When a dear friend of mine, Blaise Ylianna Hewlett, invited me to a staged reading she was performing in, I nearly ran to the box office for a chance to see her on stage. I knew that I would walk out of the theater mesmerized by my friend’s work, but I didn’t know that I would walk out having witnessed, truthfully, what I think is one of the most impressive plays of the decade.
As a theater practitioner, here is where I boldly claim that I find most commercial theater today excruciating. I could then go on to interrogate the entirety of the American theater’s means of production, content, and/or form within four to five hundred words—or, at least, try. At this moment, though, I’m much more interested in deviating from uppercase-journalistic-criticism of the System in all its lack, and zero in instead on what is so abundantly full—of soul, spirit, truth, belonging—whatever you wish to call it. And this is when I introduce you to La Familia Castillo.
Written by La Daniella, directed by Cristina Angeles, and presented by Checkmark Productions, Malcriada is a three act play revolving around a multi-generational Puerto Rican and Dominican-American family living inside a Brooklyn brownstone.
Formerly known as Castillos de Plástico, Malcriada translates to “spoiled” or “badly raised,” reflecting the central themes of the piece as its characters grapple with a slew of systemic judgements embedded within the family.
It’s the morning of Noemi’s eighteenth birthday. Her grandmother is coming home from the hospital, and her family is throwing a celebration. But when a long-held family secret is exposed, the emotional toll of multigenerational trauma and the responsibilities of care overwhelm the family’s performance of exceptionalism on all fronts.
La Daniella confronts with a bluntness that consoles, an honesty that awakens. Tension can only build so much. Words become a mirror, as complicated and nuanced as the image in the reflection. Characters are as multi-faceted as you and me without their queerness or brownness equating to direct tragedy or serving as their sole plot point. Every character’s past and future is just as important as the next’s, and every loose end is tied.
More than that, La Daniella wrote a working-class family onto the stage that was also sitting in the audience—in every aisle and every row. Malcriada is for the global majority. Representation isn’t simply about putting marginalized identities on stage. It’s about creating work that doesn’t require those identities to be explained, defended, or made palatable to an assumed audience. When the global majority is authentically represented—meaning, here, without needing to justify their existence or reason for telling their story—the global majority shows up.
I look forward to the day Malcriada is fully produced, and I’ll be running again when it is.
