Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Board Members
Yale Repertory Theatre
Through May 17
Lolita, a pro-independence Boricua trans woman, begins her morning just like any of my friends after a night out: a hazy recollection of drag bars, a sensitivity to light that indicates hangover, and a loaded gun in her hand.
Just kidding, of course — I’m not friends with Luigi Mangione. Although he would certainly be interested in what Lolita has to say and what she’s prepared to do. Armed with seven bullets, Lolita wants to shoot each and every member of the Puerto Rican Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Board.
So goes the Yale Repertory’s finale to the 2024 – 2025 season, Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management, and Economic Stability Board Members.
The board at the other end of Lolita’s pistol was established by an overwhelmingly bipartisan bill called “PROMESA” (promise in Spanish) in June 2016 to create a “bankruptcy” plan for Puerto Rico’s $70 billion dollars in debt. In essence, the act took away the authority of elected Puerto Rican officials and gave it to unelected board members. (Sound familiar?) Furthermore, in service of relieving this debt, social services were cut, and basic utilities such as electricity would be privatized. Pro-independence critics of the bill, and certainly Lolita herself, look at PROMESA as a continuation of the U.S.’s colonial extraction of Puerto Rico.
What is particularly insulting to Lolita is the lack of say that Puerto Ricans have in determining their own futures. Particularly, she looks at her transition as a mode of decolonizing herself. This is the lesson she tries to impart on The Receptionist of the Board.
Oh, right: the Receptionist. See, after Lolita walks in, guns ablazing, she collapses in front of a very gay, and very done, Nuyorican Receptionist. But as Lolita’s resolve begins to falter, the Receptionist shifts into his JOB job as a drag queen in an extravagant, no-holds-barred takedown turned target practice.
The dramaturgical arc of the play, thus, takes a beat from Scott Pilgrim’s playbook — performed by the Receptionist, Lolita must overcome each of the Board members, who are less like people and more like archetypes of oppression. For example: David Skeel, bankruptcy lawyer and author of True Paradox: How Christianity Makes Sense of Our Complex World, becomes Bishop David, hissing religious non-sequiturs in priest garb made of leather and gold chains.
So now you might be thinking: Wait, does the Receptionist play eight different characters, with eight different outfits? The answer, in fact, even more nuts — the cast and crew execute a whopping 11 costume changes, each a Broadway-ready design from Arthur Wilson. Even RuPaul would be exhausted!
The cast, who originated the roles at the play’s Off-Broadway premiere, never show any signs of fatigue. This is admirable, especially with as challenging a script as Veléndez’s. Though the play proceeds linearly, it oscillates among drag show, Socratic dialogue, and coming-out melodrama, with a healthy dose of absurdism.
These modes are held together by the unbounding exuberance of Samora la Perdida (the Receptionist), who not only bounces between genders but ultimately becomes the heart of the show. Christine Carmela, as Lolita, brings a tender fragility and quiet humor to a character it would be easy to write off as reprehensible. If anything, Carmela’s performance, balancing passion with wavering commitment, is relatable—no small feat for a character that’s introduced with a kill list.
Director Javier Antonio González is particularly attuned to the metatheatricality and didacticism that Veléndez makes a point to emphasize, a la Brecht. For example, González has the Receptionist change costumes on stage, or, more aptly, under it — Patti Panyakaew bifurcates the playing space into a sterile Wall Street waiting room sitting atop a fabulous dressing room. The Receptionist’s shifting gender performance, and the mechanical recognition of that change, evokes the absurdity of gender and possibilities of self-determination in and of itself.
From another angle, the production explores the “oversight” of PROMESA via a web of surveillance cameras. When Lolita looks into the cameras with a sinking feeling of being caught, the playing space, once blank with possibility, suddenly feels like a cage. Moreover, when the security footage is displayed on monitors — often a second behind the scene which plays out in front of us — the lag feels like a continuous fourth wall break, sanding down any suspension of disbelief without a sudden interruption. This, in an exciting and modern way, repurposes Brecht’s idea of “alienation,” a sustained state in which the audience can listen and learn. In essence, Notes on Killing is the most fun Puerto Rican history lecture one could ask for.
Veléndez’s greatest point around decolonial solidarity is bolstered by the play’s timeliness. In a time where an unelected Board cuts social services in the name of efficiency, and the right to self-determination and transition is steadily being whittled away, plays like Notes on Killing feel less like a scream into the void, and more like a slap on the butt. This is our world. This is our fight. So what are we going to do? How are we going to hold those in power accountable?
All I can hope for is that the revolution has time for this many costume changes.
