Rama Orleans-Lindsay (Photo by Grettel Cortes Photography)
Reviewed by Joel Beers
The Los Angeles Theatre Center
Through November 9
RECOMMENDED
Mascogos — set amid the searing heat of the Mexican desert and a sweltering West Side Chicago summer — burns with feverish energy Time fractures, visions collide, and characters stumble through exhaustion and revelation as thunder and pyrotechnics echo their inner storms.
Yet the play also moves with grace. Its rhythm — driven by human feet, hands, and voices — fuses dance, drumming, and song with three languages to create a vivid sensory landscape meant to be felt as much as understood.
That doesn’t mean there’s no story in Miranda González’s world premiere play, commissioned by the inimitable Latino Theatre Co. as part of its Circle of Imaginistas playwrighting initiative. In fact, there are three. One is set in 1864 Coahuila in Northern Mexico, and revolves around a Black Seminole family driven from Florida and desperate for freedom while also struggling within different cultural constraints. The second is set in 2025 Chicago, as another family wrestles with what freedom means in a country that keeps redefining it. Linking them is yet a third narrative, that of Jamari — a young man straddling both worlds, weakened by illness yet gifted (or plagued) with visions that reveal the depth of his ancestral roots.
The play illuminates a largely overlooked corner of Indigenous, Mexican and American history: the story of the Mascogos, a community of Black Seminoles who settled in Coahuila — and also, by extension, the history of Afro-Mexican peoples and communities who were not constitutionally recognized as part of Mexico’s pluricultural composition until 2019.
But González grounds her epic sweep in personal connection. Both Rogelio Douglas III as Jamari and Rama Orleans-Lindsay as Gechu/Trudy pulse with restless energy — seen in their wanderlust in 1864, their hunger for education in 2025. Meanwhile. Monte Escalante brings depth and heart to Mama Luz/Shine, the aunt trying to hold the family together across time. Lakin Valdez adds texture as both a Spanish priest and a gym teacher, bridging eras with quiet conviction.
Under the legendary José Luis Valenzuela’s direction, the production dazzles. Lighting, sound, and projections (by Xinyuan Li, Robert J. Revell, and Yee Eun Nam) conjure the play’s hallucinatory duality. François-Pierre Couture’s set manages to exist in both 1864 Coahuila and 2025 Chicago, while movement director/choreographer Urbanie Lucero sculpts motion that feels both ritualistic and fluid.
Not everything lands — the Chicago storyline feels underwritten, and the third language (joining English and Spanish), the African-tinged Gullah, can be hard to follow. But Mascogos never loses its emotional core or the urgency of its call to remember.
Nor does it preclude the play from succeeding as both a testament to the power, and importance, of ancestral memory, or from achieving what González told the Los Angeles Times earlier this month: her hope that it would spark curiosity about audience members’ own ancestral roots. It’s hard to imagine anyone leaving Mascogos without feeling that tug — or recalling Faulkner’s oft-quoted but still immortal line: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
Latino Theater Company at The Los Angeles Theatre Center, 514 S. Spring St., downtown L.A. Thurs.-Sat., 8 pm, Sun., 4 pm; thru Nov. 9. https://www.latinotheaterco.org/mascogos. Running time: 100 minutes with no intermission.
