The Brooklyn Rail

Everyone I met in Marfa knew about the play. With a population right around 1,500, the Texas town is the kind of place where a single event registers high on the Richter scale.

Springbreakers can deplete petroleum at the gas station, sending Marfans to the next town, miles away, to fill up. Chinati Weekend—the fall festival celebrating the artist Donald Judd, who put Marfa on the map—is an all-hands-on-deck affair. And on top of the upcoming play, a wedding was scheduled for the same weekend, taking over Margaret’s, one of the main drag’s dinner spots. Cram into some other restaurant, or just stay home.

But unlike other events that bring visitors to town, this one generated buzz because it gave Marfans a chance to cheer on their own.

“My wife’s in the play,” a food truck vendor told me, smiling. “She’s one of the mourners.”

On April 10 and 11, 2026, Ballroom Marfa presented Federico García Lorca’s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, remounting the New York City Players’ (and its Incoming Theater Division’s) 2024 production. Concerned with repressive gender roles in rural Spain, Bernarda Alba follows a draconian widow who subjects her five daughters to eight years of grieving after their father dies. Supercharged atoms, the daughters ricochet off of each other’s dramas while cut off from the outside world—and its bachelors.

Living hundreds of miles from the nearest city, Marfans watched the play with heightened awareness. Entire TV shows are routinely made about the obstacle course of finding love in Manhattan, this production’s original home. But the Chihuahuan Desert? In staging Bernarda Alba there, director Richard Maxwell enabled a richer exchange between art and audience, one rare for a Lorca play—or any—in America.

*

At the food truck, the day before the play’s opening, I asked the vendor which bar I should check out. For a blip in the desert, Marfa has no shortage. There’s an outdoor bar, a saloon, two hotel bars, a spirits tasting room, a wine bar, a cocktail bar, and one inside a gallery called Wrong where the liquor selection looked right. These watering holes are also breathing Reddit threads—places where locals trade intel. More gossip, more bars.

The vendor pointed me to the bar across the street, the outdoor one, where he said I could take my burger to eat. I did, ordering a beer. It was the first time in memory I had to wipe dust off my bottle. IPAs must not fly off the shelves, but where did I think I was? Order the ranch water.

Even with my rental car’s Texas plates, even though I was staying in a house and not a hotel, and even though I dress in a non-normcore manner befitting a creative community, Marfans know when someone new has come to town. They can smell tourists’ money, and fetishization of “bohemian life,” coming off of Highway 90, and they know—on a granular level that infrared tracking has yet to perfect—where everyone in town is, what they’re doing, and who they’re fucking. Twice, on my three-day trip, I heard someone tell another, “I saw your ex today,” turning warm eyes bloodthirsty. (An entire episode of the podcast “Marfa for Beginners” is dedicated to dating in town—all my exes live in Far West Texas, as they say.)

It is this comical—and stifling—insularity that made Bernarda Alba more mirror than performance.

The town is walkable—you can get from end to end in about half an hour—so I spent the day on foot before the play, window shopping and hearing people chat about the show’s opening night. After dinner, I walked to Ballroom Marfa for the play’s 7:30 p.m. curtain.

No cars. Odd for an event so many had been discussing. The doors were also locked; that’s when my stomach sank.

I pulled out my phone, went to the show’s website, and saw that while Ballroom Marfa was presenting the play, the performance was taking place a mile or two outside of town. My car was a good twenty-minute walk away, back at the house, and I’d then have to drive further in the opposite direction, all in under a half hour. Travel humbles us all, transforming everyone into Arthur Less.

Then, I saw people—and their idling vehicles—at a gas station across the street. Well, here we go.

I approached a woman about my age who looked at me exactly as I would look at a man approaching me at a gas station—with abject despair. I told her I was an idiot, and might she be able to give me a ride to a place a mile or so away?

Customer service incarnate, she kicked me to the next representative. “Talk to my brother,” she said. He was standing nearby, affable but cautious.

A moment later he was squishing his backpacking materials to one side of the backseat, making room for me. I offered to pay for the gas, but he had already taken care of it. A few minutes later, we pulled up to the correct performance venue.

Many cars.

*

The Bull Room is a new Ballroom acquisition. Perched above Marfa on a ranch, the building previously hosted bull auctions, with two doors for the livestock to enter, flaunt, and exit—a bovine runway.

Some two hundred people gathered outside awaiting the show. The sky was cloudless, the temperature the best of spring, and a breeze giggled just to say evening was coming. Nearby, a woman spoke my mind: “God the weather is so beautiful today.”

People sipped Modelos and stood chatting in twos and threes. In the distance, a lone mesa looked like it wanted to join in. Then, the doors opened.

Audiences ascended the wooden bleachers to sit in the Bull Room’s amphitheater. Maxwell’s production was as bare as the land surrounding it: Saltillo tiles on the floor, a white wall, and a few wooden chairs to move on and off. In a previous life, the space auctioned off bulls; in the play, it auctioned off daughters, who can only leave the house once they marry—and none are worthy in Bernarda’s eyes, so the youngest (and horniest) daughter, Adela, will have quite a dry spell before her sisters marry first.

Another Lorca production, Yerma—reimagined by Simon Stone in 2016—set the play in contemporary London. This was baffling. Lorca’s works, and Yerma in particular, concern rural, Catholic women whose location and religion separate them from their sexuality—and others’. The only goal Yerma’s been taught is motherhood, not the ways in which it happens, and as such she cannot fathom why she is failing when it is clear to everyone else her husband is gay. How, in contemporary London, would a blogging millennial version of Yerma have such confusion? Lorca’s plays are of a time and place, and Maxwell understands not to fuss with such settings.

As did the cast: performing entirely in Spanish with English supertitles, the women—mourners, house workers, and the Alba family—resisted any feminist awakenings and stood at militaristic attention under the watchful eye of pious Bernarda. Performing in both a ranching community and a town powered by gossip, near the border of Mexico where Catholicism reigns, Maxwell’s production was near site-specific. At the Bull Room, libertine Marfa became its opposite: an unwilling convent.

But nunneries, too, run on chisme. While in town, three different people told me Marfa is like a “high school.” One was a Ballroom employee; one a caretaker for Eileen Myles’s dogs; and one the grandchild of four Marfa families, who wore a “You are on stolen land” hat—those sartorial land acknowledgments.

The high school comparison fits the play. Stuck inside all day, the women of Bernarda Alba trade barbs whenever another turns her back. I forgot how bone-dry funny the play is, and my neighbors chuckled as much as I did at each new insult. Poor eldest daughter Angustias—thirty-nine and sickly, but with the largest inheritance—bears much of the shit talking.

She’s “narrow-waisted.” “Uglier than the devil.” “Talks with her nostrils.”

“Maybe he likes that,” another sister retorts.

She’s talking about Pepe el Romano, who wants to marry Angustias for her money, hoping she dies in childbirth, or sooner, so he can actually marry Adela. The second youngest, Martirio, is also in love with Pepe; I thought of a man I met who helped with the show’s lighting who told me the Marfa high school graduates about a dozen seniors a year. Imagine that dating pool.

Whatever breeze was cooling the night stopped when Bernarda slammed the Bull Room’s door shut. The air thickened, and the sisters got feistier. The Bull Room did not overheat, but an airflow shift was noticeable. Halfway through, the play paused; a man in late middle age seemed to be having a medical episode in the audience. His movement and responses were delayed. Audience members passed him water. A pair of people hoisted him up and slowly walked him down the aisle and out of the Bull Room.

Not only did Bernarda close the door to men, they were now being driven out.

The play resumed, and audience alertness sharpened. A few rows behind me, a rapt child babbled through the play, asking his mother questions, especially after scenes alluding to more adult content, “¿Qué pasó? ”

I could tell the child was grasping the play despite its mature themes. I looked around: dozens and dozens of people had shown up to this free performance, and dozens more would come tomorrow. In what felt like a staggering, beautiful statistic, almost a quarter of the town would see this play. A smaller population is easier to corral, but the play’s gravitational pull was also intersectional. Marfans wildly range in age, background, and economic class—especially as the town gentrifies with more New Yorkers, Angelenos, or Austinians buying their first (or umpteenth) home. Still, all walks of life came to a play whose bilinguality increased its access.

Blending professional New York and greener local actors, Maxwell displayed what a collaborative community can look like on stage—even if that spectrum means acting quality can waver.

But as Bernarda, Tory Vazquez was a flaming despot. Equally powerful was Amelia Carbajal as the spirited Adela. When she snaps her mother’s cane, Vazquez could finally flash a new emotion: terror at the realization Bernarda birthed a child as headstrong as she is. As the home’s chief caretaker, Maryela Gussi-Schwartz—who only made her acting debut two years ago—was also riveting. She juggled roles as a counselor with Bernarda and a spitfire with the daughters.

Such balancing acts can’t last forever, however, and as the tragedy neared its inevitable conclusion, sound also left the Bull Room. Laughter stilled, the child’s questions stopped, and, for the first time, at just the right moment, the play’s lights snapped off.

*

Audiences hung around after, inside the Bull Room or under a canopy of stars, saying hi to people they missed before the play but, in its gentle seating arc, spotted during the show. One person was sitting on one of the more extreme ends of the venue’s curve. He couldn’t read all the supertitles but said the staging was clear enough that he understood the action.

I realized I had succeeded in getting a ride to the Bull Room, but now I needed a ride back. Before leaving, I asked my neighbor if he might be able to give me a lift to town. He happily said yes but that his pickup was full—he had carpooled with others—so I’d have to either sprawl across their laps or ride in the bed. I took the latter.

A young painter joined so I wouldn’t be alone and asked me about myself. Maybe if I shared something colorful, it could make its way into the thread of the community, a little story about a visitor who came to town. But I didn’t have anything interesting to say, and if I told him how awesome it was just to be in a pickup beneath the stars, I’d further expose my “you’re not from around here”-ness. But I guess I already had: I’m the guy who needed a ride.

I was thinking about Marfa as a “high school.” People came to the play to see their friends, they snuck out phones to photograph their cameos, and some of the actors on stage were not exactly cast age-appropriately. I played a fifty-something my junior year; thankfully, the performers in Bernarda Alba were much better than I was in The Baker’s Wife.

But, so often in community art, the act of gathering—and what happens around it—is as much an event as the art itself. As with any community, but especially those at the scale and isolation of Marfa—a Neverland in the desert—events do more than gather. They mark time, and details affix the hands to the clock.

The man driving me back to town offered to take me and his passengers to a bar—the saloon—and a little distance from the venue allowed Marfans to open up more candidly.

Attention turned to the man who left the show midway through. Not an hour after the play, the rumor mill ignited: the man apparently didn’t leave because of heat alone. He just overdosed on an edible.