Marisol

City Theatre’s production of Marisol is an emotionally intense, bleak portrayal of a woman’s journey to an apocalyptic future. Once the eponymous heroine—a hard-working, sensible Everywoman who really doesn’t want to deal with the end of the world—finally sees where things are headed, it’s far too late for her to do much about it.

Like Tony Kushner’s better-known Angels in America, Marisol’s main conceit is that God has abandoned the world He created, which explains why things suck on Earth. The similarities end there, for in Marisol’s cosmology, God can’t be coaxed, argued or reasoned with. There’s a war on in heaven, and on Earth people can either choose sides and fight or be ground up under the (figurative) wheels of the celestial battlewagons.

Marisol, ably portrayed by Alondra Mendoza, wrestles with her own delusions of normalcy throughout the play, eventually descending into a circle of hell already inhabited by New York’s homeless—and, like Dante’s ninth circle, it’s a pretty cold place. As the play becomes more surreal, it becomes ever more bleak, with violence, death, destruction and despair all around. That’s how even the critics know it’s a tragedy.

The set is open and flexible, with smoke lending all the mystery and dread one would expect. The homeless people act as a sort of Greek chorus, by turns threatening and comforting, but always vulnerable.

Anthony Person strikes just the right mix of lovesick mooning and barely controlled madness as Lenny, while Kira Taylor is flip but slightly desperate as his sister June. The angel, played by Gladys Imperio Acosta (filling in for the originally cast actress who was injured in an accident) is both dutiful and sorrowful, though she does seem to take more glee in battle than one would hope for from an angel.

Make no mistake, Marisol is a tragedy. But it is a thought-provoking one, asking a question progressives ought to consider: Like Marisol, how often do we let our “normal” lives distract us from the impending apocalypse around us? If we won’t listen to Al Gore, maybe we need a few angels with semi-automatic weapons.