"Marisol," a play written by Jose Rivera, is the play I enjoyed reading the most this semester. Rivera, one of the leading contemporary Latin American playwrights, writes with impressive imagery. After reading "Marisol," I came away with a very specific picture of what Rivera had in mind. He easily combines the realistic moments of life, the dangers of the Bronx, dealing with an emotionally unstable young man, Lenny, and the friendships developed with those we work with. Marisol has elements of pure theology where Rivera's own possible musings are written into his characters. These elements include the appearance of Marisol's guardian angel in Marisol's dreams, the threat to Marisol's life in the form of a woman turned to a pile of salt, and the smoke from a fire in Ohio blocking the sun in New York City. These all occur in the first act before the War of the Heavens begins.
             This play was written in the early nineties, and revised and copyrighted in 1999. Rivera was very specific in his stage directions and overall views of the design and production of the play in order to facilitate his image. These stage directions and other designs should be followed by the people producing his play in order to produce the image the play means to impart to the audience. He poises a gold crown, suspended in the air over the set, over the actors, over all of his creation, signifying God. But this crown, this God, remains motionless, remains detached from all the proceedings. To support his unnervingly imminently apocalyptic world, the mundanities that we would take for granted that are missing from Marisol's world, like the moon and the extinction of coffee, are dropped to the audience in a conversation between June, a co-worker, and Marisol's best friend, and Marisol at work(Rivera 22-23). To accomplish the subtlety of unnerving the audience, Rivera gives a perfect office building; two desks, a radio, books, papers, the New York Post (Rive...