←Recommendations of I Saw Jesus in Toa Baja

The rhyme and meter Nelson Diaz-Marcano uses in I saw Jesus in Tao Baja is delightful, fresh, and gripping. Finding beauty in chaos is wonderful theme, and this playwright has skillfully captured that.

As always, Diaz-Marcano delivers a powerful and truly poetic piece. Leslie is a truly unique and fantastic protagonist who makes me smile. Well worth a read and definitely should be seen onstage.

Under the weight of tragedy, the power of finding hope and beauty through a belief in a higher power is beautifully shown. Powerful work.

Amazing play by an incredibly gifted writer--suspenseful, moving and funny, and written in poetry! No surprise this is such a highly recommend script here. Would love to see this on stage.

Diaz-Marcano has done what so many of us strive to do and that is to take the blood and suffering of our people and turn it into something beautiful, poetic, and somehow funny. No matter our circumstances there are a rainbow of emotions at play and this story doesn't allow a single color to go to waste.

The playful juxtapositions of light comedy and dark themes, the heightened story-telling, and the sheer poetry of the language used have all convinced me that Nelson Diaz-Marcano may very well be the reincarnation of Moliere. What a wonderfully theatrical, thought provoking fantasy.

It takes great mastery to balance the horrors of Hurricane Maria with a tone that never loses touch with the comic and even zany. Why has God chosen to visit such devastation on this small island, and how are the victims of this disaster to survive and even transcend? The narrator Leslie has been conceived as a transgender or "non-binary gender fluid" character, the suggestion being that she is the ultimate outcast, "not the Lord's kid" but "the shame of its breed," and yet the one Jesus has chosen to visit.

I had the pleasure of seeing a reading of this play at the 2019 Inge Festival and was delighted by the play's freshness, active use of language, fun visuals, and lively story-telling. Diaz-Marcano's writing here is complex, musical, surprising, and alive. It is my hope that this play reaches more audiences.

Diaz-Marcano has crafted a marvelous modern day, Puerto Rican Dr. Seuss tale. His lyricism and command of imagery and storytelling are beautiful. This play is about the long-lasting struggled in Post Maria Puerto Rico; it's about finding optimism and hope in dire circumstances; and faith and grace- however that looks to you.

Diaz-Marcano has crafted a lyrical, linguistic masterpiece. It takes a great deal of talent to create theatre that is both thought-provoking and visually arresting in one language, but to be able to weave together two of them in a truly all-encompassing narrative while imbuing it with a rhythm that has you nodding your head the whole way through is something special. ‘I Saw Jesus in Toa Baja’ is rhapsodic and revelatory in all the right ways. Produce. This. Play.