In Parrots at the Pagoda, Life and Death Transform

“This is where we start again. A fantasy. A dream. A promise. A song. A flock playing with fragments of a life, real and made up. Here. Now.” intones a colorful, ethereal being, dripping in electric yellow and pink.

Here is a performance of Parrots at the Pagoda, a new play with music, at Pregones/PRTT. Here is also the dreamlike, elusive “imagined afterworld” in which Jorge B. Merced’s story takes place. Now is a rainy evening in late May, toward the end of the show’s run. Now is also the past, present, and future—moments of reflection on the life of Puerto Rican drag performer Johnny Rodríguez (1912-1997).

In Parrots at the Pagoda, written and directed by Merced, a group of bird beings in luminous eyeshadow function as spirit guides who take Johnny Rodríguez (Rubén Flores) on a journey through his life in the form of “one final album.” Twelve of Rodríguez’s songs (performed in Spanish with English supertitles) anchor the piece, a rumination on legacy and memory. The five storytelling parrots—Jongo (Fernando Contreras), Jóngolo (Bryan J. Cortés), Jungu (Cedric Leiba Jr), Júngulu (Sammy Figaredo), and Jínguili (Khalid Rivera)—are creations of Rodríguez’s imagination, named for his song “Jínguili Jóngolo.”

Johnny Rodríguez was a Puerto Rican singer who rose to popularity on the island in the 1930s. He eventually moved to New York City, where he found great success performing for radio and television. Rodríguez is known for founding San Juan’s El Cotorrito, a popular “cross-dressing” nightclub in San Juan, in 1960. There, he performed iconic female impersonations, for which he is often regarded as one of Puerto Rico’s first drag artists. Still, his cultural and historical contributions are often eclipsed by the fame of his younger brother, Tito “El Inolvidable” (“The Unforgettable”) Rodríguez, a celebrated romantic singer and ideal of masculinity during his time. While Tito was called impossible to forget, much of Johnny’s story has been lost to time.

Pregones/PRTT’s firehouse-turned-theatre is a fitting place for a story about the legacy of an artist who innovated against cultural norms and helped create new ones with richer possibilities. The stage at Pregones/PRTT is a storied place. The two theatre companies (which merged into one 2014) have made critical cultural contributions to US theatre over decades by championing the revolutionary work of Latine artists. Rodríguez, like many of the artists whose work has marked this historic theatre, challenged harmful conventions and innovated the field of performance by being bold, courageous, and irreverent.

How can we approach figures who were truly scandalous in their time now that times have changed?

As I brush rainwater off my sweatshirt and make my way to my seat, I take in the familiar smell of dried paint. I like productions that feel like human hands made them. I can tell there were carpenters here, perhaps listening to merengue and bachata as they hammered and sanded. It occurs to me that I’ve grown too used to automation. Unlike the eerily polished, commercially enhanced productions I’ve frequented as of late, right away, this place feels peopled. There’s a realness and grit to it.

Appropriately, that’s true, too, of the places where drag as an artform was created and thrives: basement bars and underground nightclubs like Rodríguez’s iconic El Cotorrito. Although Rodríguez wouldn’t—and didn’t—call his art “drag.” When one of the play’s parrots refers to him as the “O.G. Drag Queen” early in the play, Johnny (the character) jumps to correct to the Spanish, “Transformista! Not drag queen! Transformista!” and the audience laughs. “Transformista” is a Spanish word directly translating to “transformist.” Other translations include “quick change artist,” “crossdresser,” and indicate that the word can be considered offensive, given its association with outdated and sometimes prejudiced views of genderqueer people. (I consider Merced’s offering in his artist’s statement: “How can we approach figures who were truly scandalous in their time now that times have changed?”)

The concept of transformation (transformación), though, is potent in Parrots at the Pagoda. Merced’s story is about transformation—of life, of self, of time, of meaning over time—both in form and subject matter. The show’s feelings and ideas, and its bold expressions of these feelings and ideas, are marked by transformation. Parrots is a formally experimental exploration of life and death, imagination and materiality, past and present, self and other, memory and loss to time, impersonation and the real thing. The parrots gracefully sail through these cosmic dichotomies in flashes of pink, yellow, and orange, disintegrating the boundaries between them. An offering expansive and rich, Parrots, like Rodríguez himself, is impossible to contain or distill.

The show’s central and most powerful consideration is the transformation of life into death, and, through memory, of death back into life. The parrots guide a dead Johnny back through key moments of his life, using his songs as guideposts. They visit the political protests for Puerto Rican independence during his childhood in the 1920s, his rise to fame as a radio star and subsequent move to New York City in the thirties and forties, his ultimate return to his homeland of Puerto Rico in 1949, and his founding of El Cotorrito there in the 1960s. The parrots remember it all. Transforming into Johnny and his loved ones at different phases of life, they help Johnny remember, too. Witnessing his past as his spirit self, Johnny reconstructs old memories, injecting them with new meaning—a transformation of the past into the present.

Parrots is practically begging me to contemplate the fundamental action of theatre—aren’t all actors impersonators, transforming into other people by trade, collapsing and expanding the space between themselves and their embodied characters as necessary?

As the parrots spin their tale, the lines between life and death, past and present, fiction and reality are quickly blurred. Dead Johnny seems alive onstage. His experience of his past brings it into the present. It becomes increasingly difficult to tell what in the story actually happened during Johnny’s life and what is merely in dead Johnny’s mind—in a sense, the distinction is false in the first place, as the story lives in his imagination. The parrots are fictional beings of his own creation. It’s layered: Johnny’s songs exist as transformations of feelings he had when he wrote them. The parrots, performing them back to him in this imagined afterworld, translate their lyrics across time and space, further transforming their meaning.

Parrots, then, deals as much with transformation formally as it does thematically, by engaging in the art form of its subject. In a sense, all of the parrots are impersonators, like Johnny was in his lifetime. They impersonate Johnny, his sister, and his lover. More abstractly (as the show’s formal experimentation calls for getting a little meta), the actors are impersonators too. They’re impersonating the parrots impersonating Johnny and his loved ones. And, obviously, the actor playing dead Johnny (Rubén Flores) is functionally a Johnny Rodríguez impersonator. Parrots is practically begging me to contemplate the fundamental action of theatre—aren’t all actors impersonators, transforming into other people by trade, collapsing and expanding the space between themselves and their embodied characters as necessary? Isn’t all theatre, then, to some degree an exercise in transformation?

Parrots and its cast of queer Latine performers are not bound by the rules of time, narrative structure, genre, gender, or language. They are open to a world of possibility.

This experimental storytelling is enlivened by indulgence in pleasure, humor, and drama. The parrots, irresistible, relish in their transformations. They fill the stage and the story completely, taking no moment for granted. Most notably, in an electric eleven o’clock drag number, Júngulu (Samy Figaredo) plays Johnny impersonating Doña Fela, former mayor of San Juan and the first woman to become mayor of a capital city in the Americas. Júngulu boldly commands the stage, singing “Voy a Ser Mala” (“I’m Gonna Be Bad”). The performance is a mischievous mockery of the very idea of “good,” celebrating troublemaking and rule breaking. In their performances, Figaredo and the other parrots stretch every note and dance move within an inch of its life, wringing it of all emotion and meaning before whiplashing to the next. The audience adores the parrots, laughing, singing, and, on occasion, rising to their feet to dance along with them. This active engagement is another way in which the parrots disintegrate boundaries, this time between the audience and performers.

This must be, in part, what Merced refers to in his artist’s note as “the pleasures and freedoms of queer theatricality.” Parrots and its cast of queer Latine performers are not bound by the rules of time, narrative structure, genre, gender, or language. They are open to a world of possibility when it comes to whose stories they tell, to whom, and how. There is great joy and pleasure in being unconcerned with being understood, categorizable, or legible to the cultural mainstream in your storytelling. There is vitality in, as the parrots put it in reference to Rodríguez’s legacy, “defying a world that tries to erase you.”

That’s what Merced and his cast of queer Latine artists do. They defy the erasure of Rodríguez and of his loud, joyous expression of himself, which was revolutionary both in its time and today. And in celebrating Rodríguez’s contributions, they make their own. Today, and throughout history, the unflinching expression of queerness and Latinidad—of otherness—is violently repressed, policed, and criminalized. Parrots defies the forces of this repression, in form and content.

Parrots is a feat as ambitious as it is critical. The play aims to touch on Rodríguez’s political (d)evolution, love, family, and career—essentially, nearly every aspect of his being. Tracing the long, winding life of a forgotten cultural icon in the container of a tight ninety minutes feels close to impossible. That’s to say, watching Parrots, I couldn't help but wish there was more of all of it: more songs, more dance numbers, more details about Rodríguez’s life, more props and set pieces for the parrots to manipulate, more costume changes, more drag performances, more moments of pain between Rodríguez and his siblings, more stolen kisses with his lover, more audience participation, and hell, maybe even a massive live band (instead of recorded tracks).

Most acutely, I longed for more connective tissue between each of the snapshots of Rodríguez’s life, or maybe more of the snapshots themselves, so that I could understand more deeply how one version of him transformed into the next, not just that he did. At times, I felt jerked around and disoriented, dropped abruptly into and out of Johnny’s life with no context to ground me. I craved more completeness. Parrots was strongest when, rather than helicoptering me into disjointed events, it gently awakened me to Rodríguez, just as the parrots aim to awaken him to himself.

Along with completeness, Parrots eludes some essential clarity. If the simple facts of what, where, who were clearer at the outset of every snapshot of Johnny’s life, the disorientation of the non-narrative, experimental form might have felt more generative and distinct. I was often distracted wondering about the fundamentals. Who were the players? What year was it, again? Were we in New York or San Juan in that scene? Was Júngulu a parrot, Johnny’s sister, or a different, new woman in his life I hadn’t met yet?

At the same time, this is precisely how memory functions: as a series of associations that become more disconnected over time. As you look back, things become blurrier, the details fading. Perhaps the play’s disjointedness is a simple symptom of the reality that Johnny Rodríguez is no longer alive. While there is an abundance of available resources on his brother, there are few existing source materials documenting Johnny Rodríguez’s public life, let alone his private life. What exists is glaringly incomplete. The very fact that, as Merced puts it, Rodríguez’s story has been “silenced,” makes Merced’s play all the more honorable and powerful an act. It remembers. It historicizes. It defies erasure.