Massacre: Sing to Your Children

Academy Award nominee and award winning playwright Jose Rivera works up a passionate, suspenseful, and crafty drama with his spicy play Massacre (Sing to Your Children). While Rivera shines a much needed spotlight on Latin-Americans, this thought provoking play centered on the logistics of human interaction and consequence holds universal appeal for any human being that takes part as an active viewer.

Director, screenwriter, and playwright Rivera offers up a passionate and suspenseful drama that appeals to the humanistic side of murder. How does Rivera combine the cold act of murder with the introspective humanistic moments that are meshed together in Massacre? Not without it's balance and contrast between, good and bad, light and dark. There is a whole lot of justifying done on the part of the seven separate, yet banded together entities that are the colorful blend of Hispanic-American characters who set out to accomplish this very task.

Rivera subjects us to frenzied and awkward character interactions mixed up with doubtful self-reflections and glimpses of calm in the pre and aftermath of a justifiable attempted murder done out of sheer desperation.

In Massacre (Sing to Your Children), the focus is on these seven distressed characters that reside as friends, relatives, lovers, and otherwise neighbors in the sleepy town of Granville, New Hampshire. All the centralized action on stage for this play happens in the interior living room and kitchen of a New England farmhouse residence. The staging was professional and aided in the swiftness needed to convey the intensity of events up to and including flashback scenes.

Massacre starts off with a bang. All seven characters rush the living room stained in blood and carrying various makeshift farmhouse weapons. There is Panama- the group's liberator/leader type, Vivy- the firecracker schoolteacher, Janis- the spontaneous songwriter, Lila- the intuitive psychic, Erik- the big quiet softy mechanic, Hector- the defunct restaurateur, and Eliseo- the wandering-soul bartender. As distinct individuals, all these characters share one thing in common- they have all had their lives disrupted and tormented by the town bully and sadistic tyrant Joe.

The audience is never given a face to go with the name and history of Joe; only a boisterously haunting voice from behind closed doors announces his menacing presence. Once the general excitement that pervades the whole group begins to wear off, and thoughts of doubt, distrust, and regret begin to surface amongst the characters over the deed that was done, creepy intensity comes to a peak, as one member of the group, doubts whether Joe was actually successfully murdered in the first place!

Between the dynamics of intense acting, Joe's voice breaking-up the group's prior peaceful lull- with only a door seemingly separating the group from their suffering yet sickeningly-sweet tormentor, and the insecurities that arise between the characters, one cannot help but become personally involved- on a philosophical level at least.

Massacre (Sing to Your Children) is a play that builds a skillful framework around the social dynamics and ethical questionings we all face as part of the human race. This is a play that is about a symbolic massacre and the skeletons that need release from our mental and spiritual death closets in order to move forward with our personal journeys in life, so that we can start new. Rivera's symbolic characters identify with the concept of what happens to us when we do not pursue our true path and settle instead for complacency within our modern era lives.