Displaying items by tag: Charin Alvarez

From the moment BOTH starts, the play demands attention. Flashing lights, sirens, and the sounds of heavy breathing build as Xochi (Paloma Nozicka) locks herself inside, trying to shut out the world. She just lost her twin brother, and nothing will be the same.

Co-presented by Teatro Vista Productions and Steppenwolf Theatre Company, BOTH is a gripping thriller that weaves humor, trauma, and terror. Is truth important, it asks, when a lie seems to be the fix?

Years after the tragedy, Xochi is now expecting a child with her doting boyfriend, Sam (Brian King) and anxiously awaiting the arrival of her family at her baby shower. Her relationships with her mother (Charin Alvarez) and brother (Eddie Martinez) are strained due to their loss and her “fictional” novel, which is actually a thinly veiled account of her rough childhood.

Xochi isn’t apologetic about it though. To her, you are either good, or you’re a liar. But her conviction is a bludgeon to those around her who need “their truth” to sugar-coat the past, their addiction, their motives, or the reality of what happened to Xochi’s twin - is he dead or only missing?

Xochi is confident that he died... until he crashes the party. Is this man (Yona Moises Olivares) actually Sebastian or someone pretending to be him?

As the lead and playwright, Nozicka is a commanding presence who gives her character intelligence and grit as she stands her ground as the walls close in on her. Olivares is a good foil for her, bouncing between sweet and sinister effortlessly, making one question what is real. What truly makes this piece work though is the intricate, flesh-out performances from the entire ensemble. Their complexity makes them feel tangible, perhaps even evoking one’s only family members.

One important character not mentioned yet is the beach house. The beach house set, designed by Sotirios Livaditis, is pristine and almost too perfect at first glance—an immaculate showroom of a life Xochi desperately wants to hold together. But as Xochi’s emotions spill over, the home takes on a life of its own. It serves as the perfect backdrop as black‑and‑white muddies into gray and control melts into chaos.

Georgette Verdin’s sure, intuitive direction threads humor, dread, and heartbreak together, allowing the play’s deeper emotional currents to resonate fully. BOTH is part Ordinary-People and part Rosemary’s-Baby. While the end does leave a bit to be desired given the play’s sharp execution, it still satisfies and leaves the audience questioning what the truth is as they unravel the mystery.

Teatro Vista and Steppenwolf have built a steady creative partnership in recent seasons, with Teatro Vista serving as a resident company in Steppenwolf’s 1700 Theater. The collaboration pairs Steppenwolf’s institutional reach with Teatro Vista’s commitment to Latine storytelling, resulting in annual productions that spotlight new voices and ambitious work. BOTH is yet another worthwhile entry in that partnership, reflecting the shared investment both companies have made in developing bold, ensemble‑driven theater.

BOTH runs at Steppenwolf Theatre until May 10, 2026.

This review is proudly shared with our friends at www.TheatreInChicago.com.  

TimeLine Theatre opens its 29th season with the world premiere of Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars, a deeply personal and politically charged play written by and starring Sandra Delgado. Under the careful direction of Kimberly Senior, the production folds an intimate family drama into the broader context of immigration under the Obama administration — a time when the tension between belonging and legality became a defining national paradox.

Delgado plays Clara, a woman whose life reads like a quintessential American story: educated in U.S. schools, an unemployed professional, a mother, an ex-wife paying alimony, and the devoted caretaker of her aging, recently widowed father. Yet, she carries one crucial distinction — Clara was born in Mexico. In the eyes of the government, despite her decades of living and contributing to the United States, she exists in a fragile legal limbo. It is this tension — between a lived sense of home and the precarity of status — that fuels Delgado’s heartfelt and sometimes haunting narrative.

The story unfolds in 2015, the final years of the Obama administration, when the nation’s immigration policy embodied contradictions. While Obama extended compassion through programs like DACA, his administration also deported more immigrants than any before it. It’s within that fraught atmosphere that Clara’s life unravels. As she plans an overseas trip, a bureaucratic hiccup exposes a youthful misstep from her past, threatening her livelihood, family, and even her right to remain in the country she calls home. What follows is both a bureaucratic nightmare and a spiritual reckoning, as Clara gazes skyward — toward “hundreds and hundreds of stars” — seeking guidance, belonging, and deliverance.

Senior’s direction is restrained and elegant, allowing Delgado’s writing to shimmer through the emotional and political layers of the story. The ensemble’s performances are uniformly grounded and generous. Ramón Camin gives Papi, Clara’s father, a stoic dignity — a man bound by nostalgia yet dependent on his daughter to navigate his new reality. Joshua David Thomas brings humor and restless charm to Ruben, Clara’s cousin, who juggles nursing school and low-level marijuana dealing with a kind of defiant optimism. Charlotte Arias’s Stella, Clara’s tween daughter with dreams of Paris, radiates a mix of giddy excitement at learning a new language and the tender angst of adolescence, embodying a generation eager to explore the world yet uncertain of their place within it. Charin Alvarez, playing every other woman in Clara’s orbit — from her attorney to her mother — threads the production together with wit, wisdom, and warmth.

Visually, the production achieves a graceful fluidity. Regina Garcia’s open set transforms seamlessly into apartments, offices, and memory spaces with minimal rearrangement, while Christine Binder’s lighting washes scenes in mood and emotion — from sterile bureaucratic glare to dreamlike luminescence. Willow James’s sound design and music further enrich the experience, grounding the play’s political urgency in emotional resonance.

Hundreds and Hundreds of Stars succeed because it is not a lecture on immigration policy, but a human portrait drawn from it. Delgado reminds us that behind every policy statistic — behind every deportation — lies a web of families, debts, dreams, and love stories. Clara’s story is one of endurance and faith, a meditation on identity and the invisible lines that divide “citizen” from “other.” In blending the personal and the political, TimeLine Theatre has once again illuminated how history lives — and aches — within the human heart.

Highly Recommended

When: Through November 9th

Where: Lookingglass Theatre, 163 E. Pearson Street

Running time: 90 minutes

Tickets: $40 - $95

(773)-287-8463

www.Timelinetheatre.com

Matthew Paul Olmos is a playwright on the rise, and under the direction of Laura Alcalá Baker we have a chance to see a beautiful production of an exceptional work in its world premiere at Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre. As the vernacular title suggests, “A Home What Howls (or the house what was ravine)” is not a staid work, not a constrained “Cherry Orchard” where emotions are buried between the lines.

Instead, Olmos’ work is poetic, magical, and musical as well, and the characters, though poor, are living rich, happy lives in their homes. In the first act, realism rules in many scenes, and Olmos shows a mastery of dialog and detail.

The play opens with a married couple—Abrana (Charin Alvarez) and Manuel Vargas (Eddie Torres) asleep on a bed. In the adjacent room their daughter Soledad (Leslie Sophia Pérez) is hard at work on papers scattered around the floor, perhaps her schoolwork, or maybe something else.

Her parents are awakened by sounds of trickling water running outside. Soon after, sound of a helicopter roars by, and we hear earth moving equipment as well. “There are nightmares around this house,” says Manuel as he and Abrana jump from the bed, and he begins fiddling with a trap door in the floor—an escape hatch?

We begin to piece together that this family is illegally living in a home condemned to make way for a reservoir, one that will allow housing and other development nearby ravine , through which a river flows. By means of a kind of inferential exposition, Olmos paints a portrait of what happens when families are driven from their homes by development—not from the outside looking in, but from inside the homes and families.

Olmos departs from this style to solid realism filled with exposition in one crucial scene: a public hearing at which the now adult Soledad challenges government official Frank over the process by which these families in the way of development have been displaced. It is certainly the best representation I’ve run across of a marginalized community challenging the validity of an eminent domain claim by city officials to displace homeowners dwelling in an area coveted by developers.

As the ravine along which they live is being flooded, and their homes taken, Soledad challenges the city establishment at a public hearing, outing all the tropes which society accepts as the rules of the game—the original seizure of the land from indigenous people by treaty and ceremony; the surveys of businesses showing broad support for the development; Tim Hopper in the role of Frank is exquisitely obtuse. After all, he argues, a ceremony was held in which a “citizen” of the indigenous “transferred” rights to development to the city. “How was this representative procured?” Soledad asks.

The question flies over his head, as Frank goes on to describe, in all sincerity, a ceremony that he found moving—but it highlights the suggestion that the indigenous individual may have had no right to speak for his people. “You’re using the term ‘peace offering,’” Soledad says. “But Public Works uses the terms ‘relinquish’ and ‘transfer.’”

And what about the original homeowners who settled for generations in this indigenous land. ”They were not asked, but they were considered deeply,” Frank says. ”Only businesses” were surveyed, admits Frank, who is beginning to realize he has aquite an adversary in Soledad. Frank says the homeowners displaced were compensated for the value of their homes, which were dilapidated and brought them little. But a home is much more than a building, Soledad points out. How were they compensated for the loss of happiness and memories, and the dispersion of their families, she asks. Market value can’t equal that kind of loss.

“A Home What Howls” runs about 90 minutes, no intermission, and is part of Steppenwolf's Young Adults theater program. But as with other such works in the Young Adults series, it is profoundly good, so I try to see them all.

I will say that I couldn’t always follow the magical parts of the second half, as the old woman resident Syera Lama (Isabel Quintero) appears. She teams up with Soledad in a quest for the rights of the people, encountering a menacing train conductor, also played by Hopper. Quintera also appears numerous times disguised as a magical figure Coyote. Despite my own confusion, the audience was clearly digging it, and the laughter at comical scenes was quite full. “A Home What Howls" runs through March 2 in Steppenwolf’s new in-the-round Ensemble Theater. It’s a great chance to see the work of a playwright we will doubtless be hearing from more and more.