With their father away at war, Louisa May Alcott's 'Little Women' kept their spirits up by enacting 'The Pilgrim's Progress'. In Dirty Market's devised piece about the family of an absent revolutionary leader, the children play at guerilla warfare, their mother drilling them with a whistle in her mouth and fire in her eyes.
What does it mean to be a child of revolution, born amid the embers of big ideas? In a jungle hideaway that doubles as a Day of the Dead shrine and a shallow grave, the siblings subsist on memories of a father whose most palpable legacy is a chair no one's allowed to sit in.
Meanwhile, their mother is a sort of Latin American Mother Courage, sacrificing her children to a war in which her investment seems to be highly erotic. The scene that shows her seducing a wounded soldier with activist slogans tucked in her undies could be a theatrical grenade, given a stronger central performance. It isn't, quite. But at its best, this manic requiem of misdirected zeal is performed and directed with sharpness and hunger.