Zoetrope

The story of an underdog military postal officer, his ex-wife, her sister, his lover, her friend, his son, the playwright René Marqués, and el Grito de Lares. With live video and movement.

2023 September Abrons Art Center, Lower East Side, NY 2019 December Festival Pueblos-Escena, Camagüey & Ciego de Ávila, Cuba
2015 January Pregones / PRTT, Bronx, NY
2014 October Encuentro Festival, Los Angeles Theater Center, California (Premiere Zoetrope Part 1)
2014 July Pregones / PRTT, Bronx, NY (Workshop Zoetrope Part 2)
2013 December Pregones / PRTT, Bronx, NY (Workshop Zoetrope Part 1)

Written and Directed by Javier Antonio González

2019 Cast
Laura Butler Rivera • Javier Antonio González • Susannah Hoffman • Alejandra Maldonado • Tania Molina • Pelé Sánchez Tormes • Veraalba Santa • David Skeist

2019 Production
Producer Jenny Tibbels
Set by Jian Jung
Lights by Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew
Sound by Elizabeth Rhodes and Keenan Hurley
Stage Manager Alejandra Maldonado

“The actors slid between languages with ease. Conceptually, I can’t think of a better way to show the divides at the heart of this absorbing and beautifully enacted saga.”

Morris, Stephen Leigh, “Encuentro 2014 Makes a National Case for Latino Theatre,” AMERICAN THEATER MAGAZINE, November 18, 2014
“Zoetrope is an innovative, hybrid and multilingual proposal that, from the ruptures and amalgams of representative methods, synthesizes the ever-living stories of the diaspora.”

Morris, Stephen Leigh, “Encuentro 2014 Makes a National Case for Latino Theatre,” AMERICAN THEATER MAGAZINE, November 18, 2014
“Javier Antonio González and Caborca’s creative capaciousness reconceives the Latinx family drama, and in this way, they expand the aesthetic horizons of Latinx theater in extraordinary new directions even as their bold experimentation takes up an important theatrical discourse that ardently attends to Puerto Rico’s embittered history of colonization and possession.”

Morris, Stephen Leigh, “Encuentro 2014 Makes a National Case for Latino Theatre,” AMERICAN THEATER MAGAZINE, November 18, 2014

About the Art

Inspired by a found box of letters from the author’s grandfather in New York - to his grandmother in Lares during the first wave of Puerto Rican migration - Zoetrope is a playfully polyphonic work about several generations of a leftist working class family on an island without political agency. Performed in both English and Spanish with supertitles.

Zoetrope

“The actors slid between languages with ease. Conceptually, I can’t think of a better way to show the divides at the heart of this absorbing and beautifully enacted saga.”

“Zoetrope is an innovative, hybrid and multilingual proposal that, from the ruptures and amalgams of representative methods, synthesizes the ever-living stories of the diaspora.”

About the Art