherwise. 

Such is the case with In the Time of the Butterflies, a play by Caridad Svich based on the novel by the same name by Julia Alvarez which is briefly on stage at the Josephine Louis Theatre on Northwestern’s Evanston campus.  The play and novel portray a fictional account of the lives of the Mirabal sisters, famous resistors and martyrs against the dictator of the Dominican Republic, Rafael Trujillo known as “El Jefe”.

As you enter the theatre you are part of a lively tropical village with greenery and an an ice stand filling the small lobby, and there are cafe tables and villagers reading papers and shouting over the audience at each other. Lux Vargas plays the surviving sister Dedé, whose bond with her sisters is as strong as her survivor’s guilt.  Clarisa Gómez Rodrígues plays the born resistance fighter Minerva. Sarah Villamil Hurtado’s faith filled Patria makes her martyrdom a spiritual redemption and Alexa Núñez Magñana plays Maria Teresa known as Mate from child to hardened fighter with weapons in her backpack. The cast handles this exquisitely challenging story of national trauma in a beautiful and touching way, but the story of how Trujillo had them murdered will leave you shaken to the core. 

Juan José Castaño Márquez who serves as dramaturg for the production states in his notes that his job is to ask questions including why is this play important now.  As we sink into authoritarianism and tyranny it is important to look unflinchingly at how that has played out in other times and nations. The director Mariana Parejo Molinares asks us to “recognize together that this story is not as distant from us as we might wish to believe”

I also think it is important to note how women throughout history have challenged authority and fought for freedom and justice and the Mirabal sisters join a distinguished list of women who have given their lives in defiance of tyranny. Their stories are less often told than those of the men. 

In the Time of the Butterflies is playing 5/23 through 5/30, 2026 at Josephine Louis Theater at 20 Circle Drive in Evanston Illinois. For tickets and information go to https://wirtz.northwestern.edu/in-the-time-of-the-butterflies/

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