Orfeo Group Theatre Company : Productions : Marisol

About the Show

The production was directed by Sarah Golden Martin and featured many familiar young Boston actors: Risher Reddick, Elizabeth Hayes, Georgia Lyman, Daniel Berger-Jones, Ramona L. Alexander and Cristina Miles as Marisol Perez. Orfeo Member Caleb Jon Magoon designed the lighting. José Rivera's OBIE Award-winning play MARISOL follows Marisol Perez, a Puerto Rican Everywoman, through a turbulent world all the more harrowing for its connections to our own. When her guardian Angel deserts her to wage war on a dying God, Marisol is left alone to fend for herself on the streets of New York. As she journeys from the Bronx to Brooklyn, she faces neo-Nazis, spiritual restlessness, a diseased and dying world and the inescapable need to rise up and fight. A magically realistic work of stark beauty and absurd humor, Rivera's penetrating vision holds up a twisted mirror to reality, revealing a simultaneously thrilling and dangerous world.

“In its maiden effort, Orfeo has pulled together some of the best young actors in town. As a whole, the ensemble is certainly among the strongest of the year, and deserves IRNE and Norton nominations. ”
– Boston critic about Orfeo's inaugural production of Jose Rivera's MARISOL

Director's Notes:

"And that's what you have to do...You have to fight. You can't endure anymore. You can't trust luck or prayer or mercy or other people...You have to get yourself some power, Marisol, whatever you do."
It is a difficult time. A time of destruction and degradation, of genocide, disease and war. Turning on the news, we can't help but feel helpless and lost and as though there has never been a time like this before. Yet history tells us otherwise.
But all is not lost. How could it be? For the times of mayhem have also brought us works of beauty and the era of Hitler was also the era of Chagall and Messiaen. These same bodies capable of cruelty and ruin are also built with a great capacity for creation and strength.
The world of Marisol is a terrible one, conceived by a playwright on the eve of the new millennium. With images of Nazi Skinheads and ominous windowless brick buildings in Brooklyn the most dangerous element in Rivera's post-apocalyptic New York is a prevailing apathy to the changing world. This play urges us away from our "boring 9 to 5 jobs...[our] intellectual detachment" and into a new kind of understanding.
We tell stories to challenge one another. We forcibly propel ourselves through this post-911 world, tightening our grip on hope and clinging to the notion that stories and experiences like Marisol's will allow us to remember our humanity and compassion.

Marisol

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