Review: Dreaming Of A Better Life

"Just Like Us," Latino Theater Company, April 10 – May 18, 2025

April 20, 2025 | By Bruce R. Feldman

In Brief: This impassioned, inspiring tale of four Mexican-American teens determined to achieve the American Dream through a college education – despite debilitating poverty, discrimination, cultural identity uncertainty, and the fear of deportation – could not be more beautifully presented. Nor could it be timelier.

After high school graduation comes college. Or will it? Valerie Rose Vega, Noelle Franco, Blanca Isabella, Newt Arlandiz, and Brenda Banda (Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography)

In the luminous drama Just Like Us, four vibrant Mexican-American young women are high school seniors preparing to celebrate prom night as they eagerly await their college acceptance notices.

Marisela, Clara, Yadira, and Elissa are all excellent students with promising futures, but their parents work in dead-end jobs and struggle to make ends meet. So, the girls also are anxiously waiting to learn whether or not they will get enough financial aid.

There’s one more problem: While Clara and Elissa have legal status, Marisela and Yadira don’t. They won’t be allowed to attend a public university. Even if they could, those institutions can offer aid only to students here legally.

They must find a private school and wealthy donors who will fund their educations.

Finally, as if all of this weren’t hard enough, should they get into college and earn their degrees, Marisela and Yadira must draw no attention to themselves that might lead to their expulsion from the U.S., the only country they’ve known.

Oscar Emmanuel Fabela, Elyse Mirto, Saul Rodriguez, Blanca Isabella, Brenda Banda and Sari Sanchez (Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography)

These young women live in two worlds: the culture of a Mexico they have never known but that has been instilled in them by their traditional immigrant parents and the spirit of American exceptionalism and possibility that fuels their dreams and hopes to rise above their circumstances.

Playwright Karen Zacarías deftly charts and explores all of these clashing currents in a multi-layered text overflowing with compassion and humor, not to mention a liberal dose of infectious Ranchera music and dance.

She based her insightful account on Helen Thorpe’s 2009 bestselling non-fiction book. Thorpe, a freelance journalist, set out to write a magazine article about the girls. After getting to know them, she realized that their stories were too complex, too consequential, too essential and would be better served as a longform narrative.

Zacarías is too talented of a writer to limit herself to just the girls’ point of view. She nimbly employs Thorpe as both narrator and as one of the major characters in the play, showing us how the journalist’s journey of personal discovery parallels that of the girls. The upper-class Thorpe wants to fully understand what makes the girls tick, and in so doing she must confront her own unchallenged assumptions and bottled-up prejudices.

They made it! (Photo: Grettel Cortes Photography)

The cast is uniformly excellent and enormously appealing. Blanca Isabella plays the dynamic, boy crazy, uninhibited Marisela with a potent combination of boundless energy and grace. Newt Arlandiz as the level-headed Yadira; Noella Franco as the religious, understated Clara; and Valerie Rose Vega as the group’s sensible leader, Elissa, all bring youthful drive and quiet dignity to their roles..

An assured Elyse Mirto portrays Helen Thorpe with authority, kindness, and the resolve not to influence the girls’ lives or decisions as she shadows them for her book. Late in the second act she learns that it’s harder to do than she thought.

The supporting players are equally outstanding, particularly Brenda Banda in the dual roles of Marisela’s timid, Spanish-speaking mother and the girls’ uplifting, slightly wacky high school teacher, Mrs. Smith.

Saul Rodriguez also is terrific as Marisela’s shy, hopelessly nerdy high school admirer Julio and as her smooth, charismatic, macho college suitor Ramiro. Oscar Emmanuel Fabela and Sari Sanchez each skillfully essay multiple, stylistically disparate roles.

"And so Marisela, the first of her family to ever go beyond the sixth grade, moves out of her house, away from her Latino neighborhood, from the panaderías, and taco stands, hair salons, and travels 10 miles south to the other side of the world, to the more affluent whiter neighborhood that will become her new home: the Universityof Denver."

These actors have talent, range, and loads of stage presence. It’s a joy to watch them bring Zacarías’ potent story to life. You can’t help but love and admire them all.

Fidel Gomez’s masterful direction is right on the money as he smoothly guides his cast through a gamut of emotions from despair and confusion to unbridled joy and optimism and back again.

Technical credits, including vivid projections by Hsuan-Kuang Hsieh, are on par with all Latino Theater Company productions. They don’t have a lot of money to spend on sets, but nothing looks cheap. Quite the opposite.

It’s always well worth the trip downtown to experience the vital work of these gifted artists. The city may look ugly and disheartening outside on Spring St. Inside, the world is full of hope, warmth, and a humanity that sustains us all through these difficult times.

“Just Like Us,” Latino Theater Company, 514 S. Spring Street, Los Angeles CA 90013, (213) 489-0994, latinotheaterco.org