No one knows what happened to Julia de Borgos, the Puerto Rican poet, in the last nine days of her life. The Flamboyán Theatre is examining her life in its debut play.We're in the midst of our summer membership campaign, and we have until August 25 to raise $14,500. Your contributions are an investment in our election coverage – they help sustain our newsroom, help us plan, and could lead to an increase in freelance writers or photographers.
This isn't the first time Marcantoni has mined his Puerto Rican family heritage to tell a story. His first play was, which enjoyed a successful run at the Bug Theatre in 2022. While Marcantoni was born in Philadelphia, his mother and father were born in San Juan in the same hospital. His family moved a lot: California, Maryland, Georgia, North Carolina — and the constant through all that change was his abuela's house in Fajardo, Puerto Rico.
While he knew a bit about Julia de Burgos when he decided to write a play about her, Marcantoni learned a lot more during his research."I didn't know about the circumstances surrounding her death, for example," he says."To this day, no one knows what happened to her in the last nine days of her life."