BroadwayWorld - Fringe Festival 2024, by Pamela Roberts

DC Theater Arts. - 5 Stars, by John Stoltenberg

DC Theater Arts. - (5/18/25), by John Stoltenberg

BroadwayWorld - Fringe Festival 2024 A lush, powerful and deeply moving production Premiering at the Capital Fringe Festival, the play explores past, present and future. Like flecks of glitter in a snow globe, in this production thoughts, memories, and fragments drift peacefully or swirl turbulently and resettle each time in unique new ways. Manasés, now 30, reflects upon growing up closeted in a conformist community, and his unrequited secret crush on his best friend, Max. The play explores how we can’t always trust our memories; our minds go in different directions, sometimes in a very linear way other times we get stuck or we want to play alternate endings. Alcerro, known primarily as a local actor, expands with this Fringe show into directing and playwriting. “Pondering About My Memories” is a way to share his own thoughts and stories rather than a character he plays. His text is deep and emotional. It is a gripping work that holds our attention the entire time – we want to know more about these characters. The production uses heightened and poetic prose, gorgeous and evocative movement – and even an extraordinarily effective low-tech puppet show. Pablo Guillen as Manasés and Joshua Cole Lucas as Max are a strong team who bring beauty and authority to their work. These two are experienced actors with a slew of credits in DMV professional theaters, including the physical theatre aesthetic of Synetic Theatre. In “Pondering About My Memories” their practiced movement is a vital asset used here to great effect – even their shadows on the wall were a striking element. Guillen and Lucas balance ease and originality in this experimental piece. Read more

DC Theater Arts. - 5 Stars The dreamlike drama of a recollected unrequited queer crush. At the beginning two young men stand back to back and, to prerecorded guitar accompaniment, begin to dance the dreamlike drama of a recollected unrequited queer infatuation that unfolds in Pondering About My Memories. The two performers, whom I’ll call the rememberer (Pablo Guillen) and the crush (Joshua Cole Lucas), have a lyrical physical synchronicity (they’ve both spent time with Synetic). But it is the emotional translucence they bring to their characters combined with playwright-director-choreographer Rodin Alcerro’s achingly affecting storytelling that makes this Capital Fringe Festival entry extraordinary. When the two actors speak, the text Alcerro scripted (in Spanish, translated into English by Oscar Quiroz) can feel torn from the soul. And when seamlessly the actors are moved to move, their choreography (by Alcerro with Joshua Lucas) speaks a language beyond and beneath words. Surreal lighting effects by Hailey LaRoe and a sound design by Brandon Cook that sometimes musicalizes their tender and tortured pas de deux with organ, guitar, and sax — and sometimes delivers sudden rumbles and sonic booms — further serve to unify the performance into what seems an artform all its own. We first meet Max (the crush) and Manasés (the rememberer) in a boyhood game of pitch and catch. Max teases Manasés for having his head in the clouds all the time. It must be a birth defect, Manasés jokes. Then, huddled together on a black set piece graffitied with multicolor expressions of love, Manasés asks, “What do we live for?” “I guess we live to be happy…,” Max answers — prompting what becomes between them, and between the play and us, a throughline existential reflection. The narrative is dramatized in bits, like bytes of memory accessed briefly. Among the incidents that impact the story is the death of Max’s older brother by hanging, having been shamed by their father for wearing women’s clothing. Max’s ensuing family gender drama gets told as…a comic puppet show. Manasés then recalls (or imagines) holding a dress and telling his wished-for boyfriend, “Maybe if I look like a woman, we could be together.” Read more

DC Theater Arts A deep well of tenderness and sensitivity flows through this production, propelled by poetic memories of an adolescent infatuation. In the center of the stage at Teatro de la Luna’s intimate black box in Petworth is a black block covered with graffiti on the theme of “AMOR” and “LOVE” — hearts and stars and such, scrawled in fluorescent-colored chalk. That simple set piece points to the gist of the play we’re about to see — a queer adolescent’s fateful infatuation with an agemate — but it barely hints at the heart-rending emotionality that will flood the space as Rodin Alcerro’s profoundly affecting two-hander, Pondering About My Memories, unfolds. Alcerro, who also directs, wrote his heartfelt play in Spanish. (“I am the only one that can do the theater I want to see,” he said matter-of-factly during a talkback on opening night.) Alcerro’s tight and touchingly poetic text is performed in Oscar Quiroz’s engaging English translation, accompanied by on-screen Spanish surtitles — a reversal for Teatro de la Luna, which performs in Spanish with English surtitles. I first discovered Pondering About My Memories during last summer’s Capital Fringe Festival in a production I adored. (My rave is here.) Upon learning that the play would be remounted with the same superb cast — Pablo Guillén as Manasés, the young man who recalls his teenage crush on Max, played by Joshua Lucas — I didn’t think twice about seeing the play again. Suffice it to say, I was smitten again. Read more