With "Calling Puerto Rico," Pa'lante Brings The Story Of Maria Home

Fior Rodriguez as Melosa. Behind her are Rafael Feliciano-Roman (filling in for Joel) and as Gentile as Debra. Lucy Gellman Photos.

Melosa stands at center stage, a walkie talkie crackling in her palm. Around her, there’s water everywhere: blocking the roads, dripping from flattened walls and roofs and trees, pooling on the ground where patches of grass should be. A rescue boat rocks gently nearby, a precarious invitation. 

Sixteen hundred miles away in New York, a shut-in named Joel is praying for his grandfather and waiting to hear her latest dispatch. Between them, thousands of lives hang in the balance. 

Melosa (Fior Rodriguez) is a character in Calling Puerto Rico, a stunning new work from Bronx-based playwright Juan Ramirez, Jr. that brings the story of Hurricane Maria home with grief, humor, intimacy and profound spirit. Told between New York City and Puerto Rico, the show takes a catastrophic natural disaster and reminds audiences of each person, each story, each life that exists within its havoc and devastation.  

This Friday, it will open at the Cabaret on Main in East Haven, as part of a statewide tour from Pa'lante Theater Company that began in Waterbury earlier this year. Following performances in East Haven on Nov. 3 and 4, the show will travel to Hartford, where it opens at the Bushnell on Nov. 17. Tickets and more information are available here.

It is supported by both Puerto Ricans United, Inc. (PRU) in New Haven and the CICD Puerto Rican Parade, Inc. Hartford Chapter, representatives of which first saw the show earlier this year.  

Director Rafael Feliciano-Roman. 

“It's a beautiful play about love, about loss, about light, about hope,” said director Rafael Feliciano-Roman, who leads the Afro Caribbean Cultural Center in Waterbury and founded Pa’lante last year out of a lifelong love for theater. “I think a cool thing about the show is the universality of it. Natural disasters, especially because of climate change, are increasing. And so, as we continue as a society, you can see yourself in this. You can see, 'Oh my God, it's gonna hit my country of origin, what can we do?'"

First workshopped in New York two years after Maria in 2019, Calling Puerto Rico tells the story of Joel (Rabel Bueno), a reclusive, socially anxious New Yorker in his mid-20s who begins to worry as he hears the first reports of a fierce hurricane barreling towards Puerto Rico. Hurricane Irma has just hit the island, damaging Vieques on its path.  Shut in his apartment, he reconnects with his grandfather Aníbal (Jeffrey Rossman), who lives on the island. Aníbal is, at first, in good humor and unphased: he’s lived through so many storms, not all of them literal. This is just the latest one.   

Around them, Ramirez world builds: there is Melosa (Rodriguez), Joel’s spunky, sweet landlord whose biting wit and nursing background are the pulse beneath everything she does, Debra (Victoria Gentile) a queer, feisty and empathic astronaut aboard the International Space Station (ISS) who can track Maria from above, Rolán (Cameron Hudson), who moves into Aníbal’s home after the storm destroys his house. All of them are connected through the magic of ham radio, a real-life method of communication that doubles as a witty device for connection and storytelling. 

“We want to show and tell stories that are Latine, Black, Afro-Latine, that might not necessarily get told,” said Feliciano-Roman. “And this is why Calling Puerto Rico called to me so much, when I read the script. Seeing this story that I can relate to so many of my life experiences … it just resonated. And I think that can be true of anyone who comes and sees this story.”

Gentile as Debra at a recent rehearsal.

As it comes to the stage in East Haven, Pa’lante has succeeded wildly in doing just that. From the moment lights come up, actors match Ramirez’ timing with ease, slipping into a universe that is not their normal, but also not so far removed from their lives that it’s totally foreign, either. On stage, actors maintain their distance from each other, as if they are stretching out the miles in real time. As they communicate through their devices, as if walls and water and air are between them, the very act of listening becoming sacred.  

If the show’s central device is unorthodox (it is not a radio play, so much as a play that employs radio), they don’t show it, committing to Ramirez’ dramatic landscape until the audience can picture them spread across time and space. A special nod here to Gentile, who is so natural as Debra that it’s hard to remember how strange it must be to casually play someone from NASA, and to Rodriguez, whose energy onstage is boundless. 

Around them, the Cabaret on Main has become a magical space to tell that story. The brainchild of New Haven Academy of Performing Arts Founders Billy DiCrosta and Neil Fuentes, the theater comes with bone-white walls and a long white screen onstage, meaning that the set can be almost entirely projected. On stage, two long tables, a raised platform and a generator give the actors space to sit, but it’s a minimal set to work with. Projections do the rest.    

At a rehearsal last Thursday night, the lights went down, and an image of a green and blue globe began to spin against both long walls, transporting a viewer immediately above the flattened earth. Behind Gentile, a separate screen became the International Space Station, bathed in pink for a moment as lighting designer Elias Ocasio got his bearings. Moments later, it had melted from fuchsia to a deep blue, the kind of color a person might see as the sky stretches for miles without a star in sight. 

Fuentes, who first saw the show when it was at Seven Angels Theatre in February, said he’s thrilled to be a partner on the statewide tour. “I think they’ll like what we have in store,” he said, before greeting Feliciano-Roman with a jubilant, familiar “Mijo!” and a warm embrace. Then turning toward the cast and crew: “I want to show you all what this theater can do.”  

He’s not the only one who is very much ready to share the show with an audience well beyond Waterbury. As they slipped into character Thursday, several of the show’s actors said that joining Pa’lante and touring the play around the state has been a learning experience for each of them, with new lessons that reveal themselves at every rehearsal, every run-though, every performance.  

For Rodriguez, who is based in Southington, it’s the first time she’s stepped into a leading role after seven years of acting, in part a result of the roles that have been offered to her over the years. Born in the Dominican Republic and raised between the D.R., Russia and Miami, she said she often thinks about the power of representation on stage, and particularly in this show. 

“There’s just so much depth to the character,” she said as Fuentes demoed a black-and-white video from Beetlejuice that turned hypnotically like a spinning top onstage. “She’s funny, but also intimate. It’s amazing—I love seeing how it resonates with folks. They love the show because they can see themselves in it.”

Fior Rodriguez as Melosa and Rafael Feliciano-Roman filling in for Joel.

The first time she read through the script and the cast talked about Hurricane Maria, “it was such a raw experience,” she remembered. As actors dug in, Feliciano-Roman never shied away from hard discussions around the pain and lasting destruction that the hurricane caused. “It was like, ‘Holy shit. This is what happened.”

Gentile, who grew up in East Haven and attended Central Connecticut State University for acting, agreed that she can feel that tug towards a vulnerable, open kind of storytelling that lives in the script. While she does not have lived experience as a Puerto Rican person, she finds the show deeply relatable on a basic, human level. 

“We’re telling the real story of something that really happened,” she said. “But it’s also the story for everyone, because it deals with grief and loss and fear and reconnecting with your roots.”   

She added that she likes Ramirez’ use of ham radio and physical distance to tell the story “in a completely different way,” flipping any idea of a self-contained show on its head. While the Cabaret on Main is intimate, it works in this sense too: the projections allow actors to straddle multiple worlds at once, maneuvering the space between New York, Puerto Rico, and outer space.    

“It’s just the desperation of needing help,” chimed in Hudson, who plays Rolán, towards the end of Thursday’s rehearsal. “I think everyone can relate to needing help.”

Cameron Hudson, who drives in from Massachusetts to play Rolán.

Feliciano-Roman added that it’s an honor to bring the work to life. While the characters may be Ramirez’ creation, all of them are based in the very real trauma that surrounded Maria, which left Puerto Rico reeling when it hit the island in September 2017 (six years later, the island is still recovering from the storm, and the human-made failures that stymied relief efforts). 

In Connecticut, which saw a massive influx of families after the storm, those stories are everywhere, from the churches and restaurants that sent supplies to the grassroots groups that led volunteer efforts across the state. 

The cast, paired with writing that balances the bitter and the sweet, spins that weight into a narrative that is at turns delightful, laugh-out-loud funny, heavy and heart rending, with plenty of learning along the way. While he’s a New Yorker, Joel feels like he could be that neighbor down the street, who was worried for days after he lost touch with his parents, his aunties, his grandmother. 

Melosa is that nurse you met who changed everything you understood about the healthcare system when she listened to your symptoms, and promised to figure out what was wrong.  Gentile’s Debra is stunningly grounded, despite being thousands of miles above the earth. 

And in the audience, it’s impossible not to root for Aníbal, because everyone has known that elder on dialysis, or in chemo, or recovering from pneumonia, who would still give someone the shirt off his back just because it’s the right thing to do (Rossman, a retired nurse, has drawn from his own experience as a grandfather for the role). Indeed, Pa’lante, Spanish for forward and also a motto of the Puerto Rican independence movement, is a theater company that thrums with heart and moxie. 

For Feliciano-Roman, it’s also personal. While he grew up in Waterbury, he still has family in Puerto Rico, and refers to the island as home. Prior to Maria, it was a three-year stint that he spent with his grandparents and cousins in Guánica that helped him envision a space dedicated to Afro-Caribbean culture in the Brass City. Since its founding in 2021, the center has become home to bomba lessons, a theater company, Taíno learning academy, and youth justice summer camp. Over the summer, he took students from Waterbury to see Aladdin on Broadway for the first time.     

Feliciano-Roman also believes in the life-saving, and life-giving, power of theater. Currently—and like many arts professionals with the same story—he runs the Afro-Caribbean Cultural Center and Pa’lante as an unpaid volunteer, with a remote day job that helps him keep the lights on. But his passion for drama goes back to high school, when a theater teacher instilled in him a love for the craft that withstood two bouts of homelessness, an HIV diagnosis, and multiple near-death experiences. It taught him resiliency, technical skills, and team building, he said.   

“Arts saved me,” he said. “Watching shows like RENT, or Hair, or In The Heights, even Hamilton … theater saved me, and so did the arts. When I was at my lowest and I had nothing, it was seeing the beauty in everything that kept me going."

He added that he is grateful for a board of directors and team that makes sure he is never working alone.

"Yes, what sustains me is I might have a vision, but a visionary without the community is just crazy, right? I get to do this stuff because they [the ACCC and Pa’lante team] get me excited.”   

It’s also what keeps him going when he’s exhausted. One year in and not yet done with its tour of Calling Puerto Rico, Pa’lante has attracted attention from not just across the state (U.S. Secretary of Education Miguel Cardona was one of the first audience members to see the show) but also the region, with people who have traveled from New York, Massachusetts and Rhode Island to see what this small and mighty Brass City theater company is all about.

“We did audience interviews, and they’re like, ‘This is the first time I’m seeing myself onstage,’” he said. “We have kids who are like, ‘I want to be Melosa. Or, ‘I want to be Aníbal.’”

It doesn’t end with the tour. In December, Pa’lante is gearing up for another season as a “theater without walls,” with collaborating partners that include Long Wharf Theatre in New Haven and the Bushnell in Hartford. While the company has not yet announced the full season, Feliciano-Roman confirmed that it will include Nelson Diaz-Marcano’s World Classic and Misfit, America, as well as the second annual Afro-Latino Film Festival in New Haven, Bridgeport, and Waterbury. Pa’lante has also signed a lease on a brick-and-mortar space in Waterbury that it can call its own. 

“I want to bring these stories [to audiences],” Feliciano-Roman said. “And so for me, anymore, I don’t get excited about being on the stage, [so much as] being behind the scenes, or bringing this culture, and lifting up.”

Calling Puerto Rico will run at the Cabaret on Main, 597 Main St. in East Haven, on Friday Nov. 3 and Saturday Nov. 4 at 7 p.m. Tickets and more information are available here.