Heaven, Earth collide in ‘Marisol’

The Apocalypse is coming, and graduate student Dawn Thomas is right in the middle of it as the title character Marisol Perez in the IU Department of Theater and Drama’s final production of the semester.

“It’s a very dark, strange journey, but there’s hope in the end, which is what I think is really beautiful,” Thomas said.

First produced in 1992, “Marisol,” written by Jose Rivera, prominently features religion, angels and God, though not in the ways many people might think, said Tom Shafer, the department’s dramaturg, or script analyst.

“This God is getting old and senile,” he said. “The angels are saying ‘We’re going to take out God and come up with something new.’”

The audience learns this from Marisol’s own guardian angel, who explains that she can’t watch over Marisol anymore because they’re busy overthrowing the current heavenly regime.

“She is abandoned,” Shafer said. “What usually protected and guarded her is no longer available.”

Graduate student Scott Anderson designed the costumes for the production and said there are three main groups of characters: the angels in the blues of a moonless night sky, the homeless people in earth tones and Marisol with her friends Lenny and June in vibrant tones as an oasis of color.


“The overall design concept was ‘Wizard of Oz’ in a lot of ways,” Anderson said, specifically Dorothy’s voyage down the Yellow Brick Road. “It’s kind of Marisol’s journey as well.”

Starting off in black, the purple of royalty, the green of life and a blue slip, Anderson said Marisol is consistently angelic in her clothing coloring, though much more vibrant.
“She’s a woman touched by angelic provenance,” Anderson said.

Shafer said as a Catholic, Rivera was comfortable talking about angels and was inspired in part to the magic realism by the black-and-white movie called “Wings of Desire,” about angels guarding over people in Berlin before the wall came down.

“Marisol has this interesting relationship with her faith,” Thomas said, describing it as a mix of Catholic doctrine and superstition that could be a reflection of Rivera’s own Catholic background.

Thomas said this questioning of faith is one way she connected to the character, which is also her thesis role.

“We live in a world where our own experience of life is pretty godless,” Shafer said, comparing modern America to Europe in the Middle Ages, when religion was much more dominant in everyday life.

Shafer compared the play to Lewis Carroll’s “Alice Through the Looking Glass.”
“It’s just wildly alive and funny,” he said, though he added it is not specifically a comedy. “It’s also a little illogical and wacky.”

Rivera also wrote the screenplay for the movie “The Motorcycle Diaries,” an Oscar-winning film about the life of Che Guevara.

Thomas said the play is largely about acknowledging the humanity of one’s own self, rather than relying entirely on a religious structure.

“She has to realize faith is more than just God,” Thomas said. “You are your own God.”

The show opens at 7:30 on Friday and runs through Dec. 13.