Romero

When I first read Xiomara Cornejo’s Romero, I knew the design had to hold more than history; it had to hold ghosts. Set in the final hours of Archbishop Óscar Romero’s life, the play bends time and invites the dead to speak. It is not realism. It is ritual.

The scenic world emerged from the tension between sacredness and rupture. At the center stood a cruciform arch, part cathedral and part memory portal. Below it, a fractured platform and a textured black floor marked with five-point stars anchored the action in both earth and spirit.

The play’s nonlinear structure demanded a space that could shift between a beach, a church, a war zone, and the afterlife without literal transitions. Projection surfaces echoed the altar at Hospital de la Divina Providencia, while lighting and media traced the line between past and present.

Lil Lamberta’s masks and oversized figures break the surface of realism, while Cherie Sampson’s projections keep each moment anchored in living memory. The design welcomes those interruptions instead of smoothing them over, so shifts in tone, time, and identity can land with real force.

Romero is larger than a single life. The space had to hold a nation in spiritual reckoning, which meant listening closely, leaving room for silence, and letting the room carry witness as much as image.