December 3–6, 2015

Leeds Theatre

Written and Directed by Nikteha Salazar ’16

We are all born with a bruise or two.
A mark of our roots.
For some of us they fade, for some of us they stay.
But we are all born with them.

—The Red Paint, prologue

Brown University Theatre presented The Red Paint, written and directed by Nikteha Salazar ’16. This new one-act play transcends time and space in an effort to explore the Chicano experience over many generations.

The Red Paint is about breaking cycles of violence. The play centers on Xochitl, a young woman who seeks to understand her father and in the process learns her own history. Her father tells the story of her family and is proud, until she begins to ask where her sorrow, her anger, and her shame come from. Enraged, the father turns on his daughter. His anger emerges from his own shame, a shame that makes him confront a past that is filled with brutality, violence, and pain. Xochitl realizes this is her inheritance. Flowers are born out of pots. The world ends. The cycle stops. And then it doesn’t.

The Red Paint was the annual Senior Slot show at Brown University Theatre for 2015. The Senior Slot show is reserved for a production proposed by a Brown undergraduate senior student. Structured cyclically, moving between 1954 and the present, The Red Paint opens up a way to healing through poetic language and stirring imagery.