The Downstairs Theater at La MaMa

How to Eat an Orange

June 4, 2024

This is the story of Claudia Bernardi, a visual artist and activist, as told in a one-woman show, "How to Eat an Orange." It tells of Bernardi’s time growing up in Argentina in the profound gloom of the military junta and the stories of the “desaparecidos,” the missing ones. It was written by Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American playwright who traveled to and wrote plays about human rights conflicts in countries worldwide. She brings a first-hand narrative understanding of what Bernardi experienced during and after the time of the junta and her work in other countries with this collection of desaparecidos' stories. [more]

Evelyn Brown (A Diary)

May 27, 2023

While the painstaking entry upon entry yearn to be something of import, we can’t help but feel it takes a certain steadfastness and desperate commitment to make the banal seem so extraordinary. This is where the brilliant attack of performance by Ms. Lauren as Evelyn, and Violeta Picayo as Evelyn Brown, come into play. Ms. Picayo can be thought of as the younger Evelyn, but the fact is they are both the same person usually on the stage at the same time, experiencing the same ennui. Ms. Lauren is the human map of a sometime wordless exploration of isolation. There is nothing secretive about it. We are witnesses to every one of her emotions as it makes its way across her face and into her beaten down yet stalwart physical life. Ms. Picayo sometimes has that innocent wide-eyed wonder that gets her through to the end of a scene, making us pity her for her stiff upper lip and beatific smile in the face of a life not well-lived. [more]

Hong Kong Mississippi

May 5, 2023

From the moment he walks out with a stuffed “Disneyfied” dragon to tell us a fairy tale his mother told him when he was little, we are enraptured by Pinky, an 11-year-old Chinese boy growing up in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. Written and performed by Wesley Du, "Hong Kong Mississippi" is a coming-of-age tale that speaks innocently, yet often in frank terms, of racism. And providing the real dose of irony, the only other character to experience a seismic shift in the play is the man who resents Pinky the most, a man who against his better judgment unknowingly becomes Pinky’s mentor and father figure he never had. [more]