yale Cabaret, 25-27 January 2024
Director: Karl Hawkins
Playwright: Sebastián Eddowes-Vargas
Scenic Designer: Anthony Robles
Costume Designer: Caroline Tyson
Lighting Designer: Larry Ortiz
Sound Designer: Wiktor Friefeld
Projection Co-Designers: Wiktor Freifeld and Ke Xu 许可
Production Dramaturg: Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo
Intimacy Coordinator: Hannah Gellman
Technical Director: Alex Thiesen
Producer: Taylor Ybarra
Stage Manager: Geovanni Colon
Performers:
Andreas Andreou
Celia Chen
Annabel Guevara
comfort katchy
Gretta Marston
Abraham E.S. Rebollo-Trujillo
Erik Robles
Francisco Morandi Zerpa
Love in the age of disaster
by abraham e.s. Rebollo-Trujillo
The commodification of homosexuality has had disastrous effects on the gay dating scene. Or maybe it’s been this way all along, and I just needed to start off with something annoying, queer, and politicized—much like Sebastián, our beloved playwright. Here, he might quote Foucault, perhaps to talk about the panopticon that is the gay dating app scene (hello, Grindr boy reading this) or the modern phenomenon of the “read receipt” that often compounds the pain of ghosting.
Maybe it is modernity that complicates love. Or maybe it’s Zeus’s curse on humans to wander forever seeking the other half from which they were split. Our two lovers in Can the Peruvian Speak? should, by all counts, be perfect for each other: both are migrant, racialized, queer, both have seen the horrors of political upheaval and the disillusionment of being artists in the US, and both have shared experiences navigating desirability in a white Western world. But in a world of occupation, displacement, genocide, and Nakba, what if sharing pain isn’t enough to connect with another human and truly see each other? Maybe all there is to do is sing karaoke and fantasize about what could have been.