Directed by Martin Balmaceda

Scenic, Costume, and Props Designer: Arely Garcia

Lighting Designer: Julian Rodriguez

Sound Designer: Sean Maguire

La Gorda - A Research Project

In late 2025, former professor of mine, Martin Balmaceda, asked me to be the scenic and costume designer for his upcoming project titled La Gorda. La Gorda, meaning “The Fat Woman” in spanish, was a show focused on an exploration of our body politics/identity, and how it is tied to the way we are perceived and treated as a result.

La Gorda, written originally in Spanish by Chilean playwright Ramón Griffero, is a short one-act play of a young woman named Loreto, nicknamed “La Gorda”, as she navigates her crush on her local lifeguard. Loreto struggles with the idea of finding herself beautiful, mostly due to being a plus sized woman. She also takes care of her party girl conventionally attractive sister, only referred to in the script as “La Pancha. La Gorda begins writing letters to the lifeguard as a way to work through her feelings, but dies before she is able to get her final letter to him.

For this particular production, the playwright, Ramón Griffero, wrote a prologue that introduced 4 additional characters. The prologue focused on human identity, what we do as a species to cope with our idea of belonging and the possibility of a higher purpose than just living day to day. It also set up the framework for La Gorda, which heavily mixed the character’s reality and inner fantasies, leaving the audience up to interpret what exactly was reality or part of the fantasy that Loreto had created.