Interview: MEXODUS Director David Mendizábal on Blending a Social, Political Message and Performance

Mexodus is an original live-looped musical written and performed by Brian Quijada and Nygel D. Robinson, has been extended for a second and final time at Audible’s Minetta Lane Theatre in New York City. The new musical, which shares the story of the Underground Railroad that ran South into Mexico, will now play through Sunday, November 1.

BroadwayWorld spoke with director David Mendizábal about what it means for the company to bring this lesser-known history to the stage, the process of live-looping, and much more! Read the full interview here. 

Mexodus highlights a lesser-known story of the Underground Railroad, the southward path into Mexico. What has it meant to you as a director to help bring this mostly untold history to the stage?

When I first got the call from Liz Carlson at New York Stage and Film, I’d been following Brian and Nygel and the work, and seeing the music videos online. But I don’t think I'd put together the full story. So, when she called me and she was like, “Yeah, they’re working on this piece about the Underground Railroad that led south, my first reaction was, ‘I don’t know about this, why don’t I know about this?’ And my second reaction was, ‘Well, yeah, that makes a lot of sense.’ So, it was both this moment of, ‘Oh, this is a part of history that we don’t know,' but also 'It’s kind of wild that we don’t know it,' because of course there would be these pathways. And of course, if you look at the history of Mexico and abolishing slavery before the United States, there are all of these reasons why this story makes sense.

I think for me as a director, I’ve always been interested in uplifting stories of underserved communities, black and brown stories, queer stories, stories you don’t get to see on our stages. And most of the time, for me, that has been about representation, we go and see these bodies on stage. But, this was an opportunity to tell a story about a part of our history that we don’t see, in a particular moment in time where history and our American history is being challenged, especially the narratives of black and brown people are being erased.

And you are working with these two amazing artists, Brian and Nygel, can you tell me what the collaborative process has been like with them?

They’re truly amazing, and the development of the show has mirrored the development of their relationship. They only met once in February of 2020 before the world shut down. And then Brian was invited by Liz and New York Stage and Film to commission something, and he had been sitting on this idea, because he had read this story about the Underground Railroad that led south, and he knew he couldn’t do it alone.

When I joined in 2021, it was myself and [Mikhail] Mischa Fiksel, our sound designer, we joined at the same time. And the big challenge was, “Can we even play this live?” It had been written to be played live, but it had always been sent back and forth, recorded to each other. And once Brian and Nygel figured out they could, the next question for Mischa was, “How do we make the looping integral to the storytelling?

A lot of times I’d seen looping, it was people stuck behind a machine. And Mischa was like, “We can turn the whole stage into a looping machine.” And so, that first meeting was a meeting of planting the seeds of possibility of what would evolve over five years, while Brian and Nygel learned what they wrote. They knew they had this beautiful story, but throughout the process—we had three productions of it at four different theaters now, Baltimore Center Stage, Mosiac, Berkeley, and now Audible—it’s continued to find itself in terms of story.

Throughout the process I was really interested in them bringing more of their personal narratives to the piece, and finding the porousness between this story that took place in 1851, but also feels so potently about right now, and about the moment in which they were writing the piece, and are living it. And how do we bring those two together? So, it was a lot of joyful inquiry into what they were working on, learning what the story was, learning who these characters are, really trying to focus the story on Carlos and Henry, the two characters that they play.

Live-looping on stage isn’t a common thing to see in theatre! I’m curious about why that was the best vehicle musically for this show.

Nygel was not a looper before he met Brian. They met at an actor/musician conference, and Brian is a looping purist, his goal is to build a looping army and change the sound of American theatre, and Nygel is on board with that. When I first met them, I had seen looping, I was familiar with it from a distance, but when I was interviewed I was like, “I really don’t know that much about it,” and they were like, “Great!” And I was like, “Oh... okay!”

And that was the challenge for them! Brian and Nygel, they wanted it to be integral, they wanted it to not feel like a gimmick, it shouldn’t feel like, ‘This is fun, but I’d rather just see it with a band.’ They needed someone who maybe didn’t know it as well as they did to communicate it to an audience. And so, that’s where I came in. Brian, Nygel and Mischa, they know everything about looping, and they geek out, but as an audience member you’re like, “Wait that’s not interesting if I don’t know what you’re doing."  And what we started to realize is this story is about work, and the work of solidarity-building. They say at the beginning, "Go ahead and stare at us, we’re two bodies." It is about these two bodies working together to make something bigger than themselves. They work together to help each other find a sense of liberation in a moment in time where they felt like they did not have that.

And so, the looping became this visual, aural metaphor, and you see it happening on stage. You see these two bodies, and you see them build something bigger than any one of them could probably do on their own. Or, if they did it would be a lot harder, and a lot longer, and a lot less exciting. In the first half of the play we really met Henry, Nygel’s character, and it seems like a one-person show almost, but what you also see is that he cannot do his story without Brian helping to orchestrate and build the thing and tell the story that they’re telling. So, it really became this metaphor for work. Of what it means to come together, to work together, to build something bigger than your own sound.

And then I also think, looking at the metaphor of the loop, it feels like as a country we are stuck. Not that 1851 doesn’t feel different than 2025, but there are these parallels of oppression, and system, and cycles. And for us, the loop also became that metaphor. And music became the conduit with which we could transport through time. And so, through sound, and through the instrumentation that we had, we could take ourselves to 1851, we could bring ourselves to 2025, we could build this world sonically that helped us understand the loop of history, but also the labor and work that it takes to build solidarity amongst communities.

The production has already been extended twice at the Minetta Lane Theatre. How has it felt to witness the audience response?

As a theatre-maker, as a director, I’m always thinking about the relationship to an audience. And I think with this play, it does feel like it is such a reciprocal relationship. I don’t know how they do what they do on stage every night. But then I see how they are filled and fueled by an audience, and the wonderment of an audience witnessing what they are doing, and participating in this journey. They say, “This is a story we all will have to pass down by world of mouth,” and it feels that way. It feels like this is a kind of oral history that if they’re not going to write about it in the books, we have to share, and we have to uplift. We have to make sure people know of these moments of black and brown solidarity, of these moments of our own history, and not let them be erased. And so, that relationship to an audience feels so critical.

It's always thrilling when an audience is embracing a show, but I think with this one it feels really special because it’s bringing together people from all walks of life. It is providing some education, it is letting people know about a part of history that they maybe don’t know about, it is entertaining them, it is moving them, it’s inspiring, and uplifting, and joyful. For such a moment in time where the world feels so dark, and so heavy, and so bleak, and conversations around social justice feels so charged, it’s thrilling to be able to work on a piece that feels like it is balancing a real political, social message with an ingenuity of theatrical wonder, and being entertaining as hell. And being able to provide this moment of joyful release for an audience.

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