Rocio Mendez

Practice

December 4, 2025

With a three-hour running time (the first act runs two hours straight without an intermission) the play is too long for its repetitiousness having the actors go over the same theater games and monologues over and over again. Of course, the play becomes an endurance test for the actors as well as viewers, whether it was intended to or not. Actors who have undergone this kind of training may be amused; those of us who have not may be bored or lose interest. Although the actors who make up the ten-member cast of "Practice" play very different personalities, we see so little of them individually that it is hard to keep them separate and they become a big blur. [more]

Ain’t No Mo’

December 10, 2022

Jordan E. Cooper’s scathing new racial comedy, "Ain’t No Mo’" has made the successful transition to Broadway with five of the six original actors from the previous Public Theater staging in 2019 and a more elaborate physical production from an almost entirely different design team. Delving into Black life and attitudes now, the play is hilarious, but not laugh-out-loud funny, rather it's impressive because of its cleverness, but its satire does not trigger laughter. However, its outrageous form of satire may not appeal to all theatergoers. [more]

No One Is Forgotten

July 14, 2019

Playwright Winter Miller offers a shakily hollow mélange of Genet, Beckett and Pinter with her two women in a prison cell scenario taking place in an unnamed foreign country. Ms. Miller’s dialogue is well-shaped and achieves sporadic humor and emotional resonance but to no real purpose as her effort comes across as an artificial exercise rather than a realized play. Without explanation sometimes only one character appears, and we’re left to conclude, “Maybe it’s a flashback or one was taken away and returned. Did one of them die?” [more]

Good Friday

February 26, 2019

A scorching and ingeniously plotted exploration of feminism versus rape culture in the contemporary United States is achieved in "Good Friday." Playwright Kristiana Rae Colón’s audacious, fierce and gripping topical drama is ultimately a provocative vigilante yarn strewn with off and onstage violence that’s dynamically presented. [more]