On the eve of a citywide ICE action, the people in Fandango for Butterflies (and Coyotes) gather in a New York community center. They have reasons to be afraid of leaving even for an ordinary errand. Yet they choose to make music and dance together. Andrea Thome’s play is inspired by interviews with undocumented Latin American immigrants living in the city, according to La MaMa’s production record. The premise makes a gathering more than a symbol of hope: it is something people organize while a threat is still present.
En Garde Arts produced the work at La MaMa in February 2020. La MaMa credits José Zayas as director and Sinuhé Padilla with original music, along with a detailed design, choreography, translation, stage-management, and performance team. A later La MaMa program identifies the project as created by an all-Latinx central creative team and records subsequent presentations at Penn State, the University of Maryland, and La Jolla Playhouse. These credits locate authorship in the people who made the event possible, while keeping the interviewees’ stories distinct from the fictional event onstage.
A fandango has a social shape: people arrive, sound is made, and participation changes the room. For an interview-based play, that form can hold different experiences without forcing them into one narrator’s account. Someone’s fear for family abroad and another person’s fear of the street outside may coexist. Music gives them a shared action in the present. It cannot remove the agents they fear, but it can let the group decide how to spend a night that others have made uncertain.
The production history raises a second question about audience. A run in a Manhattan theater and later engagements at universities and regional venues do not reach the same communities in the same way. Each presenter decides who can afford a ticket, travel to the site, and recognize the material as close to their life. The company’s later benefit concert for Make the Road New York connected the cast to an immigrant and working-class organizing group. That event did not make the play a substitute for organizing; it gave its artists another public occasion to support it.
The interview basis creates an obligation for the artists: distinct accounts must have room inside a common theatrical event. Thome chooses a collective gathering rather than a sequence of isolated confessions as the frame. The characters have no assurance that tomorrow will be safer. The fandango is their way of taking charge of this hour, together, while the risk remains outside the door.