Julio Torres would like to design a hotel. Or a lake house. He has plans for a sand castle competition and a coffee-table book that may also be a pop-up book. Once between takes for “Problemista,” the 2024 film that he wrote, directed and starred in, his co-star Tilda Swinton grabbed his hand and whispered that they should conceptualize a theme park. Martine Gutierrez, a performance artist and close collaborator on the deranged television comedy he created, “Fantasmas,” thinks that he should run for governor. It’s possible.
A former writer for “Saturday Night Live,” a standout on the dreamy, bizarro TV show “Los Espookys,” a children’s book author, an indelible late-night guest and a stand-up comedian who often sits down, Torres always seems to be adding more hyphens to what is already an impressively multihyphenate life.
On Sept. 3, he will add two more — monologuist and playwright — when his first Off Broadway play, “Color Theories,” begins performances at Performance Space New York. If “Color Theories” is not perhaps his most personal work (that honor likely goes to “Fantasmas”), it is a pristine distillation of his coolly absurdist approach and his commitment to aesthetic experiment.
“Can colors be theatrical?” Torres mused. “We’ll find out.”
I met Torres, 38, on a July afternoon, at his studio in the Greenpoint neighborhood of Brooklyn. He wanted a studio, he said, mostly so that he could decorate it. For a long time, his favorite color was clear. “It’s still something that innately calls to me because there’s something very soothing about it,” he said. Consequently a lot of the furniture was see-through. There was also a swirly lamp, a red desk, several narrow chairs built to look like chess pieces. The vibe was loosely Italianate — Art Deco via the 1980s. Many of the surfaces looked like they would be great for doing cocaine. On a teal table was a boxed-up robot, and there were several teetering stacks of coffee-table books, most focused on fashion and interior design.
“You can tell that his daydreaming is strong,” Tommaso Ortino, the set designer for “Color Theories,” had told me on the phone the day before. I could!
Daydreams are important to Torres. As are aesthetics. His surroundings, his wardrobe, his conduct of life all seem related to his artistic practice. In person, he is elegant, precise, with a desert-dry deadpan. With him, everything is a joke. Or maybe nothing is. It’s hard to tell. That afternoon, he had accessorized his summery shorts-and-shirt outfit with a necklace with the charm of a grandfather clock. He opened the front of the clock. A metal mouse peeped out. The mouse worked the clock, he reasoned.
Born in San Salvador, El Salvador, Torres moved to New York City in his early 20s to study literature at the New School. He found a job as an archivist, trading his student visa for a work visa. In 2016, he was hired to write for “Saturday Night Live.” And three years later, he received a green card recognizing his status as an alien of extraordinary ability, which feels unusually right. (Visa trauma is a subject of both “Problemista” and “Fantasmas.”) There is something otherworldly about him, an sleek, elfin outsiderishness. He knows this. His Instagram handle is @spaceprincejulio.
“He’s on the outside, but you want to be outside with him,” said the writer and comedian Fred Armisen, who later found a role for Torres in the bilingual HBO show “Los Espookys.” “It’s not like, oh, poor weird guy. It’s like, that’s where I want to travel to, that planet.”
Jeremy Beiler, who often wrote with Torres on “Saturday Night Live” (their teamwork includes the flawless commercial parody “Wells for Boys”), observed this, too. “He has this really refined observational sense of the world,” Beiler said. “You feel a bit like you’re entering his world when you talk to him.”
On “Saturday Night Live,” Torres created one sketch about a sink and two about font choices. His dream sketch, which never aired, was about a janitor at the Metropolitan Opera who falls in love with a chandelier. If these sketches were surreal, there was also a gravitas to them, a melancholic sense of longing. “Pure art,” is how Armisen put it.
“Saturday Night Live,” which is filmed live, is a little like theater, as is “The Tonight Show,” where Torres made guest appearances as a Halloween costume and Christmas gift correspondent. Torres’s first comedy special, “My Favorite Shapes,” was even more theatrical. The 2019 HBO special was filmed live during a two-show night at the Cherry Lane Theater. Which seemed like a waste.
“Walking away from that and looking back at that show, that beautiful set that we built, I kept thinking, What a shame that this only existed for literally one night,” Torres said. So he began to think about a show that would last longer, though not too long, as he believes he lacks the stamina. (“Color Theories” has a limited run.)
He was keen to explore theater, in part because he claims to know very little about theater and nothing about how to make it. But he didn’t know how to make a movie before he made “Problemista,” or a TV show before he created “Fantasmas.” And this is the kind of challenge he deliberately pursues. He never wants to become too comfortable, too knowing. “Every time I experiment with a new medium, which is what this is, I feel like an outsider in that medium,” he said.
“I’m excited by finding new places to play,” he continued. He also said that he was keen to learn to use his body in a different way, which he described, somewhat creepily, as “being in contact with my human vessel.”
Having done a show about shapes, colors was a logical next step. (An early draft of the script also included some letter-based content, including Torres’s long-held opinion that Q should go later in the alphabet.) Torres has always had strong, specific takes on colors. “Like I realized the other day that the only reason I bank at a bank is because it’s green,” he said. He also mentioned that he has recently become comfortable “with the richness of purple.” Ortino, his set designer, had told me that Torres has prejudices against yellow and navy blue, which meant that I had to change my interview outfit.
During the coronavirus pandemic, Torres made a few posts in which he assigned sounds and facial expressions to different colors, material he repurposed in “Fantasmas.” He also played with these ideas in his stand-up routines. Color helps him to understand the world — “not unlike the way that people use astrology,” he said.
And “Color Theories” is a working out of this idea, with particular colors described, though he warns the audience that he may not get to every shade. “If your color does get mentioned, please celebrate quietly to yourself so as not to make the person next to you jealous,” a line in a provisional version of the “Color Theories” script read.
That script was largely built from notes and drawings that Torres had made in a sketchbook. “The first and longest part of the process and the most joyful part of the process is opening a sketchbook and just scribbling, seeing what goes with what,” he said. He let me flip through it. There were childlike drawings of colors and shapes (a squiggle, a sunburst) and mysterious lists of words, written at all angles: “speakeasy,” “dolphin,” “electoral college,” “piñata.” For purple, a sublist read: “mystery,” “lilac,” “stepmom.” This would, somehow, become comedy.
He hopes that the set for “Color Theories” will resemble a sketchbook, which will open beneath and behind and around Torres, and that the onstage stagehands will wear sculptural paper costumes. He was also working with a composer, Lia Ouyang Rusli, to create sounds for the various colors. “Green should also sound like we combined the sounds of yellow and blue, and so that’s fun,” Torres said.
But in July all of this was still very much notional. The script was brief and unfinished and none of the designs had been finalized. “Deadlines are good, because if not, the process would never end,” Ortino told me.
This is the kind of thing that would send many of us (by which I mean, me) into an anxiety spiral. Torres seemed unruffled. And his collaborators had warmed to the challenge.
Muriel Parra, who will design the Picasso- and Bauhaus-inspired costumes, said that she had found it freeing. “Julio’s vision of the world leads us to see things in a deliciously delirious way,” she wrote in an email.
About three weeks after I met him, Torres began a stripped-down version of the show in London, an effort to finish and refine the script. Early response was positive. “This hour leaves you tickled pink,” a critic for The Guardian wrote. For Torres, the show remained slightly mysterious, just out of his grasp. He remained serene.
“I am still in search for an ending,” he wrote to me after the first few performances. “The ending will reveal itself soon. Or it won’t, and the show will never end.”
Alexis Soloski has written for The Times since 2006. As a culture reporter, she covers television, theater, movies, podcasts and new media.
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