The Café Royal Cultural Foundation NYC has awarded a 2022 Summer Performance Grant to Javier Antonio González for the 2023 production of the original play, “Zoetrope.”

Javier Antonio González is a playwright, director, and filmmaker originally from Vega Baja, Puerto Rico and the founding artistic director of the bilingual experimental ensemble Caborca. Zoetrope, an original play in English and Spanish takes place in Lares, 1951. Inés and Severino are in love. In less than a year they’ll be married and he will die in New York in the arms of another woman. A generation later, their son will reenact his father’s affair for an experimental film. Throughout all, Puerto Rico will remain a colony, as it is today. Zoetrope is a playfully polyphonic work with dance theatre and live-feed video about a leftist working class family on an archipelago without political agency.

Zoetrope was first performed in the Bronx in 2015, several years before Puerto Rico defaulted on its debt, endured draconian austerity measures from a US-imposed fiscal oversight board and unspeakable devastation from Hurricane Maria, and deposed its governor by popular protest. In the Fall of 2023, Zoetrope will return to a radically altered world for an extended run at New York’s celebrated Abrons Arts Center. This production is mounted in a Lower East Side district central to the Puerto Rican diaspora, where the moment is ripe for a reckoning with a century of colonial history.

Critic Helen Shaw called Zoetrope “huge, byzantine, adventurous, stylishly staged and forcefully political.” American Theatre called it an “anthem for revolution” and an “absorbing and beautifully enacted saga.”

As the founding artistic director of Caborca, Javier Antonio González, along with the company, has created more than a dozen productions including original plays Lying Lydia; Distant Star (adapted from Roberto Bolaño's novel); Zoetrope; Open up, Hadrian; Barceloneta, de noche; and FLORIDITA, my Love; feature film The Entitlement; devised works TIMING and el correo de la noche; and adaptations of Shakespeare, Calderón, and Arístides Vargas. Javier’s work has been presented in multiple cities through the US, Puerto Rico, and Cuba, as well as in Bogotá and London. In 2016, they directed their original translation of A Midsummer Night's Dream in San Juan, Puerto Rico for Teatro en el Parque. Their plays have been published in the anthologies Encuentro: Latinx Performance for the New American Theater (Northwestern University Press), Plays and Playwrights 2011 (New York Theatre Experience), and in the journals Revista Conjunto (Casa de las Americas, Havana) and The Puerto Rico Review. Javier holds a BA from the University of Puerto Rico and an MFA from Columbia University School of the Arts. They were a Van Lier Directing Fellow, a member of the Public Theater’s Emerging Writers Group and a recipient of the Global Connections–In the Lab grant from Theatre Communications Group. They have taught at DreamYard Prep, LaGuardia Community College, and most recently they directed Electra at Barnard College and The Lower Depths at NYU. A critic described Javier as “one of our only [US] playwrights actually writing in the epic form,” and another wrote that “power, language, and even time and space are subject to continuous interrogation and radical reassessment in Caborca’s dramatic cosmos.”

Please visit Javier Antonio’s Instagram for more information.