By Marlowe Moore
What’s going to happen at the Denver Center Theatre Company through November 3 has been years in the making. Longtime friends and collaborators Isaac Gómez, playwright, and director Laura Alcalá Baker reunite for the first time since the pandemic to create an extraordinary new production of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an adaptation of Erica Sánchez’s award-winning novel. For the first time ever, the play will take place in the round, giving audiences unprecedented access to the rich, inner world of Júlia, the main character who is painfully aware of how much she is not the perfect Mexican daughter.
Isaac picked up Sánchez’s novel shortly after its publication in 2017. From the first words, they knew they were reading something extraordinary, something crackling with life, something transmitting a razor-sharp, inescapable truth: YOU ARE SEEN. Júlia struggles. She laughs. She dances. She grieves, she says the wrong things, she hurts. Júlia loves. She fails. She causes the most awkward public scene at the worst possible time. Her rage is real, her despair is real, her flawless sarcastic timing never fails to make the exact point no one else dares to confront. Isaac read the opening line in the bookstore, then immediately shut the book. “I couldn’t read it in public. The book was going to make me feel a lot of things I knew would touch on parts of me that I hadn’t experienced in literature before.”
Isaac was sitting in the tech rehearsal of their play La Ruta for Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company when they finished the book. “I was so blown away by it, and I thought ‘this would make an excellent play,’” Isaac says. They pitched the idea to Hallie Gordon at Steppenwolf, and she immediately bought in after reading the novel.
“Another Chicago author, Samantha Irby, connected Hallie with Erica Sánchez through Instagram, and the two of them began a conversation,” Isaac says. “Hallie connected Erica and I, and she and I hit it off. She’s become a really, really good friend of mine since then. I’ve told Erica that, from the opening line, there’s something about the way that this story is written that makes me feel very naked and vulnerable.”
“I identify as non-binary,” says Isaac, “but I was raised in a household of all brothers. And as the outspoken, surly rebel of my family who was very alternative and the daughter that my mom never had but always wanted — I, too, wasn’t the perfect Mexican daughter. Because I couldn’t be. For me, there was so much about Júlia’s story and her voice…when I talked with Erica about this, she was like, ‘the person most like Júlia is you’.”
Issac adapted the novel, preserving the crackling energy and unflinching vulnerability, as they are known for in their work. “Finding my way to this story and adapting it for the stage remains one of the greatest honors of my career,” says Isaac. “This story just feels very close.”
The story grabbed Laura, too, quickly and relentlessly. “This play feels so raw,” says Laura. “I had to put it down multiple times while reading it. The vulnerability thing is really real. It feels like it is cutting so close to the vein — really fast, too. She shows all of her ugly. It’s so brutal, it’s so hard. And with a story like this, the playwright has to embody the narrator to pull the story and the audience along.”
“I find, inherent with all of Isaac’s work,” says Laura, “that we are speaking the same language. Isaac has this way of making people feel known. There’s something about an Isaac Gómez play where I go ‘oh! I know these people! I know how it breathes, I know the heartbeat,’ and that makes my work exciting.”
“Isaac and I have been close collaborators for a long time,” Laura says. “We kind of kicked off our careers together. Isaac’s first play in Chicago, my first play in Chicago, and Karen Rodríguez’s first play, who originated the role of Júlia, was together. It was for a play called The Way She Spoke. It struck such a chord for all of us at that time, and I went on to direct Isaac’s The Lover Play (Or, Sad Songs for Lost Boys) and that was right before the pandemic.” The first iteration of Mexican Daughter was running at the same time. Laura had tickets to see her friend’s play, but then Chicago shut down. That was the last time Laura and Isaac saw each other. Until now.
“So, Isaac called recently and was like this [Mexican Daughter] is happening in Denver, and I put your name forward. You’re the one I want for it. There’s nothing like having a friend and a person you admire say you’re the one for this. It makes you feel chosen and seen. At this point, I have an understanding of their writing. Even as I read the first page, I was like ‘I know what this is, let’s go.’”
When we enter Julia’s story at the start of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, a terrible thing has happened. From the moment the lights go up, we’re on this turbulent ride with Júlia, rolling up and down in her mind, her writing, her memories, as she tries to make sense out of a fatal accident that undoes her sense of reality. “The mental health piece of it is probably the most significant part of Júlia’s journey,” says Isaac. “This is the story of a young woman who desperately wants to feel seen, to feel heard, and whose dreams are bigger than anyone else’s.” Yes, there’s depression, anxiety, and grief, but there’s also the strength of a young person navigating mental health support and resources.
When Isaac and Laura reunited for this play, they knew the challenge of staging it in the round. “When you’re in the round, you’re on display all the time. Every single thing has to be so intentional, everything is on purpose,” says Laura. Inspired by the energy of Isaac’s script, she decided to create a version of this play, as she says, “that no one has ever seen before.” The openness of the theater-in-the-round lets her take I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter deeper into Julia’s “mind palace,” so that the space itself becomes Julia’s rich, complex, funny, and complicated inner world, with the textures of Chicago, Mexico, and her home life woven into it.
“I’m most excited to see Laura’s vision,” Isaac says. “She’s one of the most brilliant directors I’ve ever worked with. This is going to be a not-your-typical production of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter.”
“I’m so glad to be back in the room with Isaac,” Laura says. “It’s going to be an incredible adventure, and we’re not letting the audience go.”
Tickets are available for I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter at denvercenter.org.
Marlowe Moore for Denver Center for the Performing Arts. Republished with permission by the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
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