2022 (UN)DOCUMENTS

The Los Angeles Theatre Center, Los Angeles

Written & Performed by Jesús I. Valles

Directed by Rudy Ramirez

With a single phrase, you can give up your country. With a single signature, you can tear a family apart. With a single word, you can learn to transform.

In their first full-length solo show, (Un)Documents, award-winning actor and poet Jesús I. Valles journeys across both sides of a river with two names, moving between languages to find their place as a child, a lover, a teacher, and a sibling in a nation that demands sacrifice at the altar of citizenship. In doing so, they create a new kind of documentation written with anger, fierce love, and the knowledge that what makes us human can never be captured on a government questionnaire. Directed by Rudy Ramirez, the show received its initial workshop at The VORTEX in 2018 as part of FuturX: A New Festival of Latinx Performance. (Un)Documents won three 2018 B. Iden Payne awards for Outstanding Original Script, Outstanding Lead Actor in a Drama, and Outstanding Direction of a Drama, and was nominated for Outstanding Production of a Drama. (Un)Documents was also presented as part of the 2019 OutsiderFest artist’s showcase and featured at the Latinx Theatre Common’s Sin Fronteras Festival. (Un)Documents returned to The VORTEX in May of 2019 for a two week encore and received five nominations from the Austin Critics Table Association, including the Mark David Cohen Award for Best New Play, and was a featured performance at the 2021 ATHE conference.