Jose Rivera Selected Works

How many of us have wished for one more chance to say the right thing? A Better Orpheus Inc. provides an alternative to regret—a service that allows the living to communicate with the dead. When Nikki Corona loses her twin sister, A Better Orpheus puts her in touch with Orlando, a man dying too young. The ensuing love story leads to a quest through a vivid, fantastical afterlife as Orlando learns whether Nikki’s message to her sister has the ability to transcend death. In the rich literary tradition of magical realism and inspired by Dante’s Inferno, The Untranslatable Secrets of Nikki Corona suggests that with love, all things are possible.

In Rivera’s interpretation of the classic Jean Genet play, two maids, sisters Monique and Yvette, dream of liberating Vieques from La Doña, mistress of the largest sugar plantation on the island. Rituals are enacted, roles are reversed, identities become fluid, bombs fall, poison is consumed, genders collide, and a psycho-sexual drama is unleashed as the trio struggles with the meaning of power, sisterhood, and freedom.

The old woman of the drama is the 105-year-old Dona Belen, a widow literally haunted by Adoration, the ghost of her dead husband's lover. Vanessa, a troubled New Jersey teen, is sent to live with Belen in Puerto Rico to escape her problems back home, but instead, she finds herself embroiled in questions of Puerto Rico's independence, embodied by her conflicted love of both Cheo and Ismael.

Six one-acts described as "children's plays for adults." The plays are Flowers, Tape, A Tiger In Central Park, Gas, The Crooked Cross, and The Winged Man.

A few days before Christmas, as Maricela de la Luz and her brother Riccardo come out of a San Diego mall, the world suddenly changes. It starts off slowly. First it's the unexplainable snowfall. Then it's all the adults disappearing. Then it's the polar bear that appears out of nowhere, followed by the penguins. On the radio the governor of California is urging everyone not to panic. Maricela and Riccardo have no way of reaching their mother, who's in Las Vegas with a new boyfriend, or their father, who's stationed in faraway Korea.

Realizing the safest place to be is home, the kids decide to hit the road. But there, things are even worse. The children meet a distraught Mayan Moon God who claims that his brother the Sun God has been kidnaped by the forces of the cold. The Moon God begs the children for help. Convinced he is nothing but an unemployed actor, the kids refuse. The two-headed Goddess of the U.S.-Mexico Border they meet minutes later is harder to dismiss. She explains to them that something is out of balance in the mythic world, that's why everything is so strange in San Diego. She predicts a great battle between the gods of warmth and the gods of cold. She begs the children to join this battle and help restore the Mayan Sun God, thus saving their city. Riccardo is game but Maricela is uncertain. Suddenly the goddess freezes and is rendered unable to speak. Her life's in danger and the kids must save her.

Looking for help as they continue their journey, our young heroes confront a massive cyclops, snow wolves who want to eat them, a sleepy Hercules, a seven-headed hydra, a toxic, talking fog, two severed heads, and finally a talking snowman who wants them to give up fighting and surrender to the forces of inertia and cold. On this magical and unusual journey the children learn the meaning of heroism and commitment. Their refusal to give in to the evil snowman (who is the trickster god Loki in disguise) is the climax of this wild and fanciful drama.

Jorge moves from New York to LA to make it big in television, but is dismissed by clueless executives, starting him on a journey into the chaos of the city of Los Angles that veers from high comedy to moving moments of quiet dignity.

Rivera's first produced work. "It's a play about a bright, Americanized son's tortured efforts to break away from his immigrant parents, a break that can't be made until the assimilated hero learns to accept the ethnic heritage that he has spent his life trying to suppress. The play's vigor derives from the firm delineation of the daily life of the Iglesias, who live in a dilapidated house bereft of a phone, water and a working furnace. In the hands of a less assured writer these squabbles could easily look like ridiculous Latin caricature. Here they become entirely credible articulations of the conflicts within a family that no longer shares a common tongue." —The New York Times

Armageddon in the heavens—the angels go to war! Apocalypse on earth—cities self-destruct! Seen through the eyes of Marisol Perez, an Everywoman on a journey through a surrealistic Bronx, this miraculous drama pins the destiny of our planet on the outcome of revolution.

Each Day Dies with Sleep is the story of a young woman's struggle to find an identity apart from the two men in her life—her father and her husband. Written in Rivera's typical satiric and super-realistic style, this fantastical tragic-comedy leaps from coast to coast, and from one outrageous moment to the next.