Plays written by DANIELLA DE JESÚS
MAMBO SAUCE
PA’ TI TENGO DE TODO
GET YOUR PINK HANDS OFF ME SUCKA AND GIVE ME BACK
PLASTIC CASTLES (OR CASTILLOS DE PLÁSTICO)
Synopses:
Mambo Sauce – (9F, 6M, 2 Flex) Welcome to Cargill Island, the Area 51 of the east coast, the land of New York City’s leftovers! Poverty, high crime rates, deteriorating infrastructure and alien activity are commonplace on Cargill, but after a headless body is found in the street, the residents begin to wonder what’s behind their neighborhood’s abnormalities and what they find is something so bizarre it’ll blow through your insides and leave your stomach on the sidewalk. Inspired by true horror stories from 1970s New York, the history of Coney Island and former governor Robert Moses’ racist legacy of city planning and redlining, Mambo Sauce is a sci-fi comedy that follows an alien-obsessed stoner and a group of Black and Latine teenagers as they try to save themselves and their local zoo from an impending climate crisis.
Pa’ Ti Tengo De Todo – (5F, 2M) As the water lapped at my feet, I could feel it speaking. There was no literal speech, no words I heard but emotion I could feel, as if by osmosis. For a moment, I felt the water feeling. It was like slipping into another dimension, a dimension where water could speak. And I remembered, at some point, I had read an article that made the case that water molecules have the ability to retain memory. So I thought, if water can remember, can it remember me? Does it remember loss? Does it remember trauma? What if all the freak accidents in the bermuda triangle is caused by the collected trauma of the transatlantic slave trade? What if it’s coming to a head? Caribbean mermaid folklore, the mathematics of memory, generational trauma as a means of time travel bend, fold and strike and at the center of it all is a girl who never wanted to be touched without her permission ever again, so she tied her legs together tight–real tight–so tight her legs fused into one and formed a fin.
Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back (FKA Columbus Play) – (4-6F, 4-8M) Solandra, a Dominican-American student is alone in the throne room of Queen Isabel and King Ferdinand when their portraits come alive, poking and prodding and ready to party like it’s 1492. Meanwhile, on the island of Ayiti, as Higuamota and her family prepare for her cousin’s hair-cutting ceremony, she spots a fleet of “spacecrafts” carrying pink-skinned ghosts headed towards them. Enter Christopher Columbus and his crew of brutish bros. As Higumota struggles to save her community from invasion, Solandra contends with her attraction to white men and their fetishization of her in this dark comedic ahistorical fabulation of the colonization of Haiti and the Dominican Republic.
Plastic Castles (or Castillos de Plástico) – The Castillos are a picture-perfect, charming Puerto Rican family or at least that’s what they’d like you to think. Stifled by the outdated beliefs and structures of her “traditional” family unit, Noemi anxiously awaits the college acceptance letter that’ll whisk her away from her responsibilities as the only daughter. But on the eve of her 17th birthday, Noemi is confronted with a traumatic childhood memory that forces her to challenge the sexist and colorist power dynamics within her family. And if that wasn’t enough, the TV just broke and a bored Gramma who can’t watch her novelas creates her own drama by revealing yet another family secret, turning Noemi’s 17th birthday party into the season finale of Castillos de Plástico.
Bio:
Daniella De Jesús is a writer/performer/part-time siren from Bushwick, Brooklyn. Her plays include Get Your Pink Hands Off Me Sucka and Give Me Back, FKA Columbus Play (2022 finalist for the Susan Smith Blackburn Prize, 2021 winner of the Burman New Play Award), Mambo Sauce (The New Group Off Stage, semi-finalist for Clubbed Thumb’s 2018 commission), Pa’ Ti Tengo De Todo (The Public Theater’s Spotlight Series), Untitled Puppet Show, or On The Other Side of Anchovy Avenue (commissioned by The Public Theater for Play At Home) and her one-woman show: The Thief Cometh (United SoloFestival). She’s a member of The Public Theater’s 2018-19 Emerging Writers Group and, more recently, a staff writer on the inaugural season of the upcoming narrative podcast “FLIPPED!” (produced by echoverse and Neal Baer). Her poetry appears in “Young, Colored & Angry“, “Chiflada Magazine“, “Vagabond City Literature” and the film “Love Beats Rhymes” (directed by RZA). As a performer, she is best known for her role as Zirconia on Netflix’s Orange is the New Black, for which she received a nomination for Outstanding Performance by an Ensemble in a Comedy Series by the Screen Actors Guild Awards. De Jesús is a graduate of NYU Tisch School of the Arts with a BFA in Drama and is currently in her second year at Juilliard’s Lila Acheson Wallace American Playwrights Program.
Website: www.danielladejesus.com