Are You Dead, or Are You About to Wake Up?

The Huntington

Don’t Eat the Mangos

By Ricardo Pérez González

Directed by David Mendizàbal

March 26, 2025 – April 27, 2025

Evelyn Howe, Jessica Pimentel, and Yesenia Iglesias. All photos by Marc J. Franklin

It’s a challenge to convey the full power of Don’t Eat the Mangos without spoilers, but just like the juicy fruit that, hanging too ripe for too long, falls rotting on the ground outside this Puerto Rican house, I will keep the play’s sweetness and secrets buried under tough skin. Mangos is billed as a tragicomedy: a domestic tale of three grown sisters and their aging, ailing parents. That’s misleading. Don’t Eat the Mangos is a comitragicomedy because it comes full circle. From a starting point of hilarity it descends into a place dark beyond comprehension, and then the comedy reemerges to offer at least a nubbin of hope.

The play is delivered in about 20/80 Spanish to English which, for unilingual brains like mine, presents a challenge in understanding that required me to sit up and take notice. I sorta kinda figured that whatever was uttered in Spanish could be understood by onstage action and whatever English followed, but I was never quite confident of full comprehension. Which I decided is the point in a play whose seeds of horror are ever present, rumbling beneath the tropical levity. We descend into hell while we’re still chuckling.

The duality of comedy and tragedy bullseyes when the mother asks her oldest daughter, stalled in life in so many ways, “Are you dead, or are you about to wake up?” We, the audience, hopes for the latter, even as we brace for the former.

Jessica Pimentel and Susanna Guzmán

Don’t Eat The Mangos is a very specific play. The Huntington’s astonishing set is a very specific house in a very specific place. The house is a major character in the play. Rotating slowly, its warm light pulls us into its stifling secrets.

Evelyn Howe is a standout as Wicha, the youngest sister, though the entire ensemble is effective. Each character knows, or suspects, what’s buried beneath the mango tree, and each gives particular voice to their perspective. By plays end, the array of shame and blame and complicity with the family’s secret is so superbly woven, we can find in each member a reflection of people we know, perhaps even love. And we discover empathy for (almost) every one of them.

Which is how Mangos, in its insistent specificity, unspools a universal story. One that, unfortunately, could be told of any culture, any faith, most any family in our world.

Go see Don’t Eat the Mangos. You will laugh. You will be unnerved. You will leave with deep, unsettling questions. But the food for thought will be so sweet.