By Monet Hurst-Mendoza Directed by Tatiana Pandiani At Women's Project Theatre No Intermission TICKETS: HERE.
There is a way that Mexican culture moves through the world; quietly at first, then all at once, until you realize it has taken root in you, blooming in the corners of your life you never thought to tend. It’s not a colonizing force, but a generous one. It invites, it absorbs, it teaches you that identity is not a walled city but a gathering of songs and stories, a marketplace of devotion.
I learned that from my mother. We were a Puerto Rican household, loud and complicated and full of faith, but a lot of the music that held us together came from somewhere across the border, carried on the voice of Vicente Fernández.
My mother adored him; his voice was a cathedral of our home. Even now, decades later, his songs drift through our home like a kind of blessing, proof that culture, when it’s alive, doesn’t ask permission to cross.
So, I came to Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s Torera with that same sense of expectation. The play centers on Elena María Hernández, played by the electrifying Jacqueline Guillen, a girl who grows up in the shadow of Don Rafael’s household because her mother works there as the niñera to his son, Tanok. I expected something familiar, a story of grit and ambition, a Latino Whiplash in the bullring. What I found instead was something more allegorical: a meditation on the arenas we are born into, the ones we choose, and the ones that are chosen for us.
Monet-Hurst Mendoza’s Torera is not a play about a woman who fights bulls. It is a play about a human spirit waging war against the boundaries of its enclosure. It’s about what we inherit. the customs, the silences, the cages. And what it costs to imagine a life beyond them.
In Hurst-Mendoza’s world, the bullring becomes both a stage and a crucible: the site where identity collides with expectation, and courage must learn to dance in circles. The production moves with the grandeur of ritual and the intimacy of confession. Every element, every pulse of light, every rise of music, every heartbeat beneath the costume, seems determined to break your heart open, only to fill it again with something startlingly alive: hope, fierce and unbowed.
The playwright in me recognizes the architecture: a sports story, yes, the hero’s journey traced in sawdust and sweat. But the theatergoer, the believer in metaphor and mystery, feels something far stranger and more resonant moving beneath it.
Jacqueline Guillen's Elena is all pulse and purpose, her body restless with the ache of an ambition the world has already forbidden her to possess. To be a Torera. To step into the sacred circle where tradition, masculinity, and death conspire to say no. Her fight is not with the bull but with inheritance itself, with the mythologies that tell her she was born to kneel, not to charge. Her mother, her mother's loss, her circumstances, the weight of custom; each becomes another horn pointed toward her.
“How do I pursue a dream that to my mother is a nightmare?” Elena asks her closest friend, Tanok, the boy raised beside her, the heir to the ring, the son of Don Rafael, whose lineage of toreros stretches backward like a chain of ghosts. It’s not a question meant to be answered. It’s a confession, a plea, a tiny revolution uttered in the dark. In that moment, Mendoza distills the entire torment of inheritance: one child destined to uphold tradition, the other daring to betray it, both trapped in the same story and praying to escape by different doors.
Tanok, the son of the house, is played by Jared Machado with a kind of haunted nobility; the elegance of someone born into a legacy that fits like a too-heavy crown. He carries his inheritance like a wound disguised as privilege, every gesture betraying both the desire to please and the knowledge that he cannot. There’s a stillness to him, the kind that suggests he has been listening all his life to echoes of men who came before him and found no room left for their own voice. Machado gives us the tragedy of a young man raised to embody a myth that has already outlived its truth.
Don Rafael, his father, is brought to life by the magnificent Jorge Cordova, who sculpts the man from equal parts pride and disappointment. He is a patriarch both formidable and fraying at the edges, a figure whose authority trembles under the weight of its own exhaustion. In one devastating scene, Cordova must hold, simultaneously: anger, fear, and the unbearable glimmer of paternal pride after his son falters. The moment is important in its restraint: through a single breath, we glimpse the entire tragic economy of this family: a marketplace of masculinity, tradition, and shame, all of it paid for in silence. and Mr. Cordova delivers all of this in one breath.
And then there is Elena’s mother, Pastora, portrayed by Elena Hurst with the kind of quiet ferocity that shakes the foundations of the play. Her performance hums at a lower frequency than the others, but it reverberates longest; she is the still center around which the storms of ambition and defiance revolve. In a scene of aching simplicity; mother and daughter at a kitchen table, hands deep in masa; the play ascends into the divine and I heartfully wept. It wasn't just the cooking; it was a moment of communion, inheritance, resistance. The moment thrums with the sorrow of a mother passing on one kind of strength even as she senses her daughter reaching for a more dangerous, more radiant kind of power. She simply gives one of the best performances of the year.
This production beats with the heart of its director, Tatiana Pandiani, whose vision animates every breath of the story. She is the true torera here, entering the arena of the stage with grace and daring, orchestrating the play as both ritual and revelation. Under her guidance, movement becomes language, silence becomes prayer. With the extraordinary dancers Christian Jesús Galvis and Andrea Soto, she conjures not just atmosphere but soul, the rhythm of memory, the shimmer of myth. Together they transform the stage into a space of wonder, a choreography of spirit and shadow so visually arresting it feels less designed than summoned.
The dancer's presence expands the play beyond realism into something lyrical and haunted. They move as if they are the air the story breathes, becoming at turns the bulls, the horses, the ghosts of ancestry, the embodiment of longing itself.
Pandiani builds a world that feels both ancient and newly born, where myth and muscle share the same breath. Emmie Finckel’s set has the rough beauty of memory. Yuki Nakase Link’s lighting doesn’t just illuminate; it feels emotional, responsive. Rodrigo Muñoz’s costumes vibrate with the life and rituals of the characters, while G Clausen’s sound design folds the world in on itself: the murmurs of the crowd, the heartbeat beneath it all. Together they create not a reproduction but a revelation; a vision of Mexico that refuses to be flattened into stereotype, insisting instead on its enormity, its intellect, its soul.
Because Mexico, as Torera reminds us, is not just a nation but a force; a cultural colossus whose music, language, and art have shaped the imagination of the hemisphere and beyond. And in a time when Mexican people are still demeaned, diminished, and demonized by American racism, the presence of this play feels defiant and necessary, it demands that we acknowledge what has always been true: that Mexico is not on the margins of our American story, it is one of the principal stories.
Together, this cast, this director, this crew remind us that the most astonishing theatrical effect is never spectacle, but imagination; the invisible machinery that allows belief to leap into the lights and take root in us. The play's gift is its trust: it invites the audience to see not only with their eyes, but with that deeper, riskier part of themselves that still remembers how to wonder. That trust is the production’s highest art, the place where theatre becomes communion; where we are reminded, for a fleeting moment, of how much we still need one another to dream.
Late in the play, there comes a moment when the gears of the story show themselves, when the machinery creaks a little under the weight of all that feeling. A revelation lands with less conviction than the truths that have already broken our hearts open, and for a breath we remember that this is theatre, constructed and fragile. But the lapse is fleeting, forgivable, almost tender in its imperfection. For the world Torera builds is so whole, so vivid in its detail and humanity, that it holds us fast. We believe in these people, in their courage and confusion, in the light that leaks through their wounds. And belief, in the theatre as in life, is the rarest kind of grace.
Torera arrives in a moment when the cost of dreaming feels almost unbearable, when the act of wanting more than what you’re given has become its own quiet form of rebellion. The play understands that the dream is not the prize but the crucible; the place where a person learns who they are by refusing to surrender. The bullring, Hurst-Mendoza reminds us, is not a single arena but a hundred invisible ones: the kitchen, the family table, the body, the heart.
Elena’s triumph is not in victory but in persistence, in the furious dignity of continuing to fight even when the world insists, she should not. And as we watch her struggle; rendered here with such aching beauty, such generosity of spirit, we recognize something of our own endurance. Torera does what great theatre has always done: it returns us to ourselves, chastened, heartened, a little braver than before.
