The Brooklyn Rail

Writing for Saturday Night Live, Julio Torres brought an off-kilter, surprisingly tender sense of humor to sketches like “Papyrus,” “Wells for Boys,” and “The Actress.” Since leaving the show six years ago, he has co-created the Spanish-language horror-comedy series Los Espookys, written and directed the movie Problemista, and created the kaleidoscopic comedy series Fantasmas. Though he starred in all three projects, his onstage experience is still limited: his first stand-up special, My Favorite Shapes, was staged at Elsewhere, but Torres “mourned” that it “only existed for one night”—to be taped.

His most theatrical project yet is the solo show Color Theories, which has been promoted as a “theatrical spectacle.” Like many recent off-Broadway hybrids of theater and comedy, the project resists easy definition. If My Favorite Shapes was a surrealistic show-and-tell, Torres says this follow-up is a “looser” meditation on “understanding the world through color.” We discussed the show over Zoom, and our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Douglas Corzine (Rail): When you did My Favorite Shapes, you said that your favorite color was clear. Is that still true? Does this show have its own favorite color?

Julio Torres: My favorite color is often clear, but this show complicates my relationships with colors, and I think questions the idea or challenges the premise of a “favorite color.”

Rail: How would you describe Color Theories?

Torres: I think it’s a bit of a lecture on understanding the world through color and understanding people and each other through color. Yeah, these are theories. Findings.

Rail: My Favorite Shapes had the childlike spirit of your sketch “Wells for Boys,” plus these echoes of playing with toys as a child.

Torres: Hmm. I guess now I’m coloring.

Rail: Yeah, but you also described this as a “lecture,” and Color Theories feels intentionally grown-up or academic as a title. Am I reaching, or is there a distinction there?

Torres: Well, I also thought of My Favorite Shapes as a bit of a lecture. It was like a show-and-tell—like I’m showing fossils or something. And that engaged with found objects. This one engages with ideas—it’s more abstracted than that. It’s like hardware versus software. This is more ephemeral.

Rail: Interesting. What makes a color funny to you?

Torres: I think realizations and epiphanies are funny. Connecting dots—that’s funny. Realizing that we have an overlapping shared experience with color is where the humor comes from, I think. And sometimes colors become points of departure to go into stories or anecdotes from things that I believe correspond to those colors, that further illustrate the idea behind the assessment of the color.

Rail: The word “assessment” also feels very particular and academic.

Torres: I guess so, yeah.

Rail: Like there’s not necessarily a judgment, but a summing up. Do you think that’s accurate?

Torres: Yes, yes.

Rail: When you described shapes, a lot of them became launching points for stories. Does this use the same format?

Torres: In a looser way, but there are definitely echoes of that, of colors becoming the framework for stories.

Rail: You’ve done so much film and TV work in the last few years. What prompted this return to solo performance?

Torres: When I filmed My Favorite Shapes, I mourned a little bit that the set and the theatrical experience of it only existed for one night, to be recorded. I like the idea of a theatrical experience, and I want to feel a little more connected with my physicality as a performer and explore the comedy in my body. I think my favorite parts about acting or performing in the work that I’ve done since then have been little physical discoveries, and I want to create an arena here to discover more.

Rail: Is there a plan or an on-ramp to this project existing outside the theatrical world, or do you think of it as a live experience first and foremost?

Torres: I think it’s first a theatrical experience, but it could be immortalized in some way. But in terms of the theatrical experience, I definitely don’t see myself doing the thing of like, doing it for a year, so come see it now.

Rail: There have been, though, as you allude to, more people from different comedy spaces doing these sit-down theater pieces, or pieces in theater spaces in the last few years.

Torres: Yes, yes.

Rail: Have you seen or engaged with a lot of those shows?

Torres: Yeah—I really loved Kate Berlant’s show, Kate. I thought it was a delicious and really masterful adaptation of her abilities into a theatrical experience. Not the same at all, because it’s a play, but Cole Escola did a little bit of that as well, obviously, in the medium that would welcome their abilities, and it’s been very inspiring to see that. And I don’t mean inspiring in a corny way—I mean it in the artistic, stimulating way of seeing very hyper-specific people that I really admire create these worlds that people come to see. It’s almost like you discover a new room in the house that is your career, like, “Oh, wait, what’s here? Okay, I’ll play here for a little bit.”

Rail: When you talk about the physical discoveries of doing something live, have you had a chance in the rehearsal process to do this work for an audience?

Torres: I have run it, but only verbally—I don’t have a portable version of the set or anything like that, so that’ll come when the show happens. For context, the tour version of My Favorite Shapes was really just show-and-tell in front of a table. And then I did have a friend who made me a portable conveyor belt, which was really clunky, but I loved it. But yeah, it will be exciting to quite literally get it on its feet.

Rail: How does it feel to bring onscreen collaborators like the set designer Tommaso Ortino or the costume designer Muriel Parra into this live world?

Torres: That’s what I know! It’s the people I know and the people I have a good working relationship with. I don’t know, I think it’ll be fine. There’s a lot of live performance that I don’t know that we’ll discover together.

Rail: Are there particular challenges you’re anticipating?

Torres: Yeah, I mean the fact that I am technically the director.

Rail: Which you’ve done with film!

Torres: Yeah, with film and TV—I’m like, “I took risks with that, so let’s do the same here.”

Rail: One challenge is how to evaluate your own performance onstage. Can you watch takes of yourself?

Torres: I think I will probably approach it in that way, record the first few and watch them back. I’ll be looking for serendipitous moments—spontaneous things that worked that weren’t really planned—the way I am on set. So it actually doesn’t really change much, except this is going to be one really long take.

Rail: A press release called Color Theories a “theatrical spectacle.” What feels most spectacular about it?

Torres: I think this set will feel like a spectacle, and just the lighting and playing with color and sounds and music—by music, I mean sounds. I will not be singing.

Rail: The conveyor belt was a source of excitement and novelty in Shapes.

Torres: Yeah.

Rail: How do you do that with color?

Torres: If everything goes as planned, the set will be a giant sketchbook that I’m drawing on and that I can manipulate.

Rail: Wow. Digitally?

Torres: No.

Rail: So you’ll be working with physical colors?

Torres: Yeah. It’s a little lecture-y, I think, and I’ll illustrate ideas.

Rail: Why do a show about colors? Why are colors important to you?

Torres: I think they are… not tools, but rubrics: they’re categories that help us understand the world. The show engages with the idea that colors are a form of classification, like saying something is a mineral, animal, or vegetable, something is either red or blue or yellow or green, et cetera, et cetera. Why? How do you detect that, and what are the nuances within that?

Rail: Do you feel like you use colors to recategorize yourself? When you dye your hair a new color and say, “I am a redhead today,” does that feel like a new category to you?

Torres: It feels like a different expression of mood. Yeah.

Rail: And what is the mood board for how you present yourself in this colorful lecture space? What colors will define you?

Torres: That’s interesting because I was actually just talking to Muriel, who’s doing the costumes. I will attempt to feel like a set piece and more neutral, rather than one of the colors, which will be difficult, but I’ll attempt it.

Rail: Does this mean we should expect a return to white hair?

Torres: Oh, maybe. That’s interesting… Canvas-colored hair.

Rail: I want a credit if you do it.

Torres: Yes. Yeah.