INTAR Theatre, New York City’s oldest Latine theater company, has built its 2026-2027 season around two world premieres: Blanca and Inés, a 1950s Greenwich Village love story by Cusi Cram, in February, and I Hope This Letter Reaches Mictlān by Amalia Oliva Rojas in the spring. Before either, a three-night workshop of The Palacios Sisters, Cristina García’s Miami reworking of Chekhov, opens the year in November.
Blanca and Inés begins previews on January 30, 2027, opens on February 7 and plays a limited run through February 28. It is directed by Laurie Woolery, the Obie-winning director who ran The Public Theater’s Public Works program for more than a decade, and INTAR presents it with two community partners, LAByrinth Theater Company and The Sol Project.
The play starts at a party in Greenwich Village in 1954, where two young Latina women catch each other’s eye. Blanca is a bartender and painter who has had enough of scraping by; Inés is a Cuban seamstress with big ambitions and no interest in caution. What grows between them is part apprenticeship, part rivalry and part affair, carried on through cold-water apartments, studios and bars at the moment postwar American art was being made. INTAR calls it “an unsentimental love story about two women who want more than the world thinks they should.” Cram is a member of LAByrinth, and her Novenas for a Lost Hospital premiered at Rattlestick with Kathleen Chalfant.
I Hope This Letter Reaches Mictlān, the season’s second world premiere, follows in spring 2027; dates have not been announced. Its central character, Sarai, cannot accept the death of her twin brother, Saul, and sets out to reach him in Mictlān, the Aztec underworld, whose rules forbid the living from interfering. The play pictures an immigration office somewhere between heaven and hell, facing a black lagoon. Oliva Rojas is a Mexican poet and performer based in New York; her earlier play How to Melt ICE won the Latin American Theater Award for Outstanding Playwriting.
The season opens with The Palacios Sisters on November 20, 21 and 22, 2026, as this year’s UNIT52 workshop production. García, the novelist behind Dreaming in Cuban, wrote and adapted the script and conceived it with director Adrián Alea, whose staging of Las Hermanas Palacios at GALA Hispanic Theatre earned him a Helen Hayes nomination. Chekhov’s Three Sisters moves to Miami in 1985: the young ballerina Irinita, just arrived from Havana, joins her sisters Olga and María and their pianist brother Andrés in a city shaken by drug wars, violence and the spread of AIDS.
The ensemble is drawn from UNIT52 alumni: Christopher Aldea, Kiara Alejandra, Pedro González, Kathleen Guerrero, Derrick Karg-Zamudio, Victoria Lino, Rula A. Muñoz, Lilian Rebelo, Orlando Rivera and Alessandra Ruiz.
UNIT52 itself starts its next cycle in February. INTAR set up the free 12-week program for non-union Latine actors in response to how few Latine performers belonged to Actors’ Equity, and it is taught by INTAR legacy artists; the current teaching artist, Nancy Rodriguez, leads a course on heightened language with a focus on plays by Latine writers.
Off stage, playwright Julissa Contreras, a Dominican writer from the Bronx and a Folger Shakespeare Library commissioned playwright, is the company’s new board chair, and producer William Fernandez, whose Broadway co-producing credits include The Inheritance and Mrs. Doubtfire, has joined the board.
Casting and creative teams for the rest of the season will follow. All performances are at INTAR Theatre, 500 West 52nd Street in Hell’s Kitchen, and further details are on the company’s official website.
