Isa Condo-Olvera and Lucia Salazar-Davison Photo by Dan Norman

In 2022, Exposed Brick launched Through Our Eyes, a festival of new works that adhered to that mission with robust stagings and great promise. The company has now mounted Through Our Eyes 2, a second festival of new work, encompassing full productions of two one-act plays and readings of two more works in progress. I had the opportunity to attend Burn & Dash and Quinceañera, the two one acts, separated by an intermission.

Burn & Dash, by Sunny Thao, takes place in the woods near a village in an unnamed Southeast Asian country and, briefly, in the back of a van. Two girls, Hli (pronounced "Lee") and Nou, have met and become fast friends. They find one another in the forest where they play games like hide and seek, groom each other's hair, and share fragments of their hopes and dreams. They also harbor fears, but do not express these aloud. Instead, these are projected as interior monologue on a screen above the actors.

Nou is native to the village. At the age of 13 she yearns to run away to the city and experience the world beyond. Her parents, though, expect her to stay and marry, as many girls her age have done, to continue their traditional way of life. Hli cautions Nou about her ambitions. Hli has travelled here from another place in a van with a man who is not her father but who, she asserts, takes good care of her. He travels to sell the wares in his van. Nou asks If he sells cloth and Hli responds, no, he sells girls. Nou does not understand and Hli does not have the words to explain. Yet, Nou understands traditional "bride-napping," citing a case in her village that occurred two years before.

That distinction raises the thin margin between unwelcome cultural practices and criminal acts. Hli wants to warn Nou, yet cannot speak forthrightly. The play feels like an exchange between two girls on different sides of a threshold that leads nowhere. Their conversations are broken by uncomfortable pauses, creating a sense that the characters are unsure where their exchanges are heading and what comes next. When Hli must abruptly depart, Nou is sorry to see her friend go, but is none the wiser. A final scene depicts the moment when Hli fell in with the trafficker she calls Uncle, making it clear how easily these things occur and how guileless these girls are when the game begins.

Lily Bo Eun Gobel as Hli and Gracy Ly as Nou both do their best to create viable characters given the lack of momentum in their story. Ly especially conveys authenticity as a typical thirteen-year-old, summoning her emergent maturity one minute, and flighty or fitful as a child the next. The two characters wear identical costumes based on traditional attire. These underscore a sense of their interchangeability in the eyes of their abductors. Look at their faces and they are quite distinctive; listen to them speak, and they have their own cadence expressing their unique personalities. But to men who lure them into their vans, one is like another.

Burn & Dash features shadow puppets, designed by Ches Cipriano, fanciful images that seem to pertain to innocence and its loss, though–truth be told–that is just my best guess, as I was never certain what the puppets were meant to depict. I would have preferred if the playwright had instead devised a more engaging narrative and allowed the characters to express their feelings more directly.

Quinceañera, written by Mayra Gurrola Calderón, is the more successful of the pair. In a Hispanic-American community, Alessandra prepares for her upcoming quinceañera, but is distracted by her disdain for religion–being confirmed in the Catholic Church is part of the quincé package–and skepticism over the existence of God; her unresolved grief for her older sister who died not long ago and who appears in her dreams; her status as a lesbian and disinterest in quincé dresses that resemble ornate wedding cakes; and her massive crush on a classmate named Juliana. All that sits atop the usual business of high school classes and tolerating squirrely (though totally supportive) friends.

Calderón's play offers a clear narrative arc as the extremely likeable Alessandra faces and overcomes these obstacles. The most challenging one is to recognize and address her grief, and to understand how grief has also affected her mother. That burden is to be absorbed by a cluster of women, seen on film, who silently circle one another with elegant gestures. These film clips mean nothing at the onset but as their meaning is made clear, they provide a source of comfort and courage for Alessandra. As for catching the eye of Juliana, Alessandra's friends hatch a plot that, while perhaps a stretch of credulity, works in a romcom-spirited way, though the tone of this aspect of Quinceañera is rather at odds with the fraught challenge of her haunted dreams and aching loss.

Lucia Salazar-Davison as Alessandra and Reyna Rios as her mother wonderfully capture the struggles embedded in their relationship in both heartfelt and comedic veins. They are especially delightful out shopping for the right dress for that special day, each with a different notion of what the "right dress" looks like. While many of the mother's lines are in Spanish (which feels authentic to her character), Rios' keenly expressive performance allowed me to follow those conversations without ever wondering what I might be missing.

Isa Condo-Olvera is captivating as passionate Aurelia, returning in spirit form to guide her sister through this pivotal moment in her life. Samuel Osborn-Huerta, following a strong turn last spring in Mae West and the Trial of Sex, is splendid as confident and seductive Juliana, while Bella Maldonado and Phi Hamens Nelson are high spirited as Alessandra's BFFs.

Burn & Dash and Quinceañera are both about girls coming of age. The former proffers a world in which that crossing can be made either by sticking to traditional customs that deprive woman of choice or by falling victim to predatory men, also robbing them of choice. Nothing in it suggests free will as an option. The latter depicts a self-aware character who works her way through a maze of challenges and emerges as her true self, poised to live her life. As a primer for a young woman (or young man, for that matter), Quinceañera shines a light, even if the gleeful resolution of Alessandra's woes just in time to enjoy her special day has the scent of a Hollywood happy ending.

Through Our Eyes 2 runs through September 28, 2025, at Open Eye Theatre, 506 East 24th Street, Minneapolis MN. For tickets and information, please visit openeyetheatre.org.

Burn and Dash

Playwright: Sunny Thao; Director: Jame See Yang; Movement Director: Eliza Rasheed; Sound Design: Bailey Fenn; Lighting Design: Mitchell Frazier; Props Design: Isabella Freeland; Puppet Design: Ches Cipriano; Puppeteer: Noel Ibbs; Intimacy Director: Callie Aho; Projection Coordinator & Assistant Sound Designer: Visal Anandakumar; Stage Manager: Katie "KJ" Johns.

Cast: Lily Bo Eun Gobel (Hli), Gracy Ly (Nou).

Quinceañera

Playwright: Mayra Gurrola Calderón; Director: Nora Montañez Patterson; Costume Design: Caroline A. Zaltron; Sound Design: Bailey Fenn; Lighting Design: Mitchell Frazier; Props Design: Isabella Freeland; Videographer: Sequoia Hauck; Intimacy Director: Callie Aho; Projection Coordinator & Assistant Sound Designer: Visal Anandakumar; Stage Manager: Amanda Oporto.

Cast: Isa Condo-Olvera (Aurelia), Bella Maldonado (Yahritza/Mapimi), Phi Hamens Nelson (Alejandro), Samuel Osborn-Huerta (Juliana), Reyna Rios (Susana), Lucia Salazar-Davison (Alessandra). Actors in film sequences: Keller Flors, Veronica Garcia, Gigi Picota, Carla Solari.