“Sometimes it’s okay if your mind wanders, I think. Especially when you have nothing to do. But I realized the thing with my brother is if he just let his mind wander it would find its way to bad, ugly things.”

These are some of the first words Griselio (Bobby Román) says to Oscar (Alejandro Hernández) in the beautiful land i seek. They’re in a train compartment in 1950 on their way to assassinate President Truman, a plan to avenge the many Puerto Ricans, including Griselio’s aforementioned brother, killed in a bombing attack orchestrated by the United States. And this is what the play itself does: wanders through history to show us the bad, ugly things that shape the present-day relationship between Puerto Rico and the United States; a play inside a history lesson inside a wandering mind, centered on the true story of Oscar Collazo and Griselio Torresola and their failed assassination attempt.

The play is magical, scrupulous, and tremendously funny with a team that really knows how to commit to a bit. It’s a simple formal trick — the train they ride on is not the train they think it is, but rather an infinite line with everyone that ever was or ever will be on board. Figures from Puerto Rico’s historical and cultural past visit Oscar and Griselio in their  compartment, sowing doubt or instilling confidence in their plan.

The conceit pays off best in the play’s humor, a perfect vehicle for a painful past.

I laughed heartily at the caricature of Christopher Columbus: costumed to perfection as he would be in an elementary school Columbus Day pageant and played with grandiose pomposity by Daniel Colón. “Are these my seats?” he asks, when he enters. And then almost immediately, “Lucky I discovered these seats.” Until finally he exclaims with righteous indignation, “I discovered this compartment, remember? You’re trying to kick me out of my own compartment? Spain’s compartment? The Pope’s compartment?” I mean, that’s good comedy.

Later, when it gets real and they shoot Columbus, someone in the audience responded, audibly, “Finally,” and we all clapped.

I laughed at the appearance (of course) of María from West Side Story, here to claim Columbus as her true love. I laughed when this María, played with immaculate earnestness by Ashley Marie Ortiz, lip synched “I Have a Love” over Columbus’ dead body, which she uses as a puppet to hilarious effect before dragging his corpse off stage.

I laughed with everyone at Alexander Hamilton’s sudden arrival, also played by Colón in a decidedly Lin Manuel Miranda rendering (far more real to us in 2024 than a historical Hamilton could ever be; “He looks Puerto Rican,” Griselio says). The commitment to this bit was particularly outstanding, with surprisingly solid rap lyrics in a familiar Miranda cadence, a costume straight from the musical, and even — when West Side Story Maria returns, this time in love with Hamilton — a recreation of the iconic lighting design that framed Phillipa Soo’s face at the end of the original Broadway production.

I laughed knowingly at the inevitable entrance of John Wilkes Booth (also played by Ortiz), famously an actor before he became an assassin, who hammed it all the way up with Shakespeare’s “all the world’s a stage” speech. In the midst of all this laughter, the play tricked me into confronting one of its biggest questions when Booth invites Oscar and Griselio to treat planning an assassination the same way one might create a stage play — you’re trying to say something and therefore you must decide how you want to say it. It’s a successful metatheatrical moment that asks if the play itself will succeed in saying what it wants to say to us. “You’re doing this to make a point, right?” says Booth. “How will people understand your point?”

The team behind the play couldn’t possibly have known that it would open the same week that America would obsess over a modern-day assassination (of a CEO rather than a president), searching for exactly this kind of meaning in the aftermath. But the many other ways that the 1950 in the play resonates with our reality today are no coincidence. A moment with an FBI agent (Ortiz) who shows up with detailed dossiers on Oscar and Griselio points to the many communities in America that have been secretly monitored until their surveillance became public knowledge. The quieter moments with Harry Truman himself (Colón), cloyingly suave and unbothered by the open threats to his life, point to the seeming hopelessness familiar to anyone who has ever felt trapped in a system, compelled to push back but all the while feeling that resistance is futile.

The production’s physical comedy was skillfully staged by director José Zayas. Colón and Ortiz’s performances were especially deft — they brought specificity to dozens of characters, helping us feel the infinity on the train and making us laugh in myriad ways. The play’s design too was strongest when it was in service of the comedy; costumes (by Haydee Zelideth) and lighting (by Lucrecia Briceño) really shined in those moments. But other design elements often fell flat — at no point did I believe that the broken lock on the compartment door was once functional; the slapdash bullet holes projected on the upstage wall after a shootout were aesthetically distracting at a serious moment in the play; and an important apparition was not really designed at all, but rather staged such that it could be imagined off stage. I craved more balance between the impeccable humor of this production and the gravitas that I felt pulsing in the text.

What I am most drawn to in this play as a language-obsessed playwright is the way the characters never seem to know whether they are speaking in English or in Spanish, with visitors to their compartment giving them different answers, even as they switch seamlessly between the two to our outside ears. Only in singing is anyone certain.

Supertitles on screens above either side of the stage translated the English into Spanish and the Spanish into English throughout, and while I appreciated that the translations went both ways, they weren’t integrated into the design of the production; if anything, they looked tacked on. But the play is asking a really interesting set of questions about the experience of growing up bilingually and the unique status Spanish has as both a colonizer language and, with the arrival of English-speaking colonizers, the increasingly erased mother tongue of the colonized.

I wondered about a version of this play where the balance of Spanish to English leaned more heavily into Spanish. I wondered about a spectrum of possible English to Spanish ratios. I wondered what, if anything, had to be in English. There are some moments, yes, the Truman scenes perhaps; the Miranda-esque Alexander Hamilton probably; “María like diarrhea,” definitely. But largely, the play does me (a non-Spanish speaker) a favor by being in English at all. An appearance in the compartment by “the writer” (Nate Betancourt) seems to suggest this balance benefits playwright Matt Barbot, too. I wondered if the present ratio reflects his own feelings of language loss, or the limbo between levels of fluency felt by so many first-generation Americans.

This play wanders across a remarkable distance in the course of ninety minutes, but it doesn’t seem to know when and where to stop its wandering. A magnificent aria of a monologue takes us through the train’s infinite compartments with their infinite passengers — people we maybe wish had visited and people we maybe forgot ever existed. The play could have ended there, with Griselio’s realization that most of these famed figures from his future and our past don’t recognize him as a martyr, a hero, or even a villain. So, after everything, did he matter?

But the play doesn’t end there. It finds a few more ways to ask this question. Will we matter? Will we be remembered? Will anything change for Puerto Rico? Will Puerto Rico be free because of our actions? When the play finally does end, though, it is enormously affecting. There is a song, sung a cappella, in Spanish, that several people in the audience clearly know. I love it when a play can do this: mean a little more to some people in the audience, to the people it wants to speak to the most. I could feel the pull between those members of the audience and the performers, on the cusp of singing together instead of one to the other.

And then, another song, sung with such simple beauty by Ortiz, now playing Lolita Lebrón. And that question again. Does what we do matter to the legacy we want to leave? At some point earlier, Oscar says, “We lead to the next thing. Just like we were led here by what came before. That’s all we can do.” The play does this, too. And in the end, that’s all it needs to do.

–

The Beautiful Land I Seek (La Linda Tierra que Busco Yo) is running now at the Puerto Rican Traveling Theater.