←Recommendations of Sancocho

I was lucky to see the off-Broadway premiere of Sancocho at WP. The intricate layers of the two sisters' worlds will draw your audiences in, and the blend of reality with past trauma and present spirituality offers crucial recognition and hope to audience members dealing with transgenerational trauma. I'd love to see more productions of this play across the country!

This play has the unique distinction of making me RAVENOUS just from reading it! A beautiful snapshot into the home of Caridad and Renata and their challenges as family with the healing power of food. If you liked the movies "Chef" and "Big Night," you're going to love this play.

If you’re looking for food for thought, there’s nothing better than a serving of sancocho. It represents both legacy and lineage, especially with how a culture survives through the passing of recipes. Now if you follow said recipe, you’ll get everything you’re looking for. In this play set in one night, the ingredients are the sisterhood between Caridad and Renata, siblinghood with Eddie, song with abuela and healing of the soul for papi. This meal offering will feed your soul. Keep stirring.

Sancocho is a brilliant play. Not only are the characters complex and earthy, but the structure of the play is impeccably clean. Cato knows how to set up your expectations and satisfy them with beautiful callbacks and vulnerability. You’re going to be hungry at the end of this play, but your soul will be full.

An elegant play centered on two sisters of very different generations and experiences. The piece unravels familial trauma, while showing the effects of this knowledge on two sisters in real time. Christin Eve Cato does an exceptional job of recreating the wavelike rhythm of family relationships, with realistic surges in emotion that never fail to pull back into a foundation of unwavering love.

Such a gorgeous, tightly written piece. Using economical but potent dialogue, vivid characterization, and an excellent real-time activity, Christin Eve Cato explores generational/familial trauma, sibling relationships, and the things that prevent us from moving forward with such glorious nuance. Any two-hander needs to be populated by gripping characters, and Renata and Caridad do not disappoint. I would so love to see (and hear and smell and taste) this piece unfold before my eyes onstage.

This is one of the best plays, if not the best play, I read last year. Cato creates a work that uses food preparation to investigate how a lot of our legacy is not in what we do but in the intergenerational issues we leave behind, the guidance we give to those that come after us, and how culture defines a path but not the journey. Exquisite is a word often used incorrectly because it is not used for this play, which pace, structure and characters is the definition of it.

Sancocho is a beautiful, multi-sensory play adaptable to a variety of settings and design elements. It lends itself to zoom theatre, a radio play podcast, and of course a full production in a theatre or site specific setting. I'd love to experience it as the sisters cook in real time as they grapple with the past, present, and future. Of course, I hope to be treated to sancocho at the end because you can smell and taste it from the start!

It is not an over-exaggeration to say that in many Latinx households our greatest revelations and world changing moments can happen over chopping up the ingredients for sancocho. Everything from legacy, memory, trauma, comedy, failure, triumph, and--most importantly--love are explored all at once. There in that sacred almost spiritual realm accessed through the aromas and ritual unchanged over decades and experiences does Christin Eve Cato take us. She takes us through the titanic struggles of two sisters who try to reconcile the past while navigating a future after the passing of a patriarch. A structural marvel. Sancocho is beautiful theatre.

The smells of onion, cilantro, and garlic wafted through my imagination as I fell desperately in love with Caridad and her magical sancocho. I was lucky enough to attend the exquisite Milagro workshop production and in the span of a 90 minute real-time visit from her little sister I ran the full gamut of emotions from anger and betrayal to absolution and contentment as I wept in silent joy for the pure love these two women shared for their family, their food, and their father. This was my absolute favorite play of 2020! Bravo!