Boy Santos

An older Puerto Rican man, Charlie Santos, forced to walk home after a train malfunction, encounters a dangling red door, hanging precipitously from the entrance of an abandoned building, that immediately reawakens memories of his impoverished childhood in Spanish Harlem, 1962. The memories are brought into focus by a Narrator and revolve around Charlie’s quest to discover the cause of his infant brother’s death. Tracing events that unfold about him on the stage, he relives the quaint, curious, downtrodden and sometimes tragic circumstances in which he and his older brother, Daniel, were abandoned by their heroin-addicted father, Hector, and raised by their single mother, Maria, who tried to make a decent life for them. Convinced that one particularly traumatizing incident experienced by his pregnant mother may have caused the death of his baby brother, Charlie is forced to retrace a series of events, backwards and forwards, all circumscribed by extreme poverty and dysfunction, that seem to blend innocence, guilt and crucial necessity into a fateful concoction of unavoidable reality. In the process of recovering his suppressed past, a poignant picture is painted of life in the worn-down tenements of Spanish Harlem of the early 60’s. The ways children played, the ways grownups interacted, the ways junkies insinuated themselves into every aspect of street and home life, are enacted on the stage in both general and stark detail. Charlie must come to terms with what his memories reveal and somehow make peace with a period in his life that answers old questions as it raises new ones.