RUMOR(S)CENA – NEW YORK – I Scream Theater at The RAT in Brooklyn – one of those places New York still allows to exist: neither bar nor theatre, but an ambiguous organism where people drink, talk, mix freely, and then, without warning, someone pulls a black curtain, the noise collapses, and the room thickens into a stage.
On that night, C.M. Soto stepped into her past with the precision of a blade.
The maternal figure – addiction, dealing, that oscillation between euphoria and collapse that defines a childhood – becomes an inherited fracture. The house is her laboratory: babysitters tying tourniquets with the ease of a lullaby, faceless men drifting through the domestic scene like functional ghosts, violence settling like the white powder on the kitchen table which the child, too early, learns to imitate. More than a drug – a maternal dialect, the only way to knock on the door of affection.
The performance originates from Soto’s book These Are the Rooms to My Mother’s House, which on stage becomes an open-air emotional autopsy. She opens boxes engraved with years that will never return: inside are toys that break like bones, votive bottles, traces of a body trying to erase itself through self-harm, a diary kept to prevent evaporation. And the mother’s letters – from rehab, from jail, or from her habitual deserts – delivered to the daughter while she lives with her grandparents, attempts college, gives birth while on the run, survives an abusive husband, turns shame into economy by dancing through nights that ask no questions.
The gesture is simple and devastating: to archive what should have been forgotten – and from this architecture emerges a precise map of how trauma is transmitted. Soto doesn’t judge this mechanism: she watches it operate with the clarity of someone listening to a faulty circuit repeat the same short every time it’s switched on.
Her body is the epicentre of this operation. A body that sings as if climbing out of a well, that yields and then pushes back. Around her, a visual and sonic architecture calibrated with surgical precision. The music – composed by Benjamin Strange (UFO Death Cult) – gives the performance a pulsing structure, an emotional spine that amplifies the autobiographical material without softening it. But it is Mike Goetz’s work that truly defines the piece’s hidden anatomy: original strands of incidental music, sound textures created specifically to support, modulate, and tilt the tone of each scene. Goetz also contributes to the construction of the puppet shows, and on stage he governs the entire multimedia system – video, lights, cues – as the invisible half of a two-person company, shaping an emotional world that could not have existed without this symbiotic collaboration.
Soto seeks no redemption. She offers no consolation. She does not soften what wounds in order to make it more acceptable. Her choice is simpler and more radical: to tell her story as it is, without asking permission and without sanding it down to fit an imaginary that would prefer her story smoothed and softened. It is an act of assertion, a gesture of necessity, through which a woman raised at the margins finally claims the space to say:
“This is what happened. Look inside it.”
Interview with C.M. Soto
In your performance, the childhood home is the first stage. Each room holds both trauma and a ritual of resistance. When did you realise that this “toxic house” was not only a place of pain, but the matrix of your theatrical language?
As a child, I was inspired by Queen, David Bowie, Pink Floyd, and Electric Light Orchestra, musicians with a theatricality that mirrored my ironic and macabre landscape. I was a choir kid and did not consider myself a writer until high school, when I shared autobiographical essays with my English class, terrifying the other children but intriguing my teacher. I’d always been an avid reader, drawn to darkly humorous writers, so the written text was a natural early expression. In addition to my early adoration of books and records, I was deeply interested in anthropology, to the point of minoring in it in college. I studied my own culture and the natives within it with a desire to understand the mechanics behind their actions, their value systems, their code, and even their predatory nature. It was my passion for the exhibitionistic qualities of theatrical music, the excavation of the human experience through writing, and the documentation inherent to anthropology that gave me permission to sculpt I Scream Theater.
Your line “Will a daughter escape or will history repeat?” contains the core of the work. Do you believe trauma can truly be inherited? And is theatre a way of rewriting that inner genetics?
I believe that trauma can be passed from mother to child as early as in utero. It can certainly be absorbed through shared environments, taken as cues from parents, and imprinted across family histories. Childhood trauma is woven too deeply into the foundation to fully heal, but the traumatized can learn to live with it – with grace, and with an understanding of the human condition they might never have otherwise known. It’s like a sixth sense, the ability to perceive all the painful shades. It is the performance of I Scream Theater that is, for me, not just therapy, but exploratory surgery. I am bare, body and soul, allowing the wound to be opened for cleaning and inspection.
In your work, the body is everything: mother, temple, battlefield, instrument. How do you experience the relationship between body and word on stage?
In the dance numbers Pillow Fight and Wombling, I use performance-art dance to mirror pivotal events: kicking cocaine addiction and giving birth. As a woman, the autonomy of the body is challenged. In reproduction, it is symbiotic. It is easy to feel that the female body is not your own, as it is shared or outright stolen. Dance helps the mind reclaim the body with every minute muscle movement. It is a momentary salvation. The body has its own language that is insightful and clandestine. I think it protects the mind with an instinctual force field. I will forever be learning from the show and rewriting each line through the ritual of movement.
At a certain point, addiction changes form – no longer drugs, but men, affection, the need to be chosen. Is love a risk or a form of knowledge for you?
With my childhood, I have no choice but to view love as a risk first, and a necessity second. Conditional love creates a very specific wound that feeds insecurity and impermanence. My work addresses this grappling with self-love, the desire for romantic love, the need for family support, and the lasting effects of a poisoned community.
When the daughter becomes aware of her body, the language turns poetic and cruel. Has the female body on stage become a site of power rather than wounding?
My transformation is ongoing. My relationship with the physical body is always called into question. I was often impatient and unkind to myself during the 16 years documented in I Scream Theater. I now feel compassion for the life unfolding on the stage and for its source material.
In the “99 Cents” scene, the body becomes an object of exchange. How does the stage restore dignity to a body once subjected to power?
I experienced the strangest sensation when I became an exotic dancer. The body that grew the child, that was neglected by love, and for a time felt absent of value, found new power on the stage. A young woman’s relationship with her sensual self is a precious one, and I’d lost it in the abuse and abandonment. I regained it as a dancer. After a Covid-related catastrophic loss and stage-two thyroid cancer that threatened my singing voice, my body was frail. My self-image was damaged. Again, dance delivered me back to myself as I choreographed and practiced the eight numbers in I Scream Theater. For me, creative movement marries the physical self with the spiritual.
At one point, the daughter stops performing and begins to write. What happens when the word takes the place of the scream?
Trauma is messy, larger than life, and overflowing. The boxes are a metaphor for compartmentalizing this trauma. The written word gives validity to the voice. It is important to me to amplify the screams of underrepresented people, to give voice to their struggles with violence, generational addiction, manic ambition, and domestic erasure. No matter where we come from or what we’ve been through, we are still the architects and heroes of our own story.
After destruction and rebirth, the daughter finds peace in ordinary gestures. What does “normality” mean to you?
It’s easy to look outward for a sense of what is “normal” when you are raised in an underprivileged environment. The upside to maturing is being able to see that “normal” is mythology. It is product placement. It sells units. It is uniqueness that inspires. Uniqueness is memorable. My late-onset spirituality has helped me understand that I am here for a unique reason – to experience growth through complex challenges.
At the end, the daughter tells the mother: “Rest in peace – or perversity. Your choice.” Did you ever feel you were betraying your mother by telling her story?
My mother never felt important. I think she wanted to feel valued, but her identity was so broken. Our stories are intertwined in I Scream Theater. Neither is rose-coloured in the telling, so in that, there is fairness. Her story was valuable enough to be told. Her opening song, Ice Scream Theater, her actual words relayed by my character, and her letters reveal her step-by-step struggles. Maybe there is peace to be found in unearthing the secrets that are our first taste of poison.
Do you think off-theatre – the kind made in small venues like The RAT – can still be a place of truth and revolution?
Brave artists with freshly authentic voices are using these spaces as incubators and infusing the New York theatre scene with not just rehashed IP, but new concepts. We are rewarded with grateful audiences.
