Julián Mesri is a New York-based Argentinean-American playwright and composer who makes multilingual plays and musicals in the US and around the world. He is the co-adaptor and composer/lyricist for the Mobile Unit bilingual production of the Drama Desk nominated and LATA award winning Comedy of Errors at the Public, as well as Much Ado About Nothing, premiering this summer. His play, The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics premiered as part of Intar’s 2025 season. He is currently the Judith Champion Musical Theater Launchpad Resident at Signature Theater and a Core Writer at the Playwrights Center. Other work includes composing the live score of Henry 6 at The Old Globe, directing/arranging Songs About Trains with Radical Evolution, music directing and co-orchestrating Brian Quijada’s Somewhere Over the Border (Syracuse Stage, Geva Theater). He has been a member of the Public Theater Emerging Writer’s Group, a Dramatist Guild Fellow, an Emerging Artist of Color Fellow and Usual Suspect at NYTW, and a Van Lier fellow at Repertorio Español. He received his MFA in Playwriting from Columbia University.
Free
Monday, September 30 at 7:00 p.m. Tuesday, October 1 at 7:00 p.m. In-person reading at Playwrights' Center
John C. Dulk, the vice president of Cantilever, a multinational corporation that specializes in everything from sandals to cigarettes, moves with his family to Buenos Cruces. Here in a village nestled deep in the tropics of an unnamed Latin-American country, the locals begin developing mysterious ailments, while John’s family falls both in love with and victim to the novel, magic, and often haunted new world they inhabit.
A wildly theatrical send up of magical realism, The Irrepressible Magic of the Tropics is at once a farcical romp through Latin American history and literature and a critical exploration of capitalism, colonialism and US-led economic imperialism.
Tropics began as a response to the overuse of the phrase “magic realism” and my feeling that the realism part is under examined. The realism expresses a historical moment when Latin-American countries were dealing with the influence of multinational corporations and the United States’ economic imperialist policies, so the satire of the piece is inspired by the reality of exploitation. I am excited to think through design and costume challenges and about how to continue to push the piece’s high theatricality within its independent, Latin-American poor theater (teatro independiente) aesthetic.
This reading will be recorded and made available to view online October 21–27. You can sign up to watch that recording here.
Having trouble signing up? Please email rsvp@pwcenter.org.
If you are making a reservation for more than 6 people, please email rsvp@pwcenter.org to arrange. If you make a reservation for more than 6, a member of our Advancement team may be in touch closer to the reading date to confirm final numbers for your group.
Julián Mesri
