Review: ‘Empanada Loca’: A Tough Life and a Special Ingredient

Daphne Rubin-Vega’s bewitching beauty seems to transform in “Empanada Loca,” an exuberantly macabre solo show written and directed by Aaron Mark for the Labyrinth Theater Company. As you watch her strip away the layers of her character’s apparent normality to reveal a woman who can placidly discuss the most gruesome acts imaginable, Ms. Rubin-Vega seems to take on a furtive, almost feral quality that had me shivering all the way home.

The play is set in the lower depths of New York, in an abandoned subway tunnel where a few desperate souls live in an eternal night. Ms. Rubin-Vega nimbly portrays several characters, but her primary role is that of Dolores, whose last remaining worldly possession appears to be the massage table on which she perches for much of the evening as she regales us with the downward spiral of her life. (The set design, by David Meyer, and Bradley King’s crepuscular lighting help set the goose-pimply tone.)

Dolores’s speech is street-tough and her manner may be even tougher, but she tells us early on that she was once a college student studying urban planning. The daughter of a female cop who was shot and killed during a drug bust, she notes with a savage humor how her own early life took a sharp wrong turn: At 21 she fell in love with a drug dealer, Dominic, and moved in with him after she found her father — a doorman who’d descended into alcoholism after his wife’s killing — dead on the floor of their apartment, having choked on his own vomit.

Mr. Mark certainly doesn’t spare us many grim details. Dad’s ugly death comes to seem a comparatively benign incident in Dolores’s experience, which includes a 13-year stint in prison after she’s arrested for drug dealing and assaulting a police officer.

But it’s only when Dolores emerges from prison and begins to put together a new life that “Empanada Loca” gets truly chilling. What’s most eerie is the matter-of-fact manner in which Dolores describes the grisly series of events that turned her into an accomplice in an impromptu scheme for providing fresh meat to the empanada shop of the title, located in the apartment building where she comes to settle.

Do I need to hint at what kind of meat the shop begins to stuff into those empanadas? Well, it’s not a spoiler since the program says, “Inspired by the legend of Sweeney Todd.” In short, Dolores becomes a Mrs. Lovett of Washington Heights, coolly dispatching the occasional customer — she begins working as a masseuse, having picked up the skill in prison — for the restaurant owned by Luis, the son of the man who owned the shop when Dolores used to hang out there.