An interstate can make a place look interchangeable: exits, gas, another strip of asphalt. Leonard Madrid’s Cebollas refuses that view of I-25. Three Chicana sisters carry a dead body from Albuquerque toward Denver, a premise ridiculous enough to propel a comedy and precise enough to put New Mexico’s geography at its center. The towns on their route are specific to northern New Mexico and Colorado; the trip cannot be relocated to any anonymous highway without losing its shape. Their names make the trip legible to people who know this corridor and remind everyone else that the Southwest is lived in, not merely driven through.
The Denver Center for the Performing Arts presented the world premiere from January 26 to March 10, 2024, directed by Jerry Ruiz. It developed from a 2022 Colorado New Play Summit reading. Madrid has described his own work as Latino, Chicano, or “Brown Theatre,” and says he grew up in Portales, New Mexico. He has also said family and town mythologies animate his plays. Cebollas uses those materials without requiring the sisters to serve as cultural guides. They argue, sing, remember, and improvise a solution to a very bad logistical problem.
The body is an absurd object that cannot be wished away. It forces the sisters into one car, where every avoided conversation has too much time to return. The Denver Center says they reflect on shared history and their daughters’ futures. That is a sharper family drama than a generic reunion: the women are dealing with what they inherited and what they might pass on, while transporting a physical reminder that time does not pause for anyone’s emotional readiness.
Madrid told the Denver Center that the play is intentionally about sisterhood and how far people go to protect those they love. That aim does not make the women saints. Bickering belongs in a story about care because intimacy does not erase grievance. The road-trip comedy gives their irritation room to breathe without treating it as evidence that the bonds are weak. Even the title, Spanish for onions, suggests layers and tears; the joke works because the family keeps revealing another surface underneath the last one.
Regional theater often speaks of “local stories” as though locality were a small ambition. A New Mexican playwright writing Chicana sisters along I-25 is doing the opposite of shrinking the frame. He makes a route usually dismissed as flyover territory carry specific speech, obligation, and memory. Cebollas makes the highway a family archive. The sisters cannot leave their history at the last exit; comedy keeps them together long enough to argue over what it means.