UIC Theatre: “Marisol”

Marisol Perez, a young Puerto Rican woman and copy editor for a Manhattan publisher, receives an unexpected visit from her guardian angel, who delivers devastating news: She can no longer protect Marisol. She has been called to join a revolution already underway against an old, senile God who is dying — and “taking the rest of the universe with him.”

As the war in heaven spills into New York City, the world Marisol knows collapses into a smoldering urban wasteland. Giant fires darken the skies with toxic smoke. The moon has disappeared. Food turns to salt, water no longer seeks its level and the boundaries of reality itself begin to break down.

Written by José Rivera in 1992, this dystopian dark fantasy imagines a world consumed by greed, capitalism and the collapse of human values as the millennium approaches. In Rivera’s nightmarish vision, credit card companies arrest people who cannot pay their debts, while homeless people are hunted by roaming Nazi gangs. The result is a surreal, apocalyptic drama that uses the end of the world to ask what happens when the systems governing human society — and the God who created them — begin to fall apart.

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