¡El Conquistador!

Created by and starring perennially inventive theater artist Thaddeus Phillips — a Bride favorite — ¡El Conquistador! is at once a one-man play, a foreign film and a Latin American telenovela (soap opera). Pushing the bounds of multimedia, the show stars eight real-life Colombian soap stars via video monitor, and mini puppet surveillance sequences. A Colombian peasant whose crops have failed because of U.S. pesticides finds work as the doorman of a fancy highrise. The apartment-dwellers are eccentric and difficult, including a girlfriend-abusing man who frequently receives mysterious packages. A far-fetched soap opera ensues, marked by suspense, murder, revenge and redemption. First in a trilogy of works exploring class distinctions and contradictions of Latin American society, ¡El Conquistador! heads off-Broadway after the Bride.