Review: "Love in the Time of Piñatas" Is Packed with Treats

Love in the Time of Piñatas

Written and performed by Baruch Porras Hernandez

Directed by Richard A. Mosqueda

Presented by FRIGID New York at the wild project

195 E 3rd St., Manhattan, NYC

April 8-13, 2025

Baruch Porras Hernandez. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
When Baruch Porras Hernandez first takes the stage in his sparkling solo show Love in the Time of Piñatas–one of 63 shows at the 2025 New York City Fringe Festival, which runs through April 20th across four venues in Manhattan and one in Brooklyn–it is as one of the titular candy-filled papier-mâché containers (in a costume by Kipper Yanaga). As a piñata–something beautiful, Hernandez notes, in a world made to destroy pretty things–he leads the audience through a story of being being wrenched away from the life he'd known to be used at a little boy's birthday party, from which he escapes only to encounter abuse and finally achieve transcendence. The piñata's journey acts like a brief, fanciful version of the show as a whole–which later returns to a child's birthday from the child's perspective–and the hilarious, at times unabashedly venereal, exploration of being a queer immigrant that follows, an exploration that acknowledges but never capitulates to the traumatic aspects of Hernandez's story.

Following the show's opening section, the subsequent vignettes are less fantastical but no less funny. With an easy charisma and a finely honed sense of expressive and evocative details, Hernandez revisits a range of moments in his life, including an important experience at five years old with a birthday piñata, his family's abrupt move from Mexico to outside San Francisco, and his experience coming out of his naturalization ceremony. This is storytelling with a strong streak of stand-up, and humor dominates throughout, even as the show touches on darker topics. Hernandez narrates moments of support, from family or from strangers working in doughnut shops; but also making their way, to varying extents, into some of the stories are, for instance, queerphobia from inside and outside the family, economic struggle, suicidal ideation, and the fear generated by what Hernandez characterizes as a United States in which he is "a little disappointed," with its direct, aggressive, and often unlawful attacks by the government on both queers and immigrants.
Baruch Porras Hernandez. Photo by Robbie Sweeny.
Luckily, given the deeply unsettling current state of the nation, the sparkle in this show is literal as well as figurative, from Hernandez's costuming and glittery beard in general to, more specifically, a pair of gloves festooned with fragments of mirror–tempting to imagine here a metaphor about self-/reflection--or one particular jacket that reflects pinpoints of light onto the theater walls like a disco ball-cum-star projector. The performance is also seasoned with some dashes of music and even original poetry. When both Frida Kahlo and Rainbow Brite play notable roles in a play, that should serve on its own as a hearty endorsement. At the end of a supremely fun, delightfully candid hour, Love in the Time of Piñatas asks us to remember that even though it seems like marginalized people must fight the same battles over and over, the very fact that these battles are still being fought means there are still "badass" queers and other marginalized people to fight them.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

More reviews from the 2025 New York City Fringe Festival:

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