Torera
Long Wharf Theatre and Women’s Project Theater
New York
Through Oct. 19, 2025
Review by Aanika Eragam
As the spotlight deftly trails them, two dancers (Christian Galvis and Andrea Soto) collide on stage. The moment resembles two asteroids merging into one. Soto is lifted onto Galvis’ shoulders, her legs stretching outwards over his head, transforming into— horns? Indeed, it is in the stunning and lithe choreography and direction of Tatiana Pandiani that these two dancers become the taciturn eighth character prowling Monet Hurst-Mendoza’s original play — the bull.
As the makeshift bull rears its horns again, the audience too roars to life. Chants of “vale, vale” dot across the room. Donning a traditional bullfighting costume, the traje de luces, Tanok Cárdenas (Jared Machado) enters the ring. Earlier that afternoon, the usher handed each of us a white handkerchief. “You’ll be needing these later,” he said. Now, the moment was upon us. We fluttered our handkerchiefs, leaning forward for the gladiatorial battle at hand. For a moment, the intimate auditorium was transformed into a bullring, and there we were, watching from the stands.
It’s a testament to the precision and inventiveness of the design team for Torera, which debuted in 2023 at The Alley Theatre in Houston, Texas. Now, the play has transferred off-Broadway at the Women’s Project Theater in the Upper West Side, in collaboration with New Haven’s own Long Wharf Theatre.
The scenic design by Emmie Finckel brought to life the ancient tradition of bullfighting. Even the adobo walls of the set — a courtyard inside of a Spanish estate in the Yucatán province of Mexico — were artfully scuffed, scattered with patches of dirt and wear, the markings of years passed. Vines spilled over each wall, the cascading growth serving as a reminder that this is, at its core, a coming of age story.
As I stared at an intricately woven tree trunk that sprawled across stage right, the show’s protagonist— Elena Ramirez (Jacqueline Guillén)—appeared on stage and scuttled up it. With a dynamic and sharp performance by Guillén, Elena playfully evaded (an equally energetic) Tanok, the childhood friend whose home she grew up in. Tanok’s father, the wealthy Don Rafael (Jorge Cordova), is a famed bullfighter. Elena’s mother, Pastora (Elena Hurst), is Rafael’s live-in housekeeper, and the two children grow up chasing each other around the sprawling estate. As the play progresses, Elena and Tanok reunite around their shared dream to become matadors. As their ambitions soar, so too does their chemistry, as what began as a siblinglike rivalry transforms into a romance.
Yet, it’s an unsettled love. Class and gender are the focal points of Hurst-Mendoza’s play. Though Pastora makes breakfast for both children in the same kitchen, though they both end up, years later, sprawled on a hotel futon, drinking gluttonously on Don Rafael’s money— these shared spaces are also strained. Tanok promises to help Elena make it to the bull ring. “Then why do we still eat in your kitchen?” she challenges. “If you can’t get me into the dining room, then how the hell are you going to get me in the bull ring?”
Comparatively, Hurst-Mendoza’s exploration of gender felt more heavy-handed. The corrida is a man’s game — this is established early on. “You have to know your place,” Pastora chastises her daughter. “A girl has no place near wild animals.” In one scene, she recruits a recalcitrant Elena to help prepare a meal. As her daughter finally finds her rhythm, Pastora beams: “You’ll make a wonderful wife one day.” Elena immediately slouches in retaliation, earning a laugh from the crowd. Tanok, meanwhile, is dual advocate and perpetrator. At the height of a fight with Elena, it’s a PMS joke that he levels at her as his stinging blow. “That’s what men do,” he assures her in another scene, “We handle things.” Was that a joke? Or not? A bit of uncertain laughter followed, but one person in the audience groaned: “Oh my god.”
Perhaps most interesting in the depiction of Spanish patriarchy was its enforcer: Pastora. It is Elena’s own mother who is most explicit and insistent in shuttering her daughter’s dreams. Reeling from the loss of her own husband in the bullfighting ring years ago, she knows the sport’s danger. Yet, Pastora is also a dreamer. She wanted to be a dancer, but her own mother never supported her — an intergenerational longing that has clearly been passed down. There is a beautiful sequence where Pastora twirls alongside the two dancers, and we see a glimpse of the talent she’s forsaken. It appears again in a scene where she sings aloud to herself while folding laundry. Hurst is convincing in her righteous, angry motherhood, but it is these quiet moments, where she is alone on stage, nostalgic for her dreams, that are most revelatory. “I am proud of my life,” she later tells her daughter. “It’s not the one everyone wanted for me, but it’s the one I chose.”
This notion of inheritance — dreams passed down, legacies to bear or be burdened by — is a prominent underpinning of the play. For Tanok, the reminder of his father’s success in the bullring is weighty. “Everone wants me to be the best and that is a lot to live up to,” he says. But where he is flighty in his father’s shadow, Elena is dying to step into it. As they’re drunkenly taking shots together, he proposes a toast: “To your health and happiness!” “Fuck that!” she retaliates. “To being the best there ever was!”
Would that the play had stayed closer to its investigation of these themes — the duel between mother and daughter, the inheritance of legacy, the price of glory. But the final act took an otherwise solid foundation and shook it. A flashback between Pastora and Rafael emerges late in the play — an odd structural jump that struck me as disconcerting. Cordova’s performance, too, felt stilted in this latter half, anger dominating his delivery even in scenes of grief and tenderness. In the play’s final ten minutes, a stupendous reveal casts the entirety of Tanok and Elena’s relationship in an unsettling new light. It’s a moment that landed hastily and eruptively in a play that had no time left to unpack it or even begin to understand why the addition was necessary. Perhaps there was an underlying motivation that I missed, but mostly I felt blindsided by a reversal which struck purely as shock value.
In the play’s closing scene, the audience is asked to once again wave our white cloths for Elena, now donning a traje de luces costume of her own. She has made it as a matador, her dream. Looking out at us, she chants three times: “I am a bird. I am invincible. I soar above everything.” She is there in all her glory.
But it feels like a farce. Grieving her friend, grieving her childhood, grieving the loss of everything she knew in her life as sturdy — in the wake of all of the final act’s revelations, no one’s hands are clean. Even as she stands, proud and illuminated, the hero of the arena — the victory rings hollow.
