Building My Casa
Braulio Basilio has written a love letter to the millions of Latin immigrants trying to navigate their way through an unfriendly and lonely New York City.
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Braulio Basilio, Ursula Tinoco and Gilberto Gabriel in a scene from Basilio’s “Building My Casa” at The Downstairs Theatre at La MaMa ETC. (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp)
Playwright/actor Braulio Basilio may appear prophetic when we sit in horror today watching the news as a returning president maps out how he plans to deprive immigrants of any and all freedoms in this new administration. Created and conceived by actors Basilio, Ursula Tinoco, Gilberto Gabriel, and their fellow Teatro 220 colleague Andrés López-Alicea, Building My Casa is a timely piece of theater that desperately needs a wider audience. In Building My Casa, they do not give us any surprises nor are we ever expecting any; they give us a tale of three endearing individuals who each in their own way are strangers in a strange land.
We meet Jorge, from Chile, Valentina, from Mexico, and Román, from Puerto Rico, on the roof of their building as they celebrate the second birthday of a cat they’ve adopted and named “Antonio.” The cat’s birthday coincides with their own second anniversary as roommates. Jorge has been in New York City for seven years, having lived with another man, Antonio, in this same apartment. There are many things Jorge leaves unsaid, but that fact is not central to the friendships we watch grow as three people share their same love/hate relationship with a city that can embrace people from other lands with one hand while it pushes them away with the other.
Actor Gilberto Gabriel plays Román, a musician, singer and songwriter, bringing a requisite naïveté and charming happy-go-lucky aura to what the projection refers to as Román’s First Week in New York City. As he arrives from Puerto Rico, it can be perceived that his journey is not the most difficult of the three, yet it cannot be minimized. His expectations are such that he has set a high bar for himself as a creative. He cannot return to Puerto Rico without having achieved success. As he sings to NYC, “I don’t care/take it all/you can have everything I’ve ever made/just don’t close any doors on me/and you will always see that I’m the one that you have always been waiting for.”
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Ursula Tinoco, Braulio Basilio and Gilberto Gabriel in a scene from Basilio’s “Building My Casa” at The Downstairs Theatre at La MaMa ETC. (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp)
Roman’s almost immediate scene following, “590 Days of Román,” is not nearly as uplifting in mood, “I’d like to go back in time/to play under the table/like a child without hiding/wake up at home again/without having to think about it/and get this madness out of my mind/of going desperately into space.” Here, he climbs onto the ledge of the rooftop and precariously teeters until the cat Antonio starts choking. He stops to comfort the cat. Román uses the cat as much needed emotional support for his own panic attack. Gabriel gives us a very haunting episode here containing some beautiful moments with the cat that typifies how animal lovers interact with their pets in ways they can’t possibly reproduce with their fellow humans.
Ursula Tinoco plays Valentina, who has come to New York to write. Another creative like Román, Valentina has a direct connection to the power of books. “My grandmother gave me her passion for books, a passion that saved me from the cruelty of childhood and the loneliness of adolescence. When I left my country to live here, these books became my home, my country. They helped me endure the useless pain of being different.” Tinoco gives us a nuanced portrait of a woman who sees the books as the tangibles that connect her to her past as much as her future. The fact that her collection of books from Mexico extends out of her bedroom and into boxes on the rooftop is not a sign of hoarding as much as it is a direct reflection of how much of a past she pulls from to be a creator of her art.
Tinoco shines in her determination to pull every scrap of meaning from the farewell letter that has been “found” on the roof. The letter is a trigger for her. Notice that it is Valentina, with Román, that wants to dig deeper to know more about the writer of the note, going so far as to search social media for clues. “Why do I feel like it’s reading my thoughts? Why do I feel grief all the time? Why do I live in this city?”
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Gilberto Gabriel, Braulio Basilio, Ursula Tinoco and Daniel Diaza as Antonio/The Cat in a scene from Basilio’s “Building My Casa” at The Downstairs Theatre at La MaMa ETC. (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp)
Braulio Basilio as Jorge gives a very compelling portrayal of the immigrant who has been here all this time and has accomplished sadly little on his “bucket list.” Like most immigrants who have to hit the ground running, working to pay for rent and expenses, he has made little progress in learning English to the level that would take him to better paying jobs. Rehashing his foray into working reception (probably hired as “bilingual”) is as painful in recreation as it must have been in the moment. Manual labor in a warehouse puts him in competition with other unskilled Latin men for slight upticks in salary based on machinery credentials but ultimately does him no favors in improving his necessary skills.
Jorge pushes for more English to be spoken at home so he can practice without feeling uncomfortable in other public settings. “Because I do want to forget my language, my culture, where I come from, because I want to fit in in this shitty country that doesn’t know how to deal with people like us. Because I want to fit in but I don’t have the slightest idea of how to improve my English other than by making an effort to speak it every day.”
Basilio brings so many layers to his being the sole person who was here when the farewell letter was written. In his telling of Antonio’s Last Day we are made acutely aware of everything he has forsaken just to walk away empty handed: “And then I remember that I lost…Here I lost, lost, lost. I lost my family when I left my country. I lost my identity trying to fit in. I lost time trying to find a job, which is why I came. I lost my dreams because, when I got the job I didn’t have time to dream. I won when I met Antonio, he gave me strength to continue with what I longed for. He gave me a home. He gave me a family. And I realized that Antonio had lived here long before me, and had been losing for longer. Until he lost the will to live. And I lost everything again.”
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Braulio Basilio, Daniel Diaza, Gilberto Gabriel and Ursula Tinoco in a scene from Basilio’s “Building My Casa” at The Downstairs Theatre at La MaMa ETC. (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp)
Actor Daniel Diaza is Antonio in the readings of the poignant farewell letter and in moments that happen before the start of the play proper, and he doubles as the very visible puppeteer responsible for the other Antonio, the very friendly black cat that completes their household. Diaza becomes very much the spirit of the man Antonio in the embodiment of the cat. For an audience that has spent time with cats, Diaza firmly brings that charm and grace that doesn’t appear in any other animal.
Director Federica Borlenghi moves us effortlessly from past to present and back again giving us opportunities as an audience to decide just how much we want or need to unravel. Keeping a little bit of mystery at a close distance is not something you get in every play so it’s refreshing to take that path with Basilio’s writing.
Special mention goes to Mariana Garcia Tinoco for the puppet design and fabrication of the cat Antonio. He is an absolute wonder making it very easy to forget it is a puppet and not a living breathing creature. The cat is responsible for the first appearance of the letter, later spitting up the crumpled letter, and climbing into laps as a much needed calming force in each of their lives, when he’s not watching everything else that goes on in the action of the play.
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Braulio Basilio, Daniel Diaza as Antonio/The Cat and Gilberto Gabriel in a scene from Basilio’s “Building My Casa” at The Downstairs Theatre at La MaMa ETC. (Photo credit: Bronwen Sharp)
Sometimes you need to hear a truth over and over for it to sink in. Repeated a few times in Spanish during the course of the play, and this may be a rhetorical question…but it needs to be said, even begged, for the people who come to the United States to make it their home: “With you being the capital of the world where there are people everywhere, it can be such a lonely place.”
Building My Casa (through February 2, 2025)
Teatro 220
The Downstairs at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club
66 East 4th Street, in Manhattan
For tickets, visit http://www.ovationtix.com
Running time: 60 minutes without an intermission
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