Ruth on the Rocks, a one-woman play from actress and writer Ruth Guerra, premiered Friday, October 11, at the seventh annual Destinos, Chicago’s International Latino Theater Festival. The play follows Guerra as she recounts stories from her childhood in Back of the Yards and her life as a single mother struggling with the loss of her late father.
“It’s a love letter to the Back of the Yards. It’s a love letter to her parents, to growing up Mexican, to growing up Latina,” said Guerra’s longtime friend and Ruth on the Rocks director, Ricardo Gamboa.
Ruth on the Rocks opens with Guerra giving the audience a list of songs, each one corresponding to a different story she will tell during the performance. Together the audience is invited to build a mixtape that will dictate the lineup of the play’s vignettes.
“She’s only got fifty minutes to give you all the stories, because we want this to be a cute mixtape,” Gamboa said. “So, the show changes basically every night, and you’ll never see the same show twice.”
The play takes place in the storefront that was formerly Guerra’s father’s refrigerator repair shop. This is not some metaphor created through the magic of theater: the play is quite literally performed in her father’s old storefront at 4346 S. Ashland. The space has remained largely untouched since he passed away in 2012. The back wall still has its original wood paneling and signage, including a fire extinguisher and air conditioner both installed by Guerra’s father.
“Every rehearsal, we’ve cried,” said Guerra, who grew up in the same building as the storefront and still lives in an apartment above it. “Using this space in this way is actually emotional, because that was the space that we used when we had parties, like our Christmas, we would be down there, or if we wanted to invite people over for something festive that’s where it would take place. Now it feels like I’m inviting people over to the place as if we’re coming over for a party.”
Audiences will hear stories from Guerra’s life that reflect on her experiences with body shaming, racism, and the joys and challenges of growing up in Back of the Yards. In one vignette she recounts a family trip to Mexico. In another, the time she had to defend her mom at a McDonald’s after she was discriminated against for speaking Spanish. Several stories also recount Ruth’s adventures as a single mom, like the time she came back late from the bar and had to be the Tooth Fairy for her young son.
“When Ruth says we’ve cried every rehearsal, that’s not hyperbolic,” Gamboa said. “But we’ve also laughed every rehearsal…it ranges from hilarious to heartbreaking stories, stories that are inspiring, and other ones that are just downright traumatizing.”
This isn’t the first time Guerra’s building has played host to a performance. The refrigerator repair shop is also known as The Storyfront, a theater and performance space that Gamboa and Guerra created in partnership with West Town’s Free Street Theater. The duo produced Hood Moms in the space in 2019; that production involved training mothers in the neighborhood to tell their stories as part of a self-directed show. These mothers were then hired as storytelling and performance teachers to train the next Hood Moms cohort, a process that continued until the pandemic ended the program in 2020.
Ruth on the Rocks is produced under the auspices of Concrete Content, a theater production company Gamboa founded with their partner Sean James William Parris and longtime Free Street Theater director Katrina Dion. The group started Concrete Content to create projects that would challenge the traditional confines of Chicago’s mainstream theater scene. This includes productions like Ruth on the Rocks, where a Latina performer gets the opportunity to tell stories from her real life, Gamboa said, without running against the respectability politics of more traditional downtown or North Side theater establishments.
Concrete Content’s inaugural production, The Wizards, premiered as part of Destinos in 2022. The play follows a Brown and Black genderqueer couple who, after returning to Chicago following a hate crime in New York, discover a Ouija board that allows them to communicate with the spirits of a 70’s Mexican American Motown cover band known as The Wizards. Concrete Content’s next production will be an immersive show about the healing powers of cannabis where the audience will be able to consume an edible, a play that Gamboa said would be relatively unthinkable at most mainstream theater venues in Chicago.
Gamboa hopes their work through Concrete Content and Ruth on the Rocks refutes the narratives typically available to people of color in theater—those that focus exclusively on trauma or what he calls a kind of “masturbatory identity politic.”
Black and Brown people are often depicted one-dimensionally on the stage, Gamboa said. They feel the characters in Ruth on the Rocks are more complicated. “I hope the audience walks away with a lot of compassion for themselves, for others, and then wanting more revolutionary shit,” Gamboa added.
Guerra said she hopes people leave her show with a sense that they belong in theater spaces. “I want the people that come see me to feel very comfortable and be in a space where they don’t feel like, ‘Oh, I didn’t dress appropriately,’ or ‘Maybe I don’t belong here,’” she said. “I want people who never get out and go to [the] theater or to stuff like this to just come and have a good time.”
Ruth on the Rocks, October 11 through November 16, at The Storyfront, 4346 S. Ashland in Back of the Yards. Tickets will be priced by sliding scale donation. Ruth on the Rocks is one of twenty-two productions presented as part of the seventh annual Destinos citywide theater festival, September 30 through November 17. Destinos is produced by the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, an organization dedicated to raising the local, national, and international profile of Chicago’s Latino theater scene.
Charlie Kolodziej is a freelance journalist whose work has appeared in South Side Weekly, Windy City Times, and the Chicago Reader.