"Swimming While Drowning" Offers Unique Narrative About Struggle and Identity

“Swimming While Drowning” is a Cara Mía Theatre Co. production at Dallas’ Latino Cultural Center.

What would you do if you were drowning? Would you just allow yourself to drown or attempt to swim while drowning?

Swimming While Drowning is the brilliant Cara Mía Theatre Co. production currently presented at Dallas’ Latino Cultural Center. Writer Emilio Rodriguez has penned a stage play that leaves much healthy assumption to be made about both place and identity.

Angelo, played by Dominic Pecikonis and Mila, played by J Davis-Jones are both teenagers without homes and both in the midst of self-discovery. While Angelo is the kindhearted dreamer - Mila is the snappy, streetwise hustler. The two find themselves together in an LGBTQ shelter for homeless teenagers. They feud, they mock one another, and they question the other’s existence in such a shelter. And in the most authentic fashion possible – they develop a need for one another.

The stage is simplistic in design – a room atop a wooden platform. Positioned around the platform are imaginative sculptures. The shared space serves as a place for the two teens to hide, to implode, to reveal and to question. At times, each will step to the forefront of the platform – Mila rapping, Angelo offering thoughts through spoken word.

The two teenagers are struggling with more than just their sexual identity, but also race and the suitable place for masculinity. They disagree about who gets to use the “n-word.” Angelo says explicitly “some Puerto Ricans have a little black in them.” Mila raps about “looking for the boy that I’m trying to free.”

Angelo and Mila were originally written as gay, male and persons of color. For the Dallas production, Director Jorge B. Merced made Mila transgender. The switch is both timely and needed, as it sheds light on challenges that trans people in Dallas have recently experienced and opens the conversation about just how susceptible they are to violence.

Most impressive about Swimming While Drowning is how effectively Rodriguez presents both Mila and Angelo as struggling teenagers, without ever truly revealing their sexual identities. Instead of homosexual male or homosexual female, they are innocently presented as young people with a history of mistreatment and rightful frustration. They are humans first.

Perhaps audiences will ponder both Mila and Angelo’s identities, but they are intrinsically led to hear their voices first.

Swimming While Drowning will be presented through Dec. 15 at the Latino Cultural Center.