Color Theories: Julio Torres’ one-man show

★★★★

There have been many one-person shows of late, but before you swear off them, “you should see Julio Torres’ irresistible new one,” said Sara Holdren in NYMag.com. The former SNL writer and star of Fantasmas and Problemista “has the kind of sui generis brain you want to take a trippy vacation in.” On a set sporting pop-up furniture and a bossy robot named Bibo, who often interrupts him, Torres simply offers his idiosyncratic takes on an array of colors. “Lilac is being a mom. Purple is being a stepmom,” he tells us at one point. Fortunately, it all works because Torres “has a gift for extended, eccentric metaphor—the kind of juxtapositions that make you snort-laugh because they’re simultaneously so bizarre and so apt.”

Color Theories begins with our star bursting out of a giant storybook, a sight that’s “visually arresting and totally ridiculous,” said Zachary Stewart in TheaterMania. He proceeds to detail his color theories, informing us that yellow is joy, red is anger, and orange a mix of childlike wonder and rage that he says is common among male American celebrities. “While he never says so explicitly, it’s obvious Torres fancies himself a purple, representing dark power and intrigue.” Throughout, he has the air of an extraordinary child who’s become a keen observer of the adult world, and “he easily wins the crowd over as he invites us into his rich culture of one.”

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Navy blue, which he sees as representing bureaucracy, policing, and control, is the first color he describes, said Rosy Alvarez in the Los Angeles Times. Eventually, he uses his perceptions of blue and red to “endearingly” explain his anti-capitalist views, a “beautiful” way of making a divisive political idea palatable to anyone who’s been absorbing his worldview. It’s remarkable. “In just over an hour, Torres delivers a concise portrait of how he navigates and experiences the world in terms an elementary schoolchild can understand.”