Displaying items by tag: Allyce Torres

Spaceman, presented by [producingbody], touches down at The Edge Off-Broadway with a quiet, unnerving force, pulling audiences into the fragile headspace of an astronaut drifting far from home and even farther from certainty. Under Eric Slater’s beautifully calibrated direction, playwright Leegrid Stevens’ one‑woman odyssey becomes less a sci‑fi spectacle than a psychological excavation, using isolation, sound, and the illusion of the vastness of space to illuminate the even vaster, far more treacherous terrain of the human mind. What unfolds is intimate, disorienting, and strangely beautiful - a mission that feels as internal as it is interstellar.

Commander Molly Jennis, played with raw precision by Ashley Neal, anchors the entire piece, and Stevens places her in a cockpit that feels less like a command center and more like a sealed chamber where every thought ricochets back at her. Seven months from Earth and en route to Mars on a mission meant to help establish the first human colony, Molly exists in a liminal space where even the simplest exchange with Houston (a.k.a. Rob, voiced by Slater) arrives with a ten‑minute delay. That communication gap becomes its own form of psychological erosion - a constant reminder of how far she’s drifted from help, from home, and from anything resembling real‑time human connection.

But Molly’s mission is no longer just scientific. It’s personal. In this adaptation, the script’s original husband Harry is affectingly reimagined as Ari, Molly’s wife - also an astronaut - who died in a catastrophic space mishap, a loss that shattered her sense of purpose and left her clinging to a belief that borders on spiritual desperation. Convinced that Mars is the gateway to the afterlife, she pushes forward not only to complete her assignment but in the hope of finding Ari waiting for her on the other side of the red planet’s dust and silence. That longing becomes the engine of the play, fueling her resolve even as it accelerates her unraveling.

Life aboard the ship only intensifies that disintegration. Molly faces a barrage of indignities and challenges that chip away at her humanity: the crushing loneliness of months without touch or immediacy; the numbing boredom of endless routines; the hygiene compromises of sponge baths and wipes in place of a shower; and the messy, often humiliating realities of zero‑gravity bathroom logistics that turn even basic bodily functions into small disasters. These details aren’t played for cheap laughs - they’re reminders of how fragile the body becomes when stripped of comfort, privacy, and gravity itself. Each inconvenience compounds her grief, her remoteness, and her growing conviction that the only meaningful destination left is the one where Ari might be found.

Neal channels all of this with remarkable control. Her Molly is a woman split between duty and delusion, the clipped professionalism of a trained astronaut slowly fraying into paranoia, longing, and hallucinatory hope. Neal’s performance is built on micro‑shifts - the tightening of her jaw, the flicker of yearning behind her eyes, the way her voice strains to maintain authority even as her internal compass spins. She makes Molly’s belief in Ari’s presence feel both irrational and heartbreakingly human.

The plot circles her in increasingly suffocating loops, blurring memory, mission, and metaphysical longing until the audience is never quite sure what’s real and what’s the product of a psyche pushed past its limits. Yet even within that pressure, the play finds brief, unexpected flickers of levity - small human moments that remind us Molly is still fighting to stay tethered to herself. It’s a performance - and a character - shaped as much by silence, distance, bodily strain, and cosmic grief as by the script itself.

Ashley Neal in SPACEMAN from [producingbody] now playing through June 13 at The Edge Off-Broadway.

The production design at The Edge Off‑Broadway becomes an essential partner in Molly’s unspooling, transforming the cozy 50‑or‑so‑seat venue into an airtight capsule that pulls the audience directly into her orbit. A lone captain’s chair sits at the center of the cockpit, surrounded by glowing computer screens that flicker with data like a heartbeat she’s trying desperately to trust. Her only living friend is a small, responsive plant that tilts and bends as though it’s trying to understand her, a fragile tether to something organic in the endless dark. But she also has Jen (Sadieh Rifai) - the ship’s AI voice whose constant presence fills the silence with a companionable, sometimes unsettling intimacy. Throughout the play, the low, constant hum of the rocket engine underscores every moment, a sonic reminder of the machine that keeps her alive even as it isolates her. Lighting is used with surgical precision: tight, concentrated beams that lock onto Molly and amplify her intensity, then suddenly widen into sweeping celestial washes that pull the audience into the vast, indifferent expanse outside her ship. When a meteor strikes the hull, the sound design erupts with visceral force, rattling the space and Molly’s nerves in equal measure. And in one of the production’s most ingenious touches, Allyce Torres - dressed entirely in black and nearly invisible against the cockpit’s shadows - moves objects with ghostlike stealth to create the uncanny illusion of zero gravity. That she also portrays Ari adds an extra layer of resonance, as if her presence is haunting the space even when Molly can’t see her. Every element works in concert to heighten the story’s tension and fragility, making the production not just a backdrop but a powerful, immersive engine driving the narrative forward.

Amy Carpenter, who helps shepherd the production as a producer, also understudies Molly Jennis - a dual role that underscores her investment in the piece’s dramatic and technical precision.

The production’s technical artistry is anchored by a trio of designers whose work deepens the play’s immersive pull. Taylor Dalton (executive producer/set design/costume design), Angela Joy Baldasare (sound designer), and Garrett Bell (lighting designer) craft an environment that feels both meticulously engineered and emotionally charged, each element reinforcing the story’s tautness, precariousness, and sense of cosmic seclusion.

Ashley Neal in SPACEMAN from [producingbody] now playing through June 13 at The Edge Off-Broadway.

Even before the lights go down, Spaceman begins tightening its grip. Audience members are required to seal their phones in Yondr pouches - those soft, magnetic lock bags used at concerts and comedy shows - and the effect is immediate. In such an intimate venue, the simple act of surrendering your device creates a subtle but unmistakable shift: the outside world goes quiet, your digital bind snaps, and a faint echo of Molly’s own isolation settles in. It’s a small, clever pre‑show ritual that primes the audience for the loneliness, disconnection, and suspended‑in‑the‑void feeling that defines her journey. By the time you take your seat, you’re already living in a version of her world - cut off, contained, and waiting for contact that won’t come quickly.

Spaceman is a singular, deeply immersive theatrical experience, the kind that sneaks up on you and refuses to let go. I felt myself drawn in further with each passing minute, the tension tightening and the stakes rising as Molly’s journey pushed deeper into the void. What lingered with me was the sensation of being slowly enveloped - not by spectacle, but by atmosphere. The production creates a kind of emotional gravity, a pull that grows stronger the longer you sit with Molly’s loneliness, her determination, her fraying edges. By the time she reaches the farthest point from Earth, I realized I had traveled with her, carrying the same weight, the same longing, the same fragile hope that something - anything - might answer back.

At just 100 minutes with no intermission - and no re‑entry if you need to leave the theatre - Spaceman demands and rewards full immersion. It’s a tightly calibrated, deeply human piece of sci‑fi storytelling that lingers long after the final blackout, and it comes recommended. Spaceman runs May 19 - June 13 at The Edge Off-Broadway, with tickets priced $15-45. Tickets and additional information are available at www.producingbody.com.

The Writer by Ella Hickson, now in its U.S. premiere at Steep Theatre under the sure direction of Georgette Verdin, is a maddening yet compelling exploration of art, power, commerce, and gender. It is messy, incisive, and brashly frustrating. It is the anti-Barbie, exploring patriarchy, empowerment, and self-determination in a world without a hint of pink. People in this world must earn a living, which really gets in the way of idealism. The Writer is full of unwinnable arguments, plus a few that where the victories are the opposite of what one would like them to be. In a loosely defined series of scenes and rebuttals, the eponymous Writer reveals herself through excerpts from her plays and scenes from her life, though the lines between these are deliberately blurry. Both in the fictionalized versions of herself, and in the real (but are they? —our narrator seems a little unreliable), the Writer spends much of the play defending herself and her work, with only limited success.

Verdin has assembled a fine cast of both Steep Theatre regulars and guest artists willing to throw themselves into the melee that is this play. Lucy Carapetyan plays the Writer with an edgy and anxious self-righteousness that invites sympathy but not empathy, and occasionally veers into unpleasant self-absorption. As her fictional doppelganger and sometime lover, Krystal Ortiz’s grounded presence often makes the Writer’s points more effectively than the Writer herself, while also showing the pitfalls of the Writerly vision. Peter Moore as the Director is tasked with representing the Patriarchy and does so with the right amount of creeping condescension tempered with a pragmatic humanism that allows his arguments to resonate more than Hickson may like—or exactly how much she would like. Nate Faust makes one want to like his characters, bringing a guileless charm to his roles as the character of the Director and the real-life boyfriend of the Writer; he plays the former with a disarming openness that makes his over-bearing attitude more grating, and the latter with a weirdly imperious lack of self-esteem. Jodi Gage and Allyce Torres take on multiple roles throughout, but especially in a second act scene that breaks both the conventions of the play and the urban setting, embodying a mythological world where women are freed from the constraints of patriarchal norms in a piece that seeks to surmount conflict and tension in a modern, tribal ritual dance (Successful? No... but it requires commitment from its performers nevertheless).

The design elements also reflect the ephemeral nature of the theatre experience and the idea that reality itself is an extension of this experience. The “staged” scenes are stripped to their essentials—performer and text, with occasional projections to amplify this relationship and break away from the more concrete spaces of the rest of the play. The scenes that presumably show the Writer’s real life are played on precariously assembled sets that only partially define the spaces that they create. Scenic designer Sotirios Livaditis has created deliberately artificial stage sets with visual counterpoints that reinforce the spaces’ connections to the Writer, though the many moving parts make for some clunky scene changes. As the Writer’s perception of reality shifts into the metaphorical—writing being a calling and a life—the lighting (by Brandon Wardell) and sound (by Thomas Dixon) reflect the increasingly tenuous scenic elements, and occasionally mirror the darkness and self-doubt of the characters’ thoughts. Costume designer Gregory Graham conveys the practical concerns of the characters (and creates the modern tribal costume—accessorized athleisure: why not?) and clearly defines the difference between those who need to project a certain image and those who are privileged not to do so. Movement director Claire Bauman creates a plausible performance art ritual dance. Intimacy Director Gaby Labotka struggles with the reality of the more intensely sexual moments as far as pacing and masking (there is a lot more blanket work than there probably would be if the characters were as alone as they are meant to be), and the beats of the intimate scenes feel both awkwardly slow and rushed.

Director Verdin mostly allows the ambiguities of The Writer to be as frustrating as Ella Hickson most likely intended. She also leans into the bracing humor and combativeness of the dialogue, which is often laugh-out-loud-funny, even as the characters struggle to find common ground or solid answers. Having been written at the beginning of the #MeToo movement, the play mostly deals with the power of institutional patriarchies to shape attitudes, tastes, social hierarchies, age (what happens when an angry young woman grows older?), art, and, yes, sex. There are brief nods to intersectionality and economic class, and Verdin’s production acknowledges that these nods leave several elephants waiting in the wings in order to focus on feminism. The play and production are smart enough to understand that this two-hour dialectic is premised on the privilege of being part of a world where art provides a living for some and is affordable to others. Most people will find something to nod in agreement with, and that may not always be what the person next to them is nodding about. Hickson has written a metatheatrical puzzle box of polemical arguments, but fortunately she has also created characters that go beyond their arguments, especially in the hands of a sensitive director and a talented and empathetic cast. The Writer offers an opportunity to question what makes good Art (theater specifically, but as a metaphor for capital-A Art), the role and responsibility of the artist in society, and whether art is an extension of patriarchy or a tool to fight it. It does not offer any answers, which may have some echoing the words of one of the characters, who demands in vain that the Writer “write an ending.” But then they would miss out on the opportunity to do so over drinks after the show.

The Writer runs through September 16 at The Edge Theater 5451 North Broadway, with performances Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights at 7:30 pm, and Sunday matinees at 3pm. For tickets and more information contact the box office at (773) 649-3186 or www.steeptheatre.com.

It’s been quite a year in Chicagoland for Karen Zacarías, and it’s not over yet. One year after her The Book Club Play graced the 16th Street Theater in Berwyn, a month after Destiny of Desire opened at the Goodman, and a month before Native Gardens plays at Victory Gardens, her new play Into the Beautiful North is receiving a rolling world premiere back at 16th Street. Adapted from a novel of the same name by Naperville resident Luis Alberto Urrea, Into the Beautiful North is a hilarious, bitingly satirical, and occasionally terrifying and disturbing adventure story about a group of young Mexicans going on a quest to the distant, fabled city of Kankakee. The dangers awaiting them will change how they see everything.

The small Mexican town of Tres Camarones doesn’t have much. There’s just one internet-capable computer, owned by Tacho (Esteban Andres Cruz), the gay proprietor of the internet café. There’s a shuttered movie theatre where people used to escape into wild flights of fancy. And recently, nearly all the men seem to have deserted for the United States. This makes Tres Camarones easy prey to the evil narcos, who steal and abuse the town’s inhabitants as they please. But the town still successfully holds a mayoral election, which is won by Irma Cervantes (Laura Crotte) on a platform of boosting female employment by holding a Yul Brenner festival (though the cinema owner insists on a Steve McQueen festival).

While the town watches The Magnificent Seven, Irma’s niece, Nayeli (Ilse Zacharias), has a bold idea: why not go to the United States and gather seven brave Mexican men to fight off the narcos? They could even start with her father, who sent her a postcard once from Kankakee claiming he had done well. Irma supports the idea and contributes a lead of her own, while Nayeli gathers Tacho and her goth friend, Vampi (Allyce Torres), to make the journey to Tijuana, and then, illegally cross the border and go onward to Illinois, with stops for sight-seeing in Beverly Hills and Hollywood.

All does not go well. The band of friends is subjected to harassment and assault by federal troops searching for illegal Central American immigrants while still deep within Mexico. At Tijuana, they are joined by the dump-dwelling garbage warrior, Atomiko (Brandon Rivera), but their first crossing attempt is a disaster. The friends soon realize they have no idea what they will do even if they do get across, but this only proves to Nayeli that only the braves heroes can survive going to the United States.

Directed by Ann Filmer and cast member Miguel Nuñez, Into the Beautiful North rides the peaks of absurdity and valleys of real life horror like a roller coaster. Though we may be chuckling at Nayeli’s silhouetted Jack Sparrow-fantasy-lover one minute and cringing at an all-too-real incident of homophobia or xenophobia the next, the play is very much a coherent whole. Partly that’s because of a brilliant design by Joanna Iwanicka (set), Cat Wilson (lighting), Rachel Sypniewski (costumes) and Barry Bennett (sound/music), which capture the look of a Technicolor Western. We’re half-in the land of myth, where good and evil, love, and coming of age journeys are all outsized, so, of course, anything can happen.

But we’re also in the realm of shrewd political commentary, and that’s where the eight-person ensemble really shines. Zacharias, Crotte, Cruz, Nuñez, Torres, Rivera, and Andrés Enriquez and Juan Munoz go through a whirlwind of character changes as they perform this epic, each moving between larger-than-life performance styles and brief, but fascinating portraits of people from a massive swath of North America. Nayeli is so optimistic it’s impossible not to love her, and Tacho likewise emerges as a true hero in the face of the crap he is subjected to.

Filmer’s pre-show announcement hails the Mexican pride in this play, and that’s certainly present in abundance. Despite the outward simplicity of the presentation, we feel as though we are going on this journey with these characters as they learn about their own country and the United States. Atomiko the garbage warrior is amusing, but we are pointedly reminded that people really do live and die in such dumps. That’s an indictment of both countries’ social structures as well as a tribute to ordinary peoples’ courage, resourcefulness, and determination to survive. As is often the case with 16th Street, the play was extended before it even opened. As fine as this story is, it works especially well in an intimate setting. Don’t wait to get your tickets.

Highly Recommended

Into the Beautiful North is playing at the 16th St Theater in the Berwyn Cultural Center, 6420 16th Street, Berwyn, Il. Performances run Thursdays and Fridays at 7:30 pm and Saturdays at 4:00 pm and 8:00 pm through June 3rd. Running time is two hours and ten minutes with one intermission. Free parking is available in the parking lot at 16th St and Gunderson.

To order, call 708-795-6704 or visit 16thstreettheater.org.

*Extended through June 17th