Sweets from the Aztecs

‘Time for Chocolate’ debuts at Nightingale Theater

“The play is about my daughters’ ancestors: an homage to a heritage passed down through many generations—and now to my family as well,” Bruce Dean Willis said. “I’ve been fascinated by the history, culture and languages of Mexico for over half my life.”

Willis is Professor of Spanish and Comparative Literature at The University of Tulsa. His play, “Time for Chocolate,” will debut with Heller Theatre Company starting October 6 at Nightingale Theater.

Willis based the play off of the “Cantares Mexicanos,” a collection of 16th-century songs housed in the National Library of Mexico. The original texts were recorded in Nahuatl, a picture language of the Mesoamerican people, and eventually translated into Spanish.

Set in the late 15th century, the play takes place in an Aztec-influenced culture located several hundred miles from modern-day Mexico City. In the play, city-state leaders come together to celebrate the arts and pay respect to the initiation of the ruler’s son into adulthood.

“Time for Chocolate” is directed by David Blakely, director of the Theatre Program at Rogers State University and the resident playwright at Heller.

“The day after the gathering, the son will go off to war,” Blakely said. “It’s the last chance for the ruler to help his son understand that the world is bigger than he thinks it is. In that way it’s a very relatable story for contemporary audiences. We all want our children to understand the world they’ll have to live in.”

The play is built on spectacle, ritual, and a richness of language based in the poetry of the time, called “flower-song.” The celebration is enhanced by the sharing of a hallucinogenic chocolate drink used to induce visions and help create ecstatic poetry.

“Chocolate was a critical element of the Aztec culture,” Willis said. “Where they lived is too far up in the highlands to grow cacao. They had to get it from the lowlands, so they were constantly expanding their empire to take over those lowlands. They would get cacao from those they conquered and use it as money and for ritual observances.”

The play presents a philosophical view on the nature of living in uncertain times.

“‘We’re only here for a moment,’ is a statement made in one of the poems,” Willis said. “‘We’re only flowers’ is another. When I started fleshing out the play I realized that this is a little peek at something that was destroyed. It was an entire kind of worldview that the Spaniards set out to decimate. To me it seems like this precious time capsule.”

Time for Chocolate
October 6–7 and 13–14, 7:30 p.m. | Nightingale Theater, 1416 E. 4th St.
918-609-0482 for tickets and information