Debajo del árbol de almendras
Written and directed by Luis Caballero
64 East 4th Street, Manhattan, NYC
January 16-25, 2026
Presented in Spanish and English with supertitles
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| The cast of Debajo del árbol de almendras | . Courtesy of Teatro Círculo | |
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The furor–and
legal consequences–surrounding the unauthorized felling in 2023 of England's Sycamore Gap Tree points to the psychological significance that such natural landmarks can hold for people. Many of us could probably point to similar examples in our own lives, especially in our childhoods, even if their importance is individual rather than national. For Puerto Rican playwright and director Luis Caballero, "an immense …[,] breathtaking, majestic" almond tree that stood outside his parents' home when he was growing up, close enough that "its branches touched the balcony of the house," occupies such a position. This tree, Caballero has said, acted as both "friend" and witness to "all the stories of my neighborhood," adding that, “We all carry a tree in our subconscious. That tree is our refuge, our hiding place. … It is the home where our inner child lives.” His impassioned and impactful play
Debajo del árbol de almendras (
Under the Almond Tree), making its world premiere at Teatro Círculo this week, takes that pillar of his childhood experience not only for its title but also as a connective presence linking the three stories of individuals dealing with trauma and marginalization that the play comprises. The show's opening night also marked the opening of Teatro Círculo's "Mi casa es tu casa," a response to the assaults on immigrant communities that offers, with the support of the Howard Gilman Foundation and the Mosaic Network and Fund, free space and technical and marketing assistance to theater artists, $10 tickets for matinee and evening performances on Saturdays, and parties and other post-show events to complement the theater's programming.
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| Luis Caballero. Courtesy of Teatro Círculo |
The play's almond tree, wonderfully realized in stylized form by
Israel Franco Müller's set design, stretches up along one wall of the performance area, its branches extending along the ceiling and counterbalancing the quartet of stumps that dot the painted floor of the otherwise bare stage. The first of the stories to which the tree bears silent witness sees a whimsically dressed queer man, Toño (César Cova), being harassed by a black-clad homophobe (Bill Oxendine) who seems to know things about Toño's past. The man's allusions to his own past involve a father with an abusive dedication to hegemonic heteronormative masculinity, and he dreams of death while Toño dreams of flying and freedom (In another notable contrast, he speaks in English while Toño, until a climactic point, keeps to Spanish). The second story begins with the entrance of an inebriated woman named Lola (
Edna Lee Figueroa) drinking from a bottle before urinating near the base of the tree. She expresses her sorrow at the death of her beloved husband six months previously and recounts the story of her futile hope that her husband's physical unattractiveness would insulate her from worry about him being desired and pursued by other women (of whom she has a rather low opinion), a tale that includes her investment in her past beauty and her horror at signs of her aging. While this segment has a lot more comedy than the first, the consequences of Lola's traditional, sexist attitudes to gender and sexuality are grave and can be seen as an analogue to the damagingly retrogressive "boys don't cry" machismo critiqued in the first segment. The third segment, which contains several direct echoes of the first, again presents a pair of characters at odds, beginning with a young woman named Antonia (Kiara Alejandra) demanding that a man in a red hat (Joél Isaac) stop following her. Recalling the homophobe in the opening story, the man seems to know things about Antonia's past even though she says they weren't at school together, including that she was bullied with the nickname "Red Riding Hood" (which casts him as the wolf, imagery that the segment both plays with and undermines). As Antonia's past is revealed to be intimately connected to her relationship to the man, this segment, if the second is the most comic, becomes the most poetic, providing a moving conclusion to the play as a whole.
Each of the segments complicates its characters, adding interesting wrinkles as it moves along, and each at some point takes an unexpected turn in its narrative that adds to thematic resonances among the trio of stories. The dynamic cast invests these shadings with admirable vibrancy, whether in the ways in which Oxendine's character invades Toño's personal space or the occasionally teasing way in which Toño holds his own in the face of such incursions. Figueroa is fantastic, funny, and fierce in the middle segment, which amounts to a short one-woman show with a few recorded voices at key points in Lola's story. And Isaac cannily balances the threatening and alluring sides of his character, while Alejandra brings a sympathetic intensity to Antonia's defiant woundedness and desire for escape and freedom. From the experiences of these characters emerges a picture of the interrelationship among traumas, oppressive social strictures and stereotypes, mental health, external forces and internal divisions, and potential paths to healing. After all, if the image of the almond tree reflects a rootedness that includes past traumas, it equally reflects ongoing and unceasing growth.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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