José Rivera wrote Marisol in nineteen ninety-two. The world panicked about the ozone layer, urban decay, and the collapse of civic order. Today, theatre reviewers drag the script out of storage, dust off the apocalyptic framing, and pretend it speaks directly to our current dystopian headlines. They treat the revival at Open Fist like an urgent, necessary warning about climate collapse and political decay.
They are wrong.
Calling Marisol a prescient prophecy of modern doom misses why the play actually works and why most contemporary revivals of political theatre fall completely flat. Rivera did not write a news broadcast. He wrote a surrealist myth. When directors try to map his poetic universe onto current cable news talking points, they strip away the very thing that makes the play durable. They turn a cosmic, frantic nightmare into a lecture.
Let us look at the lazy consensus. Every standard review of this production leans on the same tired crutch. The critics write about how Rivera predicted our current social anxiety, how the guardian angels going on strike mirrors institutional failure, and how the brutal street violence feels ripped from today's front page. This analysis assumes that art only has value when it acts as a mirror for contemporary political grievances. It treats theatre like an expensive pamphlet.
Theatre does not need to be current to be vital. In fact, the moment a play becomes a direct commentary on yesterday's election or last week's ecological disaster, it has an expiration date. Marisol survives not because New York or Los Angeles looks messy right now, but because Rivera understood that human beings have always felt hunted by forces larger than themselves.
The protagonist, Marisol Perez, starts her journey as a corporate copywriter commuting through a city that has broken down. The moon has disappeared. The universe is undergoing a civil war. God is old, senile, and dying. Her guardian angel leaves her to join a celestial militia. On paper, this sounds like a heavy-handed allegory written by an undergrad who just discovered magical realism. On stage, it requires absolute theatrical commitment to succeed.
When regional theatres tackle this material today, they often fall into the trap of over-explaining the political machinery. They add projections of modern crises, costume nods to contemporary politicians, or sound design featuring actual news audio. This approach insults the audience. It assumes viewers cannot grasp a metaphor unless it wears a nametag. Rivera's brilliance lay in his refusal to anchor his imagery to a specific year. The absurdity of the urban landscape in the play is emotional, not municipal.
Consider how the production handles the mechanics of the text. Rivera uses language that hits like a physical blow. Words are jagged, rhythmic, and street-smart, colliding violently with archaic, biblical grandeur. When directors slow the pace down to let the audience absorb the "deep message," the poetry dies. The play demands velocity. It is a panic attack translated into dramatic structure. If the actors sound like they are reading poetry in a library, the engine stalls.
Another major miscalculation in contemporary stagings is the treatment of the angels. Too often, directors lean into camp or ethereal cliches. They give us flowing robes or tired punk aesthetics that feel more like a high school Halloween party than celestial bureaucracy. Rivera envisioned heaven as an armed camp gearing up for a holy civil war against a senile deity. The angels are soldiers. They are exhausted, bureaucratic, and violent. When a production softens this edge to make the play more palatable or accessible to subscribers, it domesticates a feral piece of work.
The real challenge of staging Rivera isn't updating the references. It is trusting the text's strange, unpredictable tonal shifts. One moment features a harrowing assault on a subway train; the next features a cosmic debate over the death of the universe. That whiplash is the entire point. Life does not maintain a consistent genre, and neither does Rivera's writing.
We need to stop pretending that reviving an old play requires a justification sheet connecting every scene to current events. If a piece of art requires a program note explaining why it matters right now, it probably doesn't. Marisol matters because it captures the visceral, unnameable dread of navigating a hostile world alone.
Next time a theatre remounts a classic of modern surrealism, they should throw away the contemporary framing devices. Trust the text. Let the poetry be jagged. Stop trying to make the stage look like a Twitter feed.
The apocalypse was never coming tomorrow. It is already here, and it is far weirder than any political metaphor can capture.
