Jesús I. Valles

Play Maid is a spell, a pre-emptive mourning ritual for my mother, who will be taken from me too soon by the labor she's performed in the service of all the women she cleaned for, all the babies she was paid to raise. This play is a eulogy for Lupe Ontiveros, legendary for playing over 150 maids in her acting career. This play is me obsessing over my mother, obsessing over The Maid as a social position and an ancient profession, and my strange desire to become my mother, whose love has absolutely devastated me. This is my obsession with ending this place and the labor that is killing her. Structured as a series of monologues that interrogate the role of the maid as a sociological, theatrical, and pop culture figure, Play Maid is an exercise in learning how to slowly lose your mother to very labor that fed you, inside the very country that wants you both dead.

This is a confrontation with this house that never ends.

With a single phrase, you can give up your country. With a single signature, you can tear a family apart. With a single word, you can learn to transform. In their first full-length solo show, (Un)Documents, award-winning actor and poet Jesús I. Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find their place as a child, a lover, a teacher, and a sibling in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship. In doing so, they create a new kind of documentation written with anger, fierce love, and the knowledge that what makes us human can never be captured on a government questionnaire.

Directed by Rudy Ramirez, the show received its initial workshop at The VORTEX in 2018 as part of FuturX: A New Festival of Latinx Performance. (Un)Documents won three 2018 B. Iden Payne awards for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama, and Outstanding Direction of a Drama, and was nominated for Outstanding Production of a Drama. (Un)Documents was also presented as part of the 2019 OUTSiderFest artist’s showcase and featured at the Latinx Theatre Common’s Sin Fronteras Festival. (Un)Documents returned to The VORTEX in May of 2019 for a two week encore and received five nominations from the Austin Critics Table Association, including the Mark David Cohen Award for Best New Play. (Un)Documents was a featured performance at the 2021 ATHE conference, and was selected for the Latino Theatre Co. RE:Encuentro 2021. (Un)Documents will receive its West Coast premiere through the Latino Theatre Co. in the fall of 2022.

Struggling with severe depression, You return to your hometown in Texas, right by the river that raised You, right on the border with Mexico. It’s the summer of 2019 and the Rio Bravo keeps claiming migrants’ lives during their perilous crossings. However, the people in your hometown are much more interested in talking about "The Rio Grande mermaid,” a creature rumored to haunt the river, clawing its way out of the sand, out of the water, into the air, into your head, haunting the mouths of family, friends, and strangers. Something in the water calls to You. “Come,” the river says, “Come to me.”

This play is a group project for perverts. Somewhere between lecture, re-enactment, and cruising ground, an informative presentation on the history of cleanliness and bathing starts to burst at the seams with the ghosts of a bathhouse at the end of the world. A meditation on queer longing, grief, and all our queer worlds that will come to pass, that will come to be.

"My first bullet flew swiftly through the head of a would-be Mexican president, cut through a street block, a dance club, a Walmart, cut back through to a past never-ending, cut past and rattled in my brain until it bloomed into these words, into my living." bala.fruta./bullet.fruit. is the second solo show by Jesús I. Valles. In the end, bala.fruta./bullet.fruit. asks, "What might be the opposite of a bullet? Where might we find it?"

Llermo wants to taste everything, to be bigger, to want more and nobody else seems to want that for Llermo. A bird-boned boyfriend, a diet-obsessed mother, a mushroom-fueled GROWLr hook-up, a demonic Sandra-Lee of Food Network fame, and the ghosts of dieters past converge in a queer bacchanalia that hopes all our queer wants might be unbearably fat and that all our fat wants might become wildly queer! A riff on Lorca’s YERMA, LLERMO! holds steadfast to a fat, queer, Mexican world where desire must be the fuel to make a new world.

Take some dry ramen and throw it in a plastic bag. Add Hot Cheetos, beef jerky bits, beans, Hot Fries, and hot water. Mayonnaise or mustard (if you like that shit). Let it sit. Enjoy. Anything can be lunch in 9th grade. Anything can be anything. Jeffrey, Andrew, Chris, and Jordan are 9th grade boys and they’re trying their absolute best, and the thing about 9th grade is nobody knows what they’re doing. Here they are, at lunch. Here they are, at home. Here they are, together, in 9th grade, hoping they’ll get through it.