Mara Vélez Meléndez’s “Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members” ferociously explores the intersection of the personal and the political.
“Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members,” a hot and bothered new play by Mara Vélez Meléndez, is a psychodrama with an emphasis — and I mean psycho in the nicest possible way. A coproduction of Soho Rep and the Sol Project, the show imagines a young woman with a personal mission to assassinate the bureaucrats responsible for restructuring Puerto Rico’s debt and the queer receptionist who abets her. A political allegory, a savage drag show and a folie à deux with far too much gunplay for anyone who has lived through the past week’s news, “Notes” is a trigger warning writ large and in glitter, a fever dream with streamers.
For those who don’t follow Puerto Rico’s political and economic fortunes, a brief history lesson will prove useful. By 2016, Puerto Rico’s credit crisis had worsened significantly, with the island owing more than $70 billion. In a move with celebrity backing — Lin-Manuel Miranda was at the time a supporter — Congress passed the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Act, known as Promesa, which gave an unelected board the power to restructure the island’s debt and impose fiscal austerity. Few of that board’s members lived in Puerto Rico, which added to criticism of the act as colonialist.
These circumstances have brought Lolita (Christine Carmela), a trans Puerto Rican woman, to the New York City offices of the Promesa board, with a gun in her purse. Lolita is not her real name, but she has styled herself, she tells us, after Lolita Lebrón, a Puerto Rican nationalist who participated in an armed attack on the House of Representatives in 1954. That attack wounded five members of Congress; our Lolita aims for a greater body count. Yet before she can assassinate anyone, a receptionist (Samora la Perdida) intercepts her and takes her firearm away.
The receptionist doesn’t have a name and their gender identity is unresolved.
“I haven’t found, haven’t been satisfied? With any word that represents myself maybe,” they say.
A drag performer, the receptionist suggests that Lolita should prepare for her task by pretending to shoot a drag version of each of the seven board members. Conveniently, they have a prop gun coated in gold glitter in a handy drawer, which she can use in their playlet. The receptionist then provides a fabulous interpretation of each member — dancing and lip syncing, makeup immaculate.
Demented, exuberant and appropriately angry, Vélez Meléndez’s play borrows from European absurdist theater, like the plays of Jarry and Genet, as well as a tradition of Latin American surrealism. As directed by David Mendizábal, who also designed the irrepressible costumes, the show takes place less in an office than in a shimmering theater of the mind. Is any of this real? Does that matter? Shh! They’re playing “Spice Up Your Life.”
“Notes” is queer in its aesthetics, if not exactly in its form. The drag personae emerge tidily, one after the other, and the scenes take on a kind of sameness. But the play challenges Carmela and la Perdida to negotiate realism, fantasy and everything in between, a challenge they giddily accept, occasionally finding genuine poignancy even in the midst of the irrational and bizarre. And there’s delight, of course, in seeing la Perdida emerge in each new get-up. (This is likely a show in which the backstage action — the frantic donning and doffing of wig and makeup and costume — is probably just as exciting as what’s onstage.)
Ultimately, Vélez Meléndez cares less about political consequence than about individual identity. Will Lolita accomplish mass murder? Maybe! Will she push the receptionist toward self-determination? Now there’s a question.
The moral of “Notes,” simply stated by Lolita, is both provocation and invitation: “The journey of decolonization starts with the self!” Few of us can meaningfully affect Puerto Rico’s fiscal crisis or its vexed journey toward either statehood or independence. But can we shake it, shake it, shake it, with authenticity? Can we self-govern in our private lives? “Notes” suggests that, with enough glitter, we can.
Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members
Through June 19 at Soho Repertory Theater, Manhattan; sohorep.org. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes.
Source: Theater - nytimes.com
