Purchase Puto: Plays Here

Please join us Wednesday June 10th from 6 – 7:30 pm  at Philly AIDS Thrift @  Giovanni’s Room for a very special reading from Puto: Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho, UPenn/GSWS outgoing Artist in Residence. The book covers the full range of Bracho’s work for the stage. Developed and produced for the past thirty years these one-acts, full-length plays, 5-10 minute polemics cover the underground house music scene, the conquest of the Americas, race and romance, George Floyd protests, the after-effects of the AIDS pandemic, and what (not) to wear to the afters.

Puto: Plays offers a comprehensive exploration of Ricardo A. Bracho’s groundbreaking contributions to contemporary theatre. Bracho’s work, characterized by its dialectical innovations and radical ideological critique, centers on queer, immigrant, and proletarian Black and Brown characters, challenging societal norms through Marxist critiques of Chicano nationalism, intersectionality, and queer theory. His plays, such as The Sweetest Hangover, El Santo Joto, and Puto, function as staged essays, addressing themes of class conflict, racial antagonism, and global capitalism. The collection includes Ni Madre, a science fiction chamber play reimagining the figure of La Malinche, and Mexican Psychotic, which dramatizes the life of outsider artist Martâin Ramâirez. Appetites I Have Inherited critiques Hollywood’s racial and sexual stereotypes, while Sissy redefines Chicano family narratives through a queer, coming-of-age tale set in a Marxist-Leninist home in Los Angeles. Puto envisions a dystopian Los Angeles grappling with militarized borders and class warfare, and A Black and a Brown captures the intimacy and solidarity of queer love during the Black Lives Matter protests. Puto: Plays makes Bracho’s key works available to a broader public for the first time, with a foreword by Bracho’s teacher and iconic Chicana poet Cherríe Moraga, a critical introduction by Jennifer Ponce de León, Richard T. Rodríguez, and Randall Williams, as well as an afterword by Juana María Rodríguez .

Ricardo A. Bracho is a queer Chicano Marxist playwright from Los Angeles whose theatrical works dramatize the lives of gay Black and Brown partisans of anti-capitalism and decolonization. Characterized by their playful use of theory, Bracho’s plays utilize the stage as a place for characters to debate questions of sexual and political liberation. Though Bracho’s work has been breaking ground within the experimental Latinx theater and arts community since the 1990s, his plays have not been widely accessible beyond their staging. Driven by passion-for politics, for the dancefloor, for dispossessed bodies, communities, and lands-Bracho’s award-winning plays express a polyphony of outlaw voices and contemporary dramas. With a foreword by Bracho’s teacher and iconic Chicana writer Cherríe Moraga, an afterword by Juana Maria Rodriguez, as well as critical notes and an introduction by editors Jennifer Ponce de León, Richard T. Rodriguez, and Randall Williams, Puto makes Bracho’s key works available to a broader public for the first time, bringing Bracho’s frank, transgressive, and revolutionary work to the forefront just when the world needs it most.