Yadira Correa, Danaya Esperanza, and Claudia Ramos Jordan Photo by Valerie Terranova

Much of the packed house at Thursday night's performance, a primarily young and enthused crowd, vocalized or finger-snapped in agreement with that sentiment.

In director Melissa Crespo's excellent, aggressively comical production, scenic designer Rodrigo Escalante offers audience members a clever visual on the way to their seats before being faced with the production's unit set: a cramped and cluttered dressing room in a Guthrie, Oklahoma playhouse.

The occupants are in a three-month non-union tour playing characters based on Laurey, Aunt Eller, and Ado Annie in a musical called Okla-hola!, which one character describes as, "a focking bilingual parody of Oklahoma! en Oklahoma, pero con Latinos.

The plot concerns "Mexican and Puerto Rican cowboys who want to open the town's first tequila and rum bar, so they can play dominoes and loteria," but with no mention of the Land Run that populated the territory with white settlers after the Indigenous people were driven away. ("Why do a parody of Oklahoma! from the POV of Latinos if you ain't gonna call shit out?")

Cato's play is set on June 24, 2022, the day the United States Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in deciding the case of Dobbs v. Jackson Women's Health Organization, immediately dissolving any legal barriers to Oklahoma's previously passed House Bill 4327, which bans all abortions (with difficult to prove exceptions) from the moment of fertilization.

So when Dominican-American New Yorker Melinda (Danaya Esperanza, anchoring the production with sympathetic maturity) receives a phone call from the local health center ninety minutes before showtime informing her that her appointment for an abortion has been suddenly indefinitely cancelled, it's shocking, frightening and infuriating.

Fortunately, she has the support of castmates, the cheerfully optimistic and overtly sex-positive Puerto Rican Elena (playfully energetic Claudia Ramos Jordan) and Nuyorican Jolie (Yadira Correa, emitting justifiable cynicism), who has worked professionally in theatre since being a teenager and has hit jaded survivor mode early.

Together, they discuss the country's general cluelessness about women's health issues, the difficulty in having rape charges proven, something new right-wing evangelicals have been discussing called Project 2025, and consider options for Melinda, despite knowing that the new law criminalizes anyone who "knowingly engages in conduct that aids or abets the performance or inducement of an abortion."

Popping in and out is the nurturing but overworked stage manager Alex (warm and empathetic Cristina Pitter), trying to get the performance up on time despite an absent ASM. ("I almost fired him too, but then realized it might be illegal to terminate someone while they're off on a mental health day.") When the actors turn to tarot cards for advice, Pitter adds fun moments portraying three of the images the deck illustrates. (Kudos here to costume designer Lux Haac.)

The Two of Swords warns of a future where "Some states will even ban emergency procedures! Illegal abortion clinics will pop up like traveling taco trucks, and thousands of folx will die or spend the rest of their lives in prison."

INTAR has spent decades nurturing works by artists of the Latine community, so naturally, productions sometimes contain cultural and/or political nuances this white playgoer won't always recognize. In this case, Cato notes in the script, "It is a must that all the actors, as a collective, represent the historical context of Latinx culture that includes the Black, Indigenous and European diaspora," and that "It is imperative that the role of Melinda or Jolie are portrayed by a Black Latina to convey the stark disparities of maternal mortality rates and/or incidents of forced intercourse experienced by Black women in America."

The ninety-minute play moves swiftly as the characters use raucous humor as a defense mechanism against oppression, but, without giving anything away, there is also a lovely, quiet moment when Melinda expresses her complex feelings about what it is that's inside her body. Whether you would refer to it as a baby, a potential life, or even a clump of cells, the voiceless bit of humanity is acknowledged and respected, and we're assured that whatever the character does next will come from a place of love.