THE TRUTH WAS
ALREADY OUT THERE

A haunting mystery of family trauma loses some
of its power when the answers come too easily

Peter Pasco & Erica Marie Ortega- (photo by Jaime Robledo)

Álvaro has a grievance with The X-Files. In the series’ 25th episode, Fox Mulder finds a frightened teenager hiding in a bathroom stall at Puerto Rico’s Arecibo Observatory. The boy tells Mulder his name is Álvaro. Álvaro himself was twelve or thirteen, watching alone at home in Puerto Rico on a Friday night. When he heard his own name come out of the television, he turned around to make sure no one else was in the room.

He swears the original broadcast ended with the boy leading Mulder into a tunnel dug by the Macheteros, Puerto Rican independence fighters. There the two held each other close in the dark. In the reruns, aliens haul the boy into their ship by one ankle. Álvaro believes the studio spliced in a new ending. He has written to complain by registered mail, and nobody answers. So he recites the original to himself, and every year the louder version crowds out more of it.

Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas’s play, Recent Alien Abductions, opens with that monologue. Its mysteries are more compelling than the answers that follow. By the time the family begins telling us what happened, you may have already worked out much of it. Jaime Robledo’s production at the Broadwater in Hollywood gives the material every advantage, but the writing grows less assured as it becomes more explicit.

Lynn Adrianna Freedman & Alexis Dela Rosa (photo by Jaime Robledo)

Act I is one of Álvaro’s performance pieces, presented as if in a downtown New York space around 2012. Peter Pasco’s Álvaro takes the episode apart beat by beat: a eucalyptus he says proves it was shot in Los Angeles, Mulder’s broken Spanish, the boy’s suspiciously Mexican accent. The actual episode, “Little Green Men,” aired September 16, 1994, and the boy in it was named Jorge. Álvaro sneers that American producers name Latino characters Juan or José, or Jorge “if the studio is trying extra hard” (note the playwright’s first name—Jorge).

The real subject leaks in through the asides. An Older Brother keeps turning up, with his Banana Republic cargo pants and his theory that “people only fall in love with those they don’t trust.” He thought Álvaro landed in detention every afternoon “on purpose.” Here is the play’s best idea: Álvaro can talk about damage only in the grammar of conspiracy, and the audience learns to translate. Then he catches himself, in the funniest and most frightening line of the night: “Do me a favor. Forget I mentioned my Older Brother.”

Pasco takes his time, as the script asks, and the theories turn by degrees into a portrait of a lonely kid. Robledo cuts the scripted preshow, in which Álvaro wraps audience phones in aluminum foil, so Pasco builds the paranoia from the stage alone. Colin Lawrence drapes Act I in metallic space blankets that hide the family house of Act II underneath. Between scenes, Brandon Baruch’s cold phosphorescent light catches the actors moving on and off like returned abductees.

Thais Menendez & Alexis Dela Rosa- (photo by Jaime Robledo)

Act II jumps to 2016 and a modest house in Bayamón, Puerto Rico. Álvaro is dead. Patria (Lynn Adrianna Freedman), a Nuyorican friend, has flown down for the family’s signature on a release so she can publish his performance pieces. She sleeps on a cot beside his mother, Olga (Erica Marie Ortega), who has Alzheimer’s. His older brother, Néstor (Alexis Dela Rosa), greets her with “We’re a private family.” He’ll sign, he says, when he finishes reading.

Cortiñas writes caregiving like someone who has done it. Ana (Thais Menendez), Néstor’s wife, changes Olga’s diaper and explains the method: keep the blue line on the lining above the crack, tape both sides even or she fidgets. She grades herself after every change. Today maybe a C, because the visitor has her distracted. The neighbor, Beba (Crystal Diaz), brews coffee in a saucepan. Patria says Álvaro took his without sugar. Beba adds two tablespoons. “Here,” she says, “he did.” Everyone in this house recalls a different Álvaro.

Néstor gets the strongest case in the room, and Dela Rosa, brutal and volatile elsewhere, lets this speech play as grief. Néstor once read an interview in which his brother said he left Puerto Rico without a single childhood photograph. So he mailed him one, and never heard back. Meanwhile he watched their mother call New York all night, forget she had called, and call again.

Néstor decides not to sign. Patria won’t leave without it. The next morning she ties the drawstring at Olga’s collar, and when Olga begs her to untie it, Patria makes a deal. Sign first. She holds the old woman’s hand to the page. “Those are the rules.” Olga signs, then grabs Patria’s arm and says the best line in the play: “No one wants to tell me where my face is.”

Peter Pasco (photo by Scott Leggett)

The trouble comes when the play begins confirming what it has taught us to suspect. A confrontation between Néstor and Patria grows threatening, and he turns up the television before it begins. Robledo lets that small, ugly gesture register without embellishment. Later, Beba delivers a long account of the family’s past, leaving little for the audience to piece together.

Patria also becomes less interesting as the writing makes her serve the revelation about Álvaro. Freedman gives her more spine than the script does. And Cortiñas lets her off the hook for Olga. He never returns to what she did that morning. A play this alert to who controls a record should notice when its heroine takes one by force.

Ana gets the play’s sharpest warning about Néstor and little after it. Late one night, as she plucks gray hairs from his head, he twice pins her wrist until she says what he wants to hear. Menendez plays her astute and cornered at once. Ana plants the suspicion that Patria held back some of Álvaro’s pages, then drops out of the action. Beba, by the end, exists mostly to deliver the explanation, which she calls something she “pieced together over the years.”

Sacred Fools could hardly have done more for this play. Robledo resists the script’s invitations to melodrama. Even the most volatile confrontations feel like arguments taking place in an actual household, not actors straining to make every grievance explosive. The design is inventive, and the ensemble brings texture to characters the second act sometimes treats as instruments of disclosure. Pasco alone makes the evening worth considering. I recommend the production, with reservations: the acting and direction are considerably better than the play’s insistence on explaining itself.

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photos by Scott Leggett and Jaime Robledo

Recent Alien Abductions
Sacred Fools Theater Company
Broadwater Main Stage, 1076 Lillian Way in Los Angeles
90 minutes
Fri and Sat at 8; Sun at 3
ends on November 22, 2026
for tickets, visit Sacred Fools

for more shows, visit Theatre in LA

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