Gentrification leads to madness, cannibalism and laughter in ‘The Horror of Dolores Roach’
When Justina Machado returns to her native Chicago, she barely recognizes it. Machado grew up in downtown Chicago, in the Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park, and Logan Square neighborhoods — all of which she says have been spruced up.
“You love the good restaurants, you love all this beauty, but you’re sad that your people are being pushed out, because who doesn’t want great restaurants, great places, and safety? Who doesn’t want that? The problem is that many of my people are being pushed out… Taxes and real estate are three times what you could buy in the 1980s, 1990s and early 2000s. It’s sad to see.”
Gentrification is also a catalyst for Machado’s new black comedy series” The horror of Dolores Roach,” debuts Friday on Prime Video.
Machado plays Roach, a woman who has spent 16 years in prison on marijuana charges. When she is released, the world around her will look very different. Told she has “magic hands” as a prison masseuse, Roach opens a massage parlor in the same building as an empanada shop. She has the best intentions and wants to live a normal life, until one day she has to use her special hands to save herself from a dangerous situation. The story unravels from there and those empanadas occasionally contain a mysterious meat that customers find delicious.
“Dolores says, ‘I’m just like you when everything goes wrong,'” Machado said. ‘You sympathize with her. Part of the reason you feel sorry for her is because you see this girl having 16 years of her life stolen for something you can now buy in every corner of pharmacies. One day she has just been let out and has nowhere to go. She has no one. And that’s more of a general story than what we like to think about because it’s too hurtful to think about what happens to someone after they get out of prison and they have to survive. You don’t want to think about those things.”
“The Horror of Dolores Roach” began as a one-woman play written by Aaron Mark and is inspired by the fictional story of “Sweeney Todd”.
“I was a playwright in Washington Heights. I lived there for 10 years,” says Mark. “I watched the neighborhood gentrify at the speed of light and I felt like I was watching this neighborhood cannibalize itself. Really, that was the picture. I was like, ‘Oh, my God, I’m watching a community feed itself.’ And that sent me to “Sweeney Todd.” I thought, ‘OK, there’s a cannibalism story going on in this neighborhood. And what better story of cannibalism has our species ever produced than ‘Sweeney Todd’?”
Mark wrote the play as “a contemporary ‘Sweeney Todd’ set in Washington Heights” with Daphne Rubin-Vega in mind to play Roach. She agreed and the play was performed off-Broadway in 2015. Mark then pitched the story to TV where, he says, “people thought I was crazy. I got laughed out of the rooms.”
He then decided he had enough material to make a series podcast with Rubin-Vega and Mark turned his focus to that. A month after the first season of the podcast “Dolores Roach” was released, according to Mark, there was a bidding war for the TV rights. Mark is now co-showrunner and co-executive producer on the series.
“During the casting process, we had a Zoom with Justina and she said to me, ‘I’m Dolores Roach. This is my share. What should I do?’ And I just remember thinking, ‘What do you have to do? We’d be glad to have you.’ You put the camera on Justina’s face and naturally we love her.”
Machado has appeared in many memorable roles, including ‘Six Feet Under’, ‘Jane the Virgin’ and the remake of ‘One Day at a Time’, but ‘Dolores Roach’ is her first major starring role.
“I was with every scene and every shot because this is told through Dolores’ gaze. This is her POV So when Dolores leaves the scene, the scene is over. When I wasn’t on set I was in my trailer or in my apartment in Toronto learning, so it was a completely different process. Honestly a lonelier process,” Machado said.
Leaning into the madness of Dolores’ situation was fun though.
“It’s so much fun to play something that’s outrageous and beyond. There are no limits. There is no limit to what she does. It’s just the rawness in even the way she looks… I mean, I didn’t like it much when I saw it later,” Machado said, laughing. “I was like ‘Oh, God!’ But everything was just free, hardly any makeup, just crazy hair, I loved it. It was very, very liberating.”
Adds Mark: “I like to say that Dolores Roach is a serial killer who is not a sociopath. That’s debatable, but that’s how I approach her. She is me. She is you. She is recognizable. She belongs to all of us.”
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