Review: Jos Rivera's 'Marisol' brings the apocalyptic fight to a new generation in Open Fist's revival

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Set us as preferred José Rivera’s “Marisol” came out around the same time as Tony Kushner’s “Angels in America,” and both plays, vibrating with millennial anxieties, carry the earthly battle for human survival up to the heavens.There’s a dramatically prominent Angel (Taylor Scott) as well in Rivera’s drama, now in an Open Fist Theater Company revival at Atwater Village Theatre.This celestial warrior has been protecting Marisol (Jade Santana) without her knowing it throughout her life.

Marisol, referred to by a publishing colleague as “Miss Puerto Rican Yuppy Princess of the Universe,” still lives in the Bronx and is assailed by dangers just getting to and from work every day.After an incident on the subway with a deranged man threatening her with a golf club, Marisol returns to her cramped, noisy apartment to learn that her guardian angel is abandoning her to enlist in the battle to replace a senile God, who (to judge by the ailing state of the universe) has grown too old for the job.Marisol will have to fend for herself in New York, a dystopian landscape where crime is rampant, poverty is pervasive and the unhoused are threatened by roving gangs of Nazi skinheads who set them on fire for kicks.What follows is a modern picaresque journey, in which a clever underdog has to rely on her wit and wiles to survive a corrupt and perilous world.

Rivera’s play, which won an Obie Award, caught fire in its 1993 New York premiere at the Public Theater with its theatrical street sense, savage imagery and Puerto Rican-inflected magical realism.The apocalyptic fears boiling up in the play are perhaps even more acutely felt today, with the ravages of climate change compounding each year and the threat of AI hanging an existential cloud over our heads.But what’s most satisfying about this reencounter with “Marisol�...