Color Theories

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Julio Torres’ gently surreal worldview—an effervescent blend of melancholic whimsy, deadpan absurdism, and camp-infused introspection—will come as no surprise to those already acquainted with his growing body of work. Whether you were first seduced by the geometric reveries of his 2019 HBO special My Favorite Shapes, in which he delivered a monologue of uncanny emotional depth through a conveyor belt of inanimate objects, or found yourself charmed by the bureaucratic nightmare fantasia of his 2023 feature film Problemista, a genre-defying immigrant fable filtered through Dali-esque daydreams and Kafkaesque red tape, Torres has long positioned himself as a singular voice in contemporary art-comedy.

And by the time we arrive at Fantasmas—his 2024 HBO series that feels less like television and more like a guided tour through the psyche of a queer mystic armed with a glitter pen and a penchant for unresolved metaphor—it becomes abundantly clear that Torres is not dabbling in a style so much as building a universe. Color Theories, then, is not an outlier but an extension—another window into that universe, pastel-hued and ever-so-slightly haunted. But don’t call it a play—at least not in the Off Broadway sense. Call it a chromatic séance, a theatrical mood board, or perhaps a dispatch from the dreamworld of a lonely child with a glitter pen and a grudge against Helvetica.

Before a single word is spoken, we are plunged into that world unmistakably Torresian. The set (Tommaso Ortino, working in a register somewhere between pop-up book and postmodern dollhouse) opens like a tome read only by moonlight, with pages thick enough to climb into—literally, as Torres emerges from a hole in the book’s spine, crowned with a twitching antenna light and a salt-and-pepper wig that seems to have wandered out of a Dr. Seuss fever dream (Hair designer, Sean Bennett, take your bow!). He is preceded by two silent performers: Nick Meyers as a melancholic music box, and Drew Rollins as a pool of spilled wine—yes, you read that correctly—each rendered in Muriel Parra’s delightfully deranged sculptural costumes that redefine the boundaries of Off Broadway spectacle.

And then comes Torres delivering his opening line with a sheepish grin and a tone that suggests he’s about to confess to having accidentally set fire to the Museum of Modern Art. “I have heard that this is being referred to as an off-Broadway play,” he murmurs, immediately dismissing the notion with a coy shake of the head that feels equal parts toddler and trickster god. No, this is not a play. This is Torres offering us access to his “vastly unproven” theories of color, personality, and cultural semiotics—equal parts stand-up set, TED Talk, and whispered bedtime story.

What Color Theories purports to be—at least according to its creator and star—is not a play, not performance art, nor even a comedic monologue, but rather a lecture, a pedagogical offering from a most unconventional professor. And not just any lecture, mind you, but one destined to become a mandatory component of the New York City public school curriculum. With the self-assurance of a man who has seen the future and found it delightfully bizarre, Torres declares this not as aspiration but as fait accompli.

And how, one might reasonably ask, does he intend to bend the entire educational infrastructure of the five boroughs to his whims? Torres, with characteristic faux-grandiosity and a wink so subtle it might go unnoticed by less attuned observers, unveils the political machination behind his plan: “I have donated $130 to Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign,” he proclaims, pausing to let the figure land with its full comedic absurdity. “Making me one of his largest contributors. The man is my puppet.”

The moment is quintessential Torres: a parody of civic engagement delivered with the tone of a Bond villain, filtered through a glittery lens of surrealism and strategic understatement. The joke, of course, is twofold—first, the ludicrous suggestion that a modest campaign donation confers Machiavellian influence; second, the deadpan delivery that dares you to question whether, in the logic of Color Theories, it might just be true.

Yellow, he explains, is joy—bright, pure, naive. Red is anger. Orange, then, becomes the volatile intersection of the two, a place where innocent delight and raging fury meet in manic harmony. “We like our male celebrities in America to be Orange,” he deadpans, evoking both Donald Trump and the surreal hyperreality of American fame with one throwaway line sharper than any political monologue. If Hannah Gadsby breaks comedy open, Torres throws glitter into the wound.

He wanders the stage in white pants splattered with pigment like the ghost of an art school dropout, doodling on his oversized book-set with the languid air of a child lost in thought—except this child is fiercely intelligent and faintly terrifying. He speaks in the careful, halting cadence of someone who either just woke up or has never slept, pausing often, letting silences bloom into strange little gardens of anticipation. Under Emmanuel Delgado’s saturated LED lighting, the space shifts constantly—soft pastels become ominous hues, childlike wonder morphs into existential dread, all through the manipulation of tone and palette.

There are jokes, of course, but they land sideways—never with the blunt force of punchlines, but with the delicious uncertainty of riddles. Ellen DeGeneres, for example, is reimagined not as a person but as a corporate color: a yellow jellybean with a mean red center. “I’m not talking about Ellen the person,” Torres insists, “I’m talking about the system that is “ellen.” It’s absurd and brilliant and slightly dangerous, like all his best material.

Mercifully—though perhaps inevitably, given the labyrinthine logic of his mind—Torres frequently digresses from the ostensible subject of his chromatic lecture. These deviations, rather than distractions, are in fact the very lifeblood of Color Theories, allowing his imagination to ricochet off the walls of the conceptual classroom and into stranger, more resonant territory. One such tangent involves piñatas—a seemingly frivolous topic that, in Torres’s hands, becomes a vehicle for both philosophical inquiry and quiet existential horror.

He gently instructs the audience to close their eyes and conjure an image of a piñata—a moment of collective visualization that feels part meditative exercise, part theatrical hypnosis. Once the shared figment is fully formed, he begins to deconstruct it: Why, he muses with the seriousness of a child psychologist, do parents so often bestow upon their children piñatas shaped like their favorite cartoon characters? Why invite a child to tenderly adore something, only to then hand them a stick and demand its ritualized murder? In lesser hands, this might read as mere whimsy, but Torres’ delivery—dry, precise, vaguely haunted—renders it something closer to an indictment of the emotional contradictions we foist upon the young, a commentary on the weaponization of joy and the strange brutality lurking beneath the surface of celebration. The piñata becomes a metaphor: for innocence shattered, for affection complicated, for the fine line between delight and cruelty.

Throughout the piece, we begin to understand that Torres likely sees himself as a purple—a color of shadows and mystery. “Lilac is being a mom,” he whispers, “Purple is being a stepmother.” This is followed by a moment of astonishing theatricality in which he curls his fingers in front of a lamp to cast a grotesque and beautiful shadow, conjuring purple not as a color but as an archetype. And we—astonishingly—get it.

There is also Bibo, a navy-blue robot and unwelcome timekeeper (designed by Monkey Boys Productions, operated by Ian Edlund, and voiced with mechanical petulance by Joe Rumrill), who pops out of a clock to remind Torres of the show’s running time. We come to resent Bibo’s presence, which of course is the point. Navy blue, as Torres tells us, is the color of bureaucracy, of uniformity, of the NYPD and airline logos and soulless American efficiency. It is, in essence, the opposite of Torres’s entire aesthetic project. Bibo is the enemy not just of art, but of time spent beautifully.

Color Theories is, beneath all its visual delight and narrative abstraction, a piece of observational comedy, but reimagined with the formal ambition of a gesamtkunstwerk (the German sounds more appropriate, but it refers to an artwork, design or creative process where different art forms are combined to create a single cohesive whole). Torres is not simply telling jokes; he’s creating an ecosystem. Each shade he discusses, each character he introduces (including colors personified, as if by animators on acid), becomes part of a larger theory of how we live, how we perform, and how we survive in a world that too often demands navy blue conformity from yellow-hearted souls.

Ultimately, the show is a triumph of personal vision over theatrical convention. It is not for everyone—but it is deeply for someone. And for those someones, it is a joyfully specific, emotionally resonant, intellectually ticklish ride. In a cultural landscape teeming with irony and self-deprecation, Torres dares to be earnest, weird, and tenderly grandiose. And really, when was the last time you saw someone make a shadow puppet and think, “Ah yes, that is the essence of purple”?

Color Theories (through October 5, 2025)

Performance Space NY, 150 First Avenue, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.color-theories.com

Running time: 80 minutes without an intermission