Save the dates! Westfield State’s Theatre Arts production of “Marisol,” by Puerto Rican playwright José Rivera will be performed Nov. 17-20, during Puerto Rican Heritage Month, Nov. 17–20 at 8 p.m., with a matinee on Saturday, Nov. 20, at 2 p.m. in the Ely Campus Center Studio Theatre.
Eric Parness, assistant professor of English, is directing the play, which will star eight student actors.
Winner of the 1993 Obie Award, the play is about Marisol Perez, a young Latinx woman and copy editor for a Manhattan publisher. Although she has elevated herself into the white-collar class, she continues to live alone in the dangerous Bronx neighborhood of her childhood. As the play begins, Marisol narrowly escapes a vicious attack by a golf club-wielding madman while traveling home on the subway. Later that evening, Marisol is visited by her guardian angel, who informs her she can no longer serve as Marisol’s protector because has been called to join the revolution in progress against an old, senile God who is dying and “taking the rest of the universe with him.”
With the heavens in an uproar, social stability and natural order rapidly begin to deteriorate on Earth. Acid rain burns the skin; apples and coffee are extinct. The sun never rises and the moon is lost in the orbit of another planet. Men can bear children. Like the other poor mortals suffering without assistance from on high, Marisol does her best to stumble along, trying to make sense of a world gone mad.
Tickets are $12 general public, $10 faculty and staff, $5 Westfield State students, and are available at https://westfield.universitytickets.com/?cid=185.