People Will Say We’re Defiant:
​Christin Eve Cato’s Theatre of Joyful Resistance

By Montserrat Mendez

O.K.!
Intar Theatre
By Christin Eve Cato
Directed by Melissa Crespo
At INTAR
No Intermission
TICKETS: HERE. 

From left, Yadira Correa, Danaya Esperanza, and Claudia Ramos Jordan in “O.K.! Christin Eve Cato's riotous new play at Intar.

​When I first began writing about the theatre; an art form I not only love but belong to, it was for Martin Denton at the now-defunct NYTheatre dot com, a site I still mourn like an old playhouse lost to fire. Martin didn’t just assign me reviews; he saw me. He understood, perhaps before I did, that the lens through which a Puerto Rican theatre maker from Newark would view the stage was not the same as that of a white critic seated comfortably in Row B. He began sending me to Spanish-language plays, to Latino playwrights, sensing that my gaze was rooted not in academic distance but in lived experience. I watched theatre from the ground floor, sometimes the basement, looking up.

There was a time when American theatre had room for that kind of vision. Arthur Miller wrote for the working stiff. August Wilson wrote for those born into a country that rarely wrote for them. Thornton Wilder wrote for the quiet nobodies of small towns. These playwrights didn’t condescend to those at the bottom of the ladder; they gave them poetry, dignity, presence. That era feels like a golden age now, partly because we can no longer afford the illusion that it still exists.

Somewhere along the way, American theatre became an industry, and like all industries, it streamlined its product. MFA programs began to churn out a consistent, upper-middle-class voice, well-crafted, clever, but often disconnected from struggle. It wasn’t intentional malice; it was infrastructure. Plays became portfolio pieces, and tickets soared to $300, staging stories for people whose lives rarely require reinvention.

And as the prices rose, the critics fell silent. Or, at least, the ones who knew how to listen deeply. We lost our great theatre critics to age and death, those who carried in their prose not just opinion, but history, memory, politics, and love. What remains is a cadre of well-meaning voices, mostly white, often underread in the very traditions they claim to arbitrate. In the absence of a critical counterbalance, revolutionary work doesn’t vanish; but it risks being misread, or worse, unread entirely.

Theatre was never supposed to be seen only from above. Its greatest truths rise from below.

This year, I found myself in the presence of two playwrights whose work signals a turning point in American theatre, a point of rupture and renewal. If the American Canon is indeed evolving, then these writers are standing at its edge, not quietly knocking for entry, but opening an entirely new door.

The first was Marco Antonio Rodríguez, whose Domino Effect surprised me not just with its emotional resonance but with its reach. Here is a writer who understands that human connection is not a metaphor but a lifeline. In a single evening, I heard voices I’d never heard onstage before; like an Iranian character whose presence didn’t feel like tokenism, but revelation. Rodríguez is crafting theatre that speaks across boundaries, not around them. It is intimate, political, and deeply human.

Now comes, Christin Eve Cato, and with her, a voice unlike any other in our contemporary landscape; a voice steeped in the radical tradition of Arthur Miller and August Wilson, and yet unmistakably her own. She writes from the ground up, and she writes for us, for the working-class, for the dispossessed, for those who don’t get the benefit of polite applause from audiences who can afford to feel compassion from a safe distance.

Cato does not write to be palatable. She does not soften the blow. Her work doesn’t pander to the liberal guilt of the well-seated, nor does it ask permission. And that, in today’s theatre, is its own kind of rebellion. Because we still live in an American theatre that prefers its “others” humble, grateful, and bruised just enough to be poignant, but not angry enough to be dangerous.

What Christin Eve Cato is doing is far more interesting. She is writing as if joy itself were a radical act. As if revolution didn’t always have to be grim and gray. There’s laughter in her fire, and defiance in her delight. She reminds us that even as democracy cracks and buckles under its own weight, the people most crushed by its collapse may be the ones most ready to build something new. Not out of ruins, but out of purpose.

While the old guard clutches its pearls and its subscriptions, Cato is laying the foundation for a theatre that doesn’t just reflect society, it reimagines it.

And what she’s building may well outlast the wreckage.

She’s unafraid to weave in the threads of Magic Realism, not as a genre exercise but as a reflection of the way many of us actually live. It’s a kind of realism that has less to do with spectacle and more to do with how spirit, memory, and myth are braided into daily life.

When I sat down to write this, I found myself lighting a candle to San Lucas and Santa Cecilia; patrons of memory and drama; not out of superstition but out of respect. I needed help holding onto the feeling her play gave me, that elusive vibration that lives somewhere between reverence and recognition. I knew, of course, that Obatalá, the Yoruba orisha of creativity, might be annoyed that I hadn't come to him first. Maybe he’d send a blackout, fry my Google Doc, erase my notes in protest.

That’s how many of us Latinos move through the world; with our gods and ancestors riding shotgun. And so when we see that magic honored on stage; not mocked, not diluted, not rendered "universal" for comfort, it feels like coming home to a theatre that remembers us.

White-led theatre institutions, with their endless dramaturgical notes and syllabi of what is and isn’t “stage-worthy,” have often told us that such things are too mystical, too niche, too unrelatable. But Cato, like Ryan Coogler in cinema, is writing in defiance of those boundaries. She’s saying, our world belongs here too. She’s not asking for the old system’s permission. She’s building a new one, one that doesn’t apologize for the presence of spirit, one that doesn’t ask you to check your ancestors at the door.

Certainly not at the door of a small theatre in Guthrie, Oklahoma where four women are working in a production not unlike Oklahoma!  I hesitate to give it all away because, truly, this is one of those theatrical discoveries best experienced without spoilers. But I’ll tell you this: it’s a Latino take on the classic musical, one that doesn’t so much “revise” Rodgers and Hammerstein as playfully, raucously possesses it. 

And the greenroom of this new musical, replete with Mexican Revolutionaries and Puerto Rican dancers, is the heartbeat of the play, where sacred irreverence meets cultural specificity in a riot of laughter, longing, and ancestral interference. You don’t just watch it. You feel like you’ve been let in on something deliciously unspoken.

And that, more than anything, is what theatre should do. Let us in. Show us what we didn’t know we missed. And remind us that revolution doesn’t always come in the form of a raised fist; it might just arrive in a well-timed joke, or a tarot card being read backstage. 

Melinda, played with a quiet but piercing truth by Danaya Esperanza, is a woman caught in the crosshairs of a nation that cannot decide who it belongs to anymore. She’s unexpectedly pregnant. She’s thinking about an abortion. And then the world turns upside down. Roe v. Wade is overturned, and in Oklahoma, a state always prepared to act fast when it comes to turning back the clock, a 1910 abortion law snaps back into place, as if nothing had changed in over a hundred years.
But everything has changed.

What Christin Eve Cato understands, and what makes her such a vital voice in American theatre right now, is that the past doesn’t stay in the past when it was never meant to include you in the first place. This isn’t just a law from 1910, it’s a ghost law, written by white men for white women, at a time when the future we’re living in now was unimaginable to them. A future where the United States is hurtling toward becoming a “minority white” country by 2045. And as that demographic shift looms, the machinery of the state, fearful, desperate is already digging in its heels.

This is a play about what it means to be criminalized by the ghost of a dead country. You see it in Melinda’s eyes. You feel it in her silences. Esperanza carries this weight the way only a great stage actor can; by letting it sit just beneath the surface, letting the audience feel the contours of it without drawing a map. It’s a sadness that’s ancient and freshly inflicted, and it turns what could have been a simple dramatic arc into something haunted and necessary.

She shares a dressing room with two other women, one of whom is Jolie played with luminous restraint and wisdom by Yadira Correa. Jolie is not a side character. She is the kind of woman who usually gets written out of history or flattened into metaphor. But here, she is fully alive. She is a woman who lives in the aftermath of pain, not just the emotional kind, but the physical kind that comes from having a body the medical system was never designed to listen to.

Correa plays her with grace, not in spite of her suffering, but through it. Jolie is not looking for pity, and she’s certainly not looking for a cure. She’s found, instead, a kind of hard-won dignity, the kind that doesn’t shout its presence but settles into the room like a familiar warmth. It’s a performance that holds space, for Melinda, for the audience, for the unsaid things that so often get left backstage.

What this production reveals, in layers, is how much America has asked women, especially Black and Brown women, to endure, to navigate, to survive. And in that cramped dressing room, filled with offstage jokes and onstage history, Cato offers a vision of survival that isn’t sanitized or simplified. It’s defiant. It’s funny. It’s holy. And it’s real.

And then there is the rocket fuel of the production: Claudia Ramos Jordan as Elena, who in turn plays Ado Ana, whose white version is Ado Annie. She doesn’t enter the play; she detonates into it. Like a firecracker let loose in a quiet room, Elena doesn’t just take the stage; she claims it like a birthright.

What Christin Eve Cato does with this character is something quietly radical. She doesn’t rewrite Ado Annie so much as free her. All the familiar qualities are still there; the buoyant charm, the openness, the kinetic joy of someone who knows how to fall in love twice before lunch. But here, through Elena; Ana/Ado Annie have something the original never dared offer her: an inner life. A voice that belongs not to the men who sing about her, but to herself.

And through Elena, we see a woman who doesn’t just stumble into desire; she names it. Owns it. And feels no need to apologize for the fact that pleasure, too, is part of a full and unapologetic life. Ms. Jordan gives us two characters in one, Elena, the self-aware actor, and Ado Annie, the liberated archetype and each is as vivid as the other. It’s a comic performance, yes, but also a masterclass in timing, intelligence, and mischief. She’s not simply funny. she’s essential!

Rounding out the cast is Cristina Pitter as Alex, the stage manager. It’s the sort of role that can feel, at first, like a narrative afterthought; the glue that keeps everyone else together. But you’d be wrong to underestimate her. I certainly was. Because Pitter doesn’t just hold the show together, there's an entire section where she absolutely hijacks it. 

Without giving too much away (and truly, this is a surprise worth preserving), Alex becomes the key to one of the production’s best twists. Pitter plays it with the confidence of someone who knows the real story has been humming underneath the whole time, and we just haven’t caught up yet. And when it lands, it doesn’t just get laughs; it reshapes the play. It's one of those moments that remind you how satisfying live theater can be when it trusts its performers, its audience, and its sense of play all at once.

If this production has a secret superpower, it’s that no role is ever just what it seems at first glance. Every character, no matter how comic or peripheral, holds a door open to something deeper. And each actor steps through it with courage and clarity.

The play unfolds across three stages; what I call, The Immigrant Latino Divine Comedy, or more precisely, Dante's Inferno Latino, and here, is where knowing our culture is not just helpful, it is paramount. 

Level one: a problem arises; perhaps personal, perhaps medical, but always compounded by a system engineered to make it worse. White America, ever ready with legislation and judgment, steps in. All Latinos are familiar with this system. (For example, all my white college friends were told to take out one loan, I was made to take out six, six which would lead to the same amount as the one but would lead to a lifetime of debt.)

Level two: we turn inward and upward. Saints, ancestors, spirits, in the case of O.K.! tarot cards; the spiritual scaffolding of our lives comes into play. Not because we’re superstitious, but because we know the things that save us aren’t always visible. We confide in the dead way before we dare trust the living.

And level three: the release. The conversation. The quiet miracle of finally sharing our burden with friends and family, of saying the unsayable out loud and finding, perhaps, that we’re not alone after all.

Christin Eve Cato builds this journey, dense with history, humor, and heartbreak, into a brisk, ninety-minute whirlwind. She captures something elusive and essential about the Latino experience in America: how often our stories must hold contradiction, how often laughter must carry pain, and how even a comedy about abortion can feel like an act of cultural reclamation.

Director Melissa Crespo, working in the intimate confines of INTAR Theatre, navigates this multiverse of tones with astonishing grace. Peter Brook once wrote in The Empty Space that “Reality is a word with many meanings.” Crespo understands this deeply. She allows each layer of Cato’s world; the realism of reproductive rights, the mystical language of the spirits, and the surreal delight of a Latina reimagining of Oklahoma! to coexist without contradiction. Each is true. Each has a place. None undermines the others.

Rodrigo Escalante’s set design is a source of delight, full of hidden reveals and theatrical sleight-of-hand. A windmill, for instance, does something so unexpectedly perfect I wouldn’t dream of spoiling it here.

Maria-Christina Fusté’s lighting washes the play in mood and memory, and the sound design, by Daniela Hart had fun building a reality for two shows, the show in front of us and the musical about to start somewhere beyond. 

Lux Haac’s costumes evolve with the narrative, shifting from grounded realism into something joyfully ridiculous. At the final point of the play, Jolie has transformed into a Mexican revolutionary grandmother draped in bullet belts, and it lands not as parody but as promise of what's to come. We're in for a big fight.  We're telling jokes now. But somewhere deep inside, we suspect that it may get violent. 

And here lies the brilliance of Cato's work. It invites us in with humor, catches us off guard with beauty, and before we realize it, we’re knee-deep in truth. Not the tidy, network-ready kind, but the messy kind born of legacy, language, and lives lived in-between borders both literal and spiritual.

It is both theatre and resistance with punchlines. It is the beginning of a necessary new American canon; one that must be born, because the truths it tells have been too long ignored. 

Very recently, I wrote an essay titled The Revolution Has Called Places. In it, I spoke of our responsibility as artists; to speak, to warn, to document, to defend a democracy that is not just fraying at the edges but unraveling in our hands. Days later, the news arrived: the National Endowment for the Arts was being rescinded from many theaters. The blow was not surprising. But it was no less devastating.

And make no mistake; among the first to be silenced will be the voices shouting hardest. The works with the most rage. The plays that don’t comfort but confront. Plays like Christin Eve Cato’s.

But Cato; and the women who take the stage with her sent me out of that theater not with despair, but with a new kind of marching order. We cannot save the institutions that do not see us, that will not recognize our voices, our communities, our pain. And perhaps, we should not try. Perhaps the most radical thing we can do is to let the old structures be burned by the very same people who created them, and while they burn their precious white America, we begin building something new in their shadow. Something braver. Something that tells the truth.

And if we’re honest, yes! things are dark. And yes!  they may get worse. But that doesn’t mean we stop laughing. Laughter, after all, is its own form of resistance. It reminds us we are still alive. Still watching. Still listening. Still here.

And that, perhaps, is the most revolutionary act of all.

And I'm just a boy that can't say no... to a good revolution.