A woman walks into a Wall Street office with a plan to kill the seven members of Puerto Rico’s oversight board. That is the provocation in Mara Vélez Meléndez’s Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members. The playwright does not give Lolita a plain political hearing. She gives her a receptionist with a performance to put on. A room built to receive visitors becomes a drag stage, and a bureaucratic title becomes something that can be spoken aloud, exaggerated and challenged.
The play was first presented in New York by Soho Rep and The Sol Project in 2022. Yale Repertory Theatre staged a later production from April 25 through May 17, 2025, directed by Javier Antonio González. Yale’s production record identifies Lolita as a young Boricua trans woman and describes the work as an existential drag extravaganza aimed at unelected officials and the people who appoint them. Vélez Meléndez, Yale notes, was born and raised in Puerto Rico. The conflict belongs to a particular island and to a protagonist whose own autonomy is continually contested.
The oversized title is part of the argument. “Oversight,” “management” and “economic stability” sound like neutral administrative virtues. In the play’s frame, they belong to an institution that claims authority over people who did not select its members. Soho Rep described its original staging as using drag to confront colonial control and the limits placed on individual lives. Drag is an apt form for that question because it reveals how authority is costumed. A suit, a title and a polished office can perform legitimacy as deliberately as any sequined gown.
Lolita’s violent mission is a fictional dramatic premise, not a proposed remedy. Treating the work as a policy prescription would flatten its theatrical intelligence. The receptionist interrupts the straight line from grievance to revenge. Performance opens a second question: if the board’s power depends on making its decisions appear inevitable, can a show make those decisions look constructed, contestable and absurd? The play puts bodily autonomy beside fiscal control because both involve someone else claiming the right to decide for another person.
The receptionist is an especially pointed obstacle. An office routes the public through people who can admit, delay or redirect them. Here that routing becomes a performance that disrupts Lolita’s plan. Her demand for access cannot remain a simple trip through a doorway. Theater lets the waiting room become the place where authority is exposed, rather than a delay before the important action begins.
The play’s wager is that a boardroom is already theater. Officials enter, recite their roles and ask the public to accept the script. Vélez Meléndez answers with a form that refuses to behave, bringing glitter, anger and theatrical risk into a room designed to keep decisions tidy. Its title may be unwieldy, but its target is precise: the false calm of power exercised at a distance.