Am I Roxie? Am I a Play? Am I at the Wrong Theater?
Geffen’s Latest Solo Act Feels More Fringe Than Mainstage

Within five minutes of “this fiercely funny one-woman tour-de-force” (so says the publicity), actress Roxana Ortega is already fighting back tears about losing her mother due to Alzheimer’s. Thus begins her sappy and self-centered new play, Am I Roxie?, now playing at Geffen Playhouse in Westwood.

Ortega plays herself, a native Angeleno and working commercial and voice-over actress. Told in flashback, she receives a call that her mom is found wandering about the city, which means one thing – her dad, who was taking care of her, has died. After brief conversations with her siblings and aunts, she takes on the responsibility and promptly sends dear old Mom straight to a nursing home found on Yelp. Along the way, she talks with her sham spiritual advisor, meets her husband, freezes her eggs, learns Spanish, and hikes Mount Kilimanjaro as a way to overcome her caregiver’s guilt. Every now and then, she reads one of her mom’s poems, but the play is otherwise all about Ortega and how she feels. Oh, and did you know she’s an actress? For anyone who’s hiring that might be in the audience, she shows off her commercial and video game work.

If you’re worried that this might be a sad play, don’t worry. Am I Roxie? is kitschy sentimentalism, like The Moth Radio Hour at its most formulaic and conventional. Ortega sets up a few good punches, but pulls every one. Mom becomes racist as she loses her personality, talking about “los chinos feos,” but Ortega drops it entirely without even a translation, rather than going for a riotously offensive comedic scene.

The play doesn’t actually dramatize much, if anything. It’s all about Ortega’s feelings and how she copes. She even has a line where she says, “this disease was teaching me.” Ortega plays a small collection of characters, mostly with a similar Spanish accent. However, they’re not realized. Her aunts seem delightful, but the few scenes with them is merely each aunt taking turns saying one line for a round or two. There’s little in the way of actual conversation or non-Ortega monologue. Even though I am never in the mood to sit through an Alzheimer’s story of familial loss, Ortega finds plenty of possible gems with which to write an absorbing, compelling story. One with fully-formed characters. With conversations. Played by actors. Plural. Instead, I’m supposed to care about her and her lived experience. I don’t.

Now, the opera aspect. Opera frames the story and serves as somewhat of a throughline. Mom apparently loved opera, but, though living in the LA area, never attended. She and Ortega played a charming opera improv game while growing up. We learn nothing else about Mom and opera, but it’s important enough that Ortega takes her to her first opera while deep into the illness, Carmen, starring Plácido Domingo. (Except, he last sang that opera in LA in 1998, roughly 20 years before this story takes place. Yes, this is what I was thinking while Ortega was talking about Domingo’s glorious voice.) The play did not answer for me what opera meant to Mom beyond a cutesy child’s game.

Bernardo Cubría directs, unwisely letting Ortega’s manic and cloying tendencies run rampant; nor does he solve the sudden, disjointed lurches in plot (I mentioned earlier that she meets her husband: in the first scene with him, in which he’s barely present, she kisses him, and then nothing until she mentions, at the end, that they got married — there’s no romance to make us care).

The over-produced set by Efren Delgadillo Jr., consists of rows of red velvet curtains, a screen in the middle, TVs on the sides, and a one-time use of a tall inclining platform for Ortega’s tourist trip up the mountain. Costume designer Jennifer Lynn Deck provides an ugly poofy blue jumpsuit with material such that it looked like Ortega was wearing jeans underneath. Pablo Santiago’s lighting doesn’t call attention to itself. Sound designer Cricket S. Myers offers audio files when called upon, such as the predictable overuse of “Circle of Life” from The Lion King (1994), and the gunshot sounds we were warned about in the lobby, which were weak.

Going in, my question was, “Who is Roxie and why is she at the Geffen?” I’m all for seeing blazing new talent at LA’s biggest theaters, but Am I Roxie? feels like an overlong Fringe play from a performer desperate to get traction.

Near the end of the play, Ortega discovers the joy of simply talking to her mom, taking each day on its own terms, making the pain of memory loss bearable in its own way. Two miles away, Odyssey Theatre Ensemble has a wonderful new play that explores this idea with wit and insight. Go see Just Another Day instead.

photos by Jeff Lorch
poster photo by Corey Olsen

Am I Roxie?
Geffen Playhouse, 10866 Le Conte Avenue in Westwood
85 minutes, no intermission
Wed-Fri at 8; Sat at 3 & 8; Sun at 2 & 7 (check for variances)
ends on October 5, 2025
for tickets, call 310.208.5454 or visit Geffen Playhouse

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA