Leonard Madrid, playwright of the new comedy “Cebollas,” has one sister, 10 aunts and 36 primas, or female cousins. “The play celebrates them all,” he says of his sisters-act comedy getting its world premiere at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts.
The play was featured in a workshopped stage reading during the DCPA’s Colorado New Play Summit in 2022; previews begin Friday and the production runs through March 10.
“I wanted to celebrate the strong relationship and joy of sisterhood that I see everywhere in life, but seldom see onstage,” Madrid said in an email. “I also wanted to write a play where amazing actresses of all ages could perform something full of laughter and joy.”
Zuleyma Guevara, Xochitl Romero and Jamie Ann Romero (no relation to Xochitl) play the siblings. Tere (Guevara), the bad-ass elder, and Celia (Xochitl Romero), a nurse, agree to aid little sis Yolie (Jamie Ann Romero) who is, as the script winks, “very pregnant … like super pregnant,” on a clandestine mission that will take them from Albuquerque to Denver.
The Interstate 25 jaunt would likely be enough to get laughs and family stories flowing, but then there’s the matter of a dead body. (No spoiler here.) But it doesn’t take long for “Cebollas” — “onions” in Spanish — to begin, ahem, peeling back the layers of what seems at first like a “Weekend at Bernie’s” goof.
A New Yorker, Guevara is making her Denver Center debut. So, is Angeleno Xochitl Romero (although she appeared in the New Play Summit reading). The comedy marks the welcome return of Denver native Jamie Ann Romero. no stranger to local audiences or the Denver Center’s stages. The trio has been in rehearsal since mid-December.
Has the vibe been what playwright Madrid had hoped? “The chemistry in the rehearsal room is actually better than I’d imagined,” Madrid said. “The cast is not only skilled and talented, they are also kind, supportive and hilarious.”
We couldn’t resist asking the leads, working together for the first time, to tell us how their sisters’ act was going. Their conversation has been abridged and edited for clarity.
Q: So, how’s it feeling?
Zuleyma Guevara: “Comedy’s no joke.”
Jamie Romero: I don’t think I’ve laughed this much in a rehearsal room.
Xochitl Romero: I would say 90 percent of the time we’re just laughing.
J. Romero: It’s a good, warm room to be in, which is important for building comedy, safety and security, the trust.
Q: How quickly did you feel like “Oh, this is going to be great?”
J. Romero: Day One.
Guevara: Actually, before Day One. I hadn’t worked with them before, but my sister worked with Jamie and a good friend of mine worked with Xochitl and they were like, “They’re amazing!”
Q: Does everyone here have a sister or sisters? How representative is the play?
J. Romero: I don’t have any siblings. But I have tons of cousins and my immediate family and I are very close. I was just having dinner with them last night, and we were laughing the whole time.
X. Romero: Jamie and I have parallel lives, basically. So, my first cousins are like siblings. The room — and the play — really lends itself to the way that Latinx families show love and that it’s a lot of ribbing. I’ll make fun of you, but I love you. And it’ll get to about here [she raises her hand to slightly above her head] and, in my family, I’m the one who’s like, “That’s enough, guys.”
Guevara: I have two sisters and two half-sisters and you know if we don’t stop, in 20 years our kids are going to be talking about, “Well, that was when they stopped talking.” But there’s also the other side of it. Like I would slit my wrists for these women without a thought. I think that Leonard really captured that with the relationships: how deep the love and commitment goes. And because it’s so deep and because it’s so all-encompassing, you kind of have to balance that with the humor.
Q: How does this play fit into the things that you want to do as an actor?
X. Romero: We’ve (said) in rehearsal that roles for women of color in theater and in any kind of mainstream media are 1) so few and far between and 2) so rarely comedic where they’re showing love toward one another. There’s not the traditional Latinx tropes. None of us are dealing drugs. None of us are the “Madonna the whore,” et cetera. We’re just three funny sisters. Period. And that is just so rare, so refreshing, so fun. For me, it’s an absolute joy to just be able to be in a space that’s filled with joy, period.
Guevara: I echo those sentiments. I’m a lot older than my sisters and I’ve been doing this for a minute. Even as recently as the pandemic, whatever came along, you just had to say “yes” to it. You don’t know what else is coming. It doesn’t matter what they’re asking of you, but you try to bring some truth to it.
I think, after the pandemic, I’ve been blessed to be able to be in pieces where I can bring my whole self. I’m not denying that I’m Black. I’m not denying that I’m Latina. I’m not denying that I’m a woman. I’m not denying that I’m a certain age. So, all of those things. And to walk into a rehearsal room where the writer actually says, “I know all of these wonderfully talented older actresses that are not working or only do the same role over and over. And I wanted to write something that was reflective of their experience but also celebratory of their experience.” I feel like that’s what’s happening in the room. We’re really celebrating all of what we are, every aspect of our being as performers and as people.
J. Romero: Wow. Not like on the lighter side, but I was really excited to come do this project because it is such an ensemble comedy. Even just women in general, we so rarely get to be funny. We so rarely get to do slapstick and physical comedy on stage. And that’s one of the things that I love so much about Leonard’s play, is, like, we get to be funny. We also get to dig deep. It’s not just chuckles. It’s also deeply rooted.
X. Romero: Yeah, there’s real stuff
Guevara: But we get to go home laughing. I do a lot of plays where [she inhales and exhales deeply] I have to detox. Your body can’t tell the difference whether you’ve either had a bad experience or you’re just playing at it. Your body goes through it. And so, it’s a really nice experience to be able to laugh as we’re walking home and not feel like, “Oh, my God, I have to take this off before I can breathe again.”
Q: The notion that in bringing your authentic self to a role you get to be a more authentic performer is so rich.
X. Romero: I feel like the dialogue lends itself to so much to the dialogue that I would use if I were at home with my family. When there are words coming out of your mouth that you would say in a certain place, your body falls into that place. And so that’s been nice. It’s easy to pretend that I’m in a car with my family when the words that are coming out of my mouth are words that I would say to my family. So, I don’t have to figure out what shade of me lives here, because that shade of me lives at home.
J. Romero: I find sometimes that characters that are closer to me can be harder to play; it feels a little bit more vulnerable because it’s actually a little bit of me out there.
Also, I think we lend a little bit of ourselves to every character we play.
Q: How about a moment of biography? How did you get here?
Guevara: I got on a plane at La Guardia. [The room bursts into laughter.]
X. Romero: I grew up in a very small farm town, El Centro, on the border in southern California. My grandparents were all farm workers. My parents were migrant farm workers. My first interaction with theater was teatro campesino coming to the farms, explaining farm workers’ rights. I didn’t really grasp what that was, but I was like, this is a good show. I was one of the older siblings of a ton of cousins, so we would perform plays for my grandma and her friends. I just knew from there. It was that clear.
J. Romero: Well, I’m born and raised Denver, and I’ve lived in New York for almost 10 years now. It’s been so wonderful to be back, and I’m so grateful to do this play with these women, with this creative team, with the Denver Center. And the fact that this play is rooted a lot in my own life, especially the road-trip part, because I have a lot of family in Alamosa … .
Guevara: I was born in Venezuela, and I came to New York when I was five with my parents. My father’s from Trinidad, the island. And the very first play I saw, I don’t remember what I was watching because I couldn’t speak English, but my mother took us to Radio City Music Hall. I remember walking into that theater, man, and … . There’s a smell in theaters. And I was like, what is this?
And we walked in, and back then they had those beautiful velvet curtains with the little light and the little ashtray at the seat. And the minute that curtain went up and this woman came out in all her glory because she knew how to make an entrance, I was like, “Mommy.” I told her in Spanish, “Is this what I’m supposed to feel at church?” And she’s like [Guevara makes a disapproving shush]. From that moment, I knew that I wanted to be an actor, even though for my family, that was not an option. They were so glad that I didn’t get into a performing arts high school. They were like, ‘Yeah, well, you’re not that good.’ [She went to an engineering high school.]. It was a battle at home and proving it to them made it easier to prove to everyone else that I belonged and that this is what I was supposed to do.
J. Romero: We’re so lucky.
Q: So, Jamie, we’re going to return to you for a moment. Seriously, how did you get here, to the stage?
J. Romero: I was shy little kid shy. And a grade-school teacher encouraged me to join the after-school program. And we did a play. I played a piece of bread. It was terrifying. I didn’t love it, but somehow a little seed kind of stuck. And then I started doing theater in high school as an elective and just fell in love.
IF YOU GO
“Cebollas”: Written by Leonard Madrid. Directed by Jerry Ruiz. Featuring Zuleyma Guevara, Jamie Ann Romero and Xochitl Romero. At the Singleton Theatre in the Helen Bonfils Theatre Complex, 14th and Curtis streets. Previews start Jan. 26. Opens Feb. 2 through March 10, For tickets and info: denvercenter.org or 303-893-4100
