From the get-go, it’s do or die. Mona Martínez, as Carmela, and Diego Mariani, as Paulino, are as skittish as if dancing in front of a firing squad. Thanks to these two breathtaking theatre artists, ìAy, Carmela!, based on a real life love story, is both funny and profoundly moving on a deeply human level. The actors’ all-out, visceral, tour-de-force performances on opening night brought a full-house audience to a standing ovation. [Read more...]

Shake those hips and roll those shoulders loose. Viva Peru! Vicky Leyva, a.k.a. “The Mulatta Flower of Peru,” dances barefoot, sings folklore straight from an impassioned heart and lights up the stage with bravura alongside her singing and dancing daughters Vanessa Diaz and Susan Duston. Together they represent a revolution. [Read more...]

The Teatro de Parla Youth Company of Spain delivers a powerful blast from the past. On the backs of black t-shirts worn by three actors, white print spells out: GUERRA (war), ENFERMEDAD (disease), and HAMBRE (famine). The characters stand upstage on a platform littered with bodies. These villains represent the rewards of war. [Read more...]

Venezuelan playwright Gustavo Ott confronts us with close encounters of the domestic-violent kind. Divorcees, Evangelists and Vegetarians (Divorciadas, evangelicas y vegetarianas), an accessible play both tragic and hysterically funny, is about three needy women at the existential brink of self-destruction or complete madness. It exposes what women often hide from public view – the debilitating reality of domestic violence. [Read more...]

The Innocent Eréndira and her Heartless Grandmother (La Cándida Eréndira)

Abandon all moral judgment and logic to enjoy this erotic fairy tale. A grandmother sells her young granddaughter for rape and sex trafficking. Welcome to the grotesque and mysterious world of Gabriel Garcia Marquez where evil becomes palatable through magical realism. [Read more...]

Quique Aviles, poet and brilliant impersonator of true stories, is back. After two sold-out blockbusters at the GALA Tivoli Theatre, Aviles has returned to the 55-seat black box theater in the DCArts Center with the same show about Salvadoreans in Washington D.C. [Read more...]

How can a hero be so blind to the palpable warnings encircling him; so deaf to his own instincts?

Lope de Vega, the Spanish Shakespeare, shows us the answer through Alonso, the title character from one of his masterpieces, El Caballero de Olmedo (The Knight from Olmedo.) The knight believes he is invincible because of his devotion to his code of honor. But he really is courting disaster [Read more...]

30 Years of the Salvadorean presence in DC

Quique Aviles’ floor-blistering one-man show about the Salvadorean diaspora to Washington D.C. hits you like a fireball from a volcano. From the moment Aviles bounds from the aisles onto the stage and alternates English with Spanish, there is no language barrier. [Read more...]

A projection of El Bola’s round face with infectious smile greets you from a circular screen. Then Marcelino Valdes, in elegant white and black tux, steps through the Omega-shaped portal and impersonates Cuba’s King of Song by sing-speaking the riff: “All of us black folk drink coffee, you know!” from Ay, Mama Ines, (by Eliseo Grenet) and the fireworks begin. [Read more...]