Julia is Chicago born and raised, but Connor - a well-off white boy from Evanston - still wants to know on their first meeting where she’s “ from from” (a question that elicited groans from teenagers in the audience at Saturday’s opening performance). Sánchez and Gómez adeptly capture the sense of dual identity that many first-generation children of immigrants can feel. In one moment that may feel familiar to fans of the TV series “Fleabag,” Connor even calls Julia out on this dissociation, which she chalks up to her writerly tendencies - she’s always observing herself, crafting her own story as she goes.
Julia frequently steps outside of her present moment, even in the middle of her first kiss with Connor (Harrison Weger), to dish with the audience. Gómez retains the novel’s first-person point of view, allowing Julia (Karen Rodriguez) to narrate her own story as she works through her own grief while also dealing with school, college applications and her first boyfriend. (Gómez’s “The Leopard Play, or sad songs for lost boys,” a deeply personal work about sexuality and Latino masculinity, is playing at Edgewater’s Steep Theatre through March 14.) For “Perfect Mexican Daughter,” the adapter is Isaac Gómez, a rising local talent with his own strong perspective on Mexican familial expectations.
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