Chicago Tribune
- Recommended
"...Saracho has a comedy writer’s incisiveness and irreverence—the Puerto Ricans of Division Street get all kinds of ribbing here—but you also sense her affection for the underdog. Next season, Saracho will adapt Sandra Cisneros’ “The House on Mango Street” for Steppenwolf for Young Adults. I can’t wait. Saracho has the ability and comedic disposition to be a great Chicago writer—someone who could capture the faces of the city in a way that you’d want to read about them. Maybe she’ll grow into a kind of Mexican-American Nelson Algren. I hope so."
Chicago Reader
- Recommended
"...The details of the monologues are perfect, with the pauses and dropped sentences, the abrupt shifts and idiolects of real talk—so perfect that I kept wondering whether they’d been taken verbatim from the interviews. Saracho and director Sandra Marquez are both veteran actors, and their love of creating real people onstage, down to the smallest nuance, carries over to the cast, who seem like they could’ve been pulled in off the street."
Examiner
- Highly Recommended
"...Directed by Sandra Marquez, the 90-minute production also manages to transcend the bumbling human condition. In this docudrama of an urban altar, there’s a glimmer of something arching above and among the people who come to pray and gape and scoff and mock the image by the highway. The devil, so conventional wisdom has it, is in the details. But in Our Lady of the Underpass, it’s something on the other end of the spiritual spectrum. Something that defies the endless mundane tragedies of the everyday and hovers, defiant and hopeful, between the asphalt and the eternal."
Time Out Chicago
- Recommended
"...Enterprising playwright Saracho seized the low-hanging fruit of the situation and conducted on-the-scene interviews with several believers and skeptics who found themselves equally drawn to the intersection. And although this resulting monologue play feels neither as fully developed a theater piece nor as diverse a Chicago cross section as you’re craving, Saracho, the fearless solo artist whose Latina-based troupe, Teatro Luna, has given the Chicago performance scene some of its strongest perspective in recent years, still demonstrates her hand at captivating an audience with a first-person narrative."
ChicagoCritic
- Recommended
"...Tanya Sarocho’s original new work, Our Lady of the Underpass, is an artistic piece that is touching and very funny. Based on interviews with people who were attracted to an alleged apparition of the Virgin Mary that appeared under the Fullerton overpass in 2005, Our Lady of the Underpass provides sharp insight into universal human need."
Chicago Stage and Screen
- Highly Recommended
"...Each story is real and will make you think. Even though the subject matter would not lead you to think of this as a comedy, it is. There are laughs galore from the beginning to the end, but with some dark and sad notes to the lives of these people. After all, they are all in search of something to make their lives better and more complete and Saracho captures this with just the right touch. No matter your ethnicity, Hispanic, Polish or American, no matter if you are a Catholic or not, you will find yourself feeling what these people felt and seeing that you yourself have some missing pieces in your own life's puzzle."
