Review: "Lipstick" Smudges the Lines Between Genders and Generations

Lipstick

Co-written by Edu Díaz and Linda Morales Caballero based on a story by Linda Morales Caballero

Directed by Lil Malinich

Presented by Edu Díaz at Chain Theatre

312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC

April 5-19, 2026

Edu Díaz in Lipstick. Photo by Krystal Pagán.
For centuries in Western culture, cosmetics have been discussed as having a transformative power, which has been invoked in ways ranging from a condemnation of their facilitation of falsehood and pride to a selling point for potential consumers. In Lipstick, a solo show based on acclaimed Peruvian author Linda Morales Caballero's short story "Labial," from her book El libro de los enigmas, the titular cosmetic wields just such a power across two generations of one family. Lipstick's unnamed narrator-protagonist, expressively and affectingly inhabited by Canary Islands-born actor and the show's co-writer Edu Díaz, shuffles through his past experiences and present anxieties in a contemplation of the causality and complexity of identity. Developed over the course of a couple of previous festival appearances, Lipstick is debuting in its new, full-length English-language form as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds go directly to the artists, and which this year runs from April 1-19 at UNDER St. Marks, the wild project, Chain Theatre, and The Rat NYC.

Before Díaz's character makes his entrance, Lipstick begins with piano music by Musical Director Ángelho Díaz, whose live, onstage accompaniment acts as punctuation throughout the play. Here, at the outset, the music is sometimes suggestive of the score for a silent film, and when Díaz does enter, it is with a sense of heightened emotion. Clad in a dressing gown and furtively clutching a box with unknown contents, he is startled when he catches sight of the audience. Having safely put down the box, he begins to speak of himself, establishing as central the question of whether it is better for him to be invisible or to be seen as he is, as well as what impact the latter would have. He describes his present condition as vacillating between feeling hollow and feeling filled with anxiety, and soon turns towards the past and memories of his mother applying her lipstick at the mirror, an act that he recalls as always turning her into a diva while turning him invisible to her. When he removes a representative lipstick from its container, it is bathed in a golden glow like that emitted by the suitcase in Pulp Fiction, highlighting its totemic status; and when he puts on both the lipstick and a blond wig, he becomes his mother–an actor switching characters but overlaid with a character trying on another (gender) identity. The protagonist himself describes his mother as having had two personalities in one body, the mother and, transformed by her lipstick, the woman, unhappy with motherhood and trying to be desirable and to be seen.  
Edu Díaz in Lipstick. Photo by Krystal Pagán.
At other points, a pair of glasses transforms Díaz's character into his therapist, perfectly pitched as a prototypical specimen who believes in exercises and structure, an approach from which the skeptical protagonist does his best to take something useful for dealing with the fear of disappearance that he shares with his mother. (The play's text offers eloquent–and accurate–descriptions of being a woman with anxiety, or perhaps the anxiety of womanhood, which Díaz performs with feeling and nuance.) The protagonist, we learn, grew up amidst the sufferings of his childhood to conduct his own self-transformations via lipstick, a part of how he interacts with the multiplicities of his own identity. As part of these stories, the play regularly features snippets of mood-and-theme-appropriate songs, sung in Spanish by Díaz (in a well observed detail, the mother, fearing that motherhood has been causing her self to disappear piece by piece, is ignored on one of the occasions when she calls for music and has to repeat her request). By far the longest sung portion, significantly, is a Spanish-language version of a familiar feminist disco hit, its message of resilience resonating with the protagonist and play's ultimate emphasis on exploration over surety: knowing all answers, the unnamed man muses, might turn out to be worse than anxiety of unknowing. However, he concludes, accompanied by symbolic costume change, that doesn't mean you should wait to be seen. Nor should you wait to see Lipstick.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

More reviews from the 2026 NYC Fringe Festival:

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