Kathleen Culebro
Title of Play
Dolores, Who Now Knows Everything
Director
Evan Michael Woods
Date and Place of Reading
June 29, 2026
Pearl Studios, New York City
How to Access the Play
Email kathleenculebro@me.com or visit New Play Exchange.
Cast
Christine Carmela–Stage Directions
Dan Domingues–Padre Justino
Liza Fernandez–Dolores
Omar Lopez-Cepero–Santiago
Sol Miranda–Hermana Concepción
Casterline Villar–Matilde
About the Playwright
Kathleen Culebro is a Mexican playwright whose work is steeped in her cultural roots. Her produced works include A Leopard Complains of Its Spots, La Llorona, Smart Pretty Funny, and The Amazing, Fabulous, and Spectacular Untruths of Juan Garcia—a semifinalist for the 2024 O’Neill National Playwrights Conference. Kathleen’s most recent play, Dolores, Who Now Knows Everything, has been developed at the Sin Muros Festival at Stages Theatre in Houston and is the recipient of the
2026 New Voices, New Plays, New York award from Broad Horizons Theatre Company. Her plays have been produced across the United States and abroad, leading The New York Times to describe her as “clearly a writer of promise.” Recent commissions include Still No Exit for Bishop Arts Theatre Center in Dallas and a Texas-themed Sleeping Beauty for the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra.
About the Play
In this boisterous farce, the inhabitants of a small, isolated village in 19th-century Mexico yearn to escape from the tedious routine of their meaningless lives. The village priest, Padre Justino, longs for a promotion to join the high-ranking church fathers in Rome where he can wear robes of the deepest and most eye-catching red reserved only for cardinals. Matilde, an ambitious woman who fears she may soon become a spinster, yearns to have attractive and wealthy Santiago for herself, even if it means poisoning his wife, Dolores. Well-meaning but bored Santiago falls prey to Matilde's sexual overtures. And what would a long-suffering nun like Hermana Concepción do to escape the convent-slash-insane-asylum-slash-home-for-unwed-mothers where she is trapped doing what she can to care for its various occupants?
These yearnings are unleashed one day when Matilde, unable to deny herself any longer, moves ahead with her plans to poison Dolores. To save his wife from death, Santiago makes a desperate bargain with God, promising never to look upon Matilde again and to devote himself fully to Dolores, if God will only make her well.
Apparently, God agrees to the bargain. Dolores revives, but quite changed. She returns to the living with extraordinary knowledge in that she can cure illnesses, repair anything, and even recall every human accomplishment across time, including the future. Perhaps, too, she can bring meaning into the tedious lives of her fellow villagers.
The raucous action of the play succeeds in skewering hypocrisy, both institutional and individual; exposing corruption and oppression inherent in colonial politics and religion; and making buffoons of human beings who, even when given an opportunity to do so, cannot bring themselves to examine their own lives, let alone improve them. By the end of the play, only Matilde–perhaps the least deserving of all–is devious and daring enough to escape death and live a life of some meaning. What does this say about human capacity for change and growth? For that matter, what is a meaningful life anyway?