Full Contact

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Full Contact, written and performed by the stellar Ariel Estrada, begins almost surreptitiously end-of-day, with his drunken stagger through the threshold of his apartment—a sight that irresistibly conjures the spectral wobble of any “success story” returning from yet another existentially bruising day in the workplace. From the clipped, affectless Human Resources voice mails that puncture the silence like bureaucratic stabs, we glean that he has been unceremoniously ejected from his office job for what are described, with exquisite corporate opacity, as “altruistic financial improprieties.” And thus, with that single phrase—so prim, so paradoxical—begins this aching, slow-blooming saga of a man coming undone, thread by inevitable thread.

A rented studio apartment in New York City circa mid-2024—a space that wears its chaos like a badge of honor. It is small, cluttered, undeniably alive, a kind of urban terrarium for the brokeass artist and gay divorcé who calls it home. Evidence of his beloved cats abounds, as does the unmistakable aroma of long-term queer bachelorhood: a mélange of thrift-store detritus, mismatched comforts, and the lingering melancholy of dreams deferred yet stubbornly unextinguished. It is the sort of male habitat that sends his Filipina women friends—sweet, practical, mortified—into polite paroxysms of horror, prompting earnest offers to buy sponges and perform emergency restoration. And yet, for all its disarray, the place is cozy, lived-in, defiantly his, at least as much as any corner of New York can belong to anyone. A safe house in every sense: emotional shelter, financial compromise, existential bunker. “I never felt safe in your home. So I made my own,” he’d say to his father. THE STUDENT, our tragicomic pilgrim, freshly ejected from his high-profile, high-paying job, has flown too close to the sun—ambition or naïveté, take your pick—and this moment captures him in the immediate, smoldering aftermath of reentry. He is a mess, a catastrophe rendered in human form, a tableau of bathos, gorgeous in his ruin and absurd in his self-pity. Here, at the threshold of collapse, the play begins.

“The show is, in essence, a chronicle of my life as a fighter,” he remarks, with the matter-of-fact candor of someone for whom the vocabulary of bruises and breath has been second nature. “I mean literally in the ring—getting hit, hitting back—the intimate choreography of violence I both gave and received. And all that time, while I was training myself to fight, I never stopped to ask who, ultimately, I thought I was fighting against.” He provides a litany that is not your average enumeration. There is an inventory of skeletal damage that terrifies: “My heart breaks. My body breaks. And I smile. Because I was moved by the spirit of the animals…Age 22: Hernia repair, left side. Age 25: Bone removal, right foot. Age 26: Hernia repair, right side. 33: Reconstruction, left shoulder. 35: Cortisone shot, right hip. 36: Clean up, right hip. 38: Total replacement, right hip. 42: Clean up, left knee. 45: Reconstruction, right shoulder. 47: Clean up, right knee. 50: Total replacement, left hip. 53: Cortisone shots, both knees. More cortisone shots, both knees. More cortisone shots, both knees.” It is a quintessential Estradian paradox: the spectacle of physical confrontation revealing, rather than concealing, a metaphysical one.

Indeed, the play allows those reverberations to manifest openly. One of Estrada’s most prized sequences is a bout between himself and another black-belt martial artist—a confrontation all the more uncanny because Estrada embodies both figures. In true theatrical fashion, the doubleness becomes a metaphor: a man sparring not merely with an opponent, but with an earlier iteration of himself. “I’m 33. I’m competing in a mixed martial arts tournament on the Lower East Side, A black belt from another style says to me: THE JUDGE: You need to show a little more toughness, boy (The STUDENT contemplates a retort, but instead really gays it up.) STUDENT: Oh. Of course sir, you’re absolutely right. Thank you so much…I beat the shit out of that asshole in the ring…Thanks so much for your advice, sir. Was that tough enough for you? Was that man enough for you?”

Yet to reduce Full Contact to a martial-arts memoir would be to flatten its larger, more resonant inquiries. The work aspires to something more capacious: an embrace of the self in its totality, despite the myriad pressures—familial, cultural, and societal—that demand neatness, conformity, or silence. Martial arts becomes the aperture, not the subject; the real drama resides in the unmasking.

The catalytic moment, as Estrada recounts, arrived in 2006 with the death of his father—an event that sent him careening into a fervent excavation of his Filipino-American identity. Threading through it all, the unrelenting echo of his late father’s imperatives, are delivered with the authority of a man convinced he speaks for both God and bloodline. It was during this period of research and reckoning that he encountered the concept of kapwa, that profoundly communal idea of shared selfhood and belonging that now forms the conceptual backbone of the play. From it, Full Contact draws not only its emotional vocabulary but its moral architecture.

Director Gaven D. Trinidad has the task of taking this beautiful rage, this sinuous grace, and guiding it in its fierceness to the loudest cork pop of the most exquisite champagne. Trinidad’s almost feverishly kinetic staging refuses to permit Estrada even a moment’s repose; instead, it propels him through the performance space in an unbroken cascade of motion, as though his very body were the battleground upon which past and present collide.

Scenic designer Cinthia Chen conjures an immaculate, almost monastic whiteness—an environment so pristinely spare that the few objects occupying it—a lone chair, a utilitarian desk, a mute television, a microphone poised on its slender stand, and a set of wheeled wall panels—take on an almost talismanic significance. Arranged with a cartographer’s precision, these elements form an ideal topography for the play’s dreamlike yet wrenchingly confessional voyage. In Chen’s hands, emptiness becomes not absence but invitation: a blank expanse upon which memory, fantasy, and psychic rupture can inscribe themselves with indelible force.

Chen’s artistry extends, with equal wit and sophistication, to her projection design. Flickering across the antiseptic landscape are bursts of pop-cultural sunshine—glimpses of the The Mary Tyler Moore Show, its buoyant optimism thrown into sharp, almost cruel relief against the desolation unfolding live onstage. Equally jarring (yet richly comic in their own right) are appearances by The Robin Byrd Show: the classic “in-bed, in-depth” Jeff Stryker interviews and studio photos of a magnificent body that always strived for perfection (not wasted on any gay male growing up in that era) whose garish exuberance becomes a counterpoint to Estrada’s interior unspooling.

Yang Yu’s lighting design bathes the production in a kind of haunted luminosity, summoning the contours of a past that feels at once meticulously reconstructed and dangerously unstable. Sudden surrealist ruptures—light that fractures, flickers, or blooms into startling bursts of crimson—act as emotional detonations, revealing the subterranean turbulence roiling beneath Estrada’s seemingly controlled exterior. In Yu’s palette, memory is not a gentle sepia tint but a volatile spectrum, always threatening to sear.

Complementing this visual volatility is Jordan Rose Bernstein’s bracing sound design, a sonic architecture that growls, throbs, and unsettles with the ferocity of the metropolis itself. The low, menacing rumble of a dog—more archetype than animal—haunts the edges of the narrative, while other auditory effects slide seamlessly between the literal and the hallucinatory. Bernstein’s musical interludes, deftly woven into the aural fabric, serve not as respite but as further immersion, deepening the production’s sense of a world where reality and memory collide with unnerving force.

In its final form, the piece stands as both elegy and proclamation: a testament to a heritage reclaimed, and to the fierce, necessary act of making contact—full, unguarded, and profoundly human—with oneself. Estrada exists here in a purgatorial tension, suspended between the gravitational pull of guilt and the stark instinct toward survival. The play chronicles not simply his attempt to move forward but the Herculean labor of taking even the first tremulous step toward healing—an act rendered as perilous as any physical combat he has ever undertaken. At times it seems his own mind, a treacherous and labyrinthine opponent, threatens to drag him beneath its tide. And yet, in the fragile space between collapse and catharsis, the work finds its most haunting register: a portrait of a man grappling to reclaim his narrative before the darkness that shaped him claims him once more.

Full Contact (through December 7, 2025)

Leviathan Lab & Mixed Asian Media

The National New Play Network NYC Rolling World Premiere

TheaterLab, 357 West 36th Street, in Manhattan

For tickets, visit http://www.leviathanlab.org

Running time: 60 minutes without an intermission