Review: PUEBLO REVOLT at Ground Floor Theatre
GFT delivers a politically resonant and profoundly personal piece with Dillon Christopher Chitto's two hander.
In Dillon Christopher Chitto’s PUEBLO REVOLT, now playing at Ground Floor Theatre, history breathes through two brothers standing at the edge of revolution. Funny, tender, deeply human, and quietly devastating, PUEBLO REVOLT transforms the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 from a distant historical event into something immediate and painfully recognizable: a story about identity, survival, belonging, and the cost of resistance.
Playwright Chitto, who is of Mississippi Choctaw, Laguna Pueblo, and Isleta Pueblo heritage, wisely avoids turning the play into a museum piece or history lecture. Instead, PUEBLO REVOLT is infused with contemporary humor, sibling tension, queer longing, and emotional intimacy. The play understands something too often erased from Indigenous narratives: Native people were never merely symbols of tragedy or resistance. They were, and are, gloriously alive, complicated, funny, fearful, loving people.
Under Carl Gonzales’ direction, Ground Floor Theatre anchors all of that humanity in two tightly wound, deliberate, and excellent performances from AJ Reyes as Feem Whim and Benjamin G. Bazán as his brother Ba’homa. To start, Gonzales understands this play requires a distinct and nuanced pacing. Even in well produced, professional productions, we too often come away with a flat and distanced experience of story telling that Gonzales gets right with Chitto’s personal portrayal of the Pueblo Revolt. It’s a crucial element in a story that is simultaneously grave, funny, vulnerable, cruel, and loving. In other words, lifelike. Gonzales is also blessed with a pair of actors who possess an effortless chemistry with sharp comic timing. Reyes, who bears the brunt of a good deal of the play’s vulnerability, is both charming and affecting. Bazán gives us an evocative performance of Ba’homa as an uncomplicated but passionate young man navigating a complex and dangerous time. Chitto deserves credit for creating Feem and Ba’homa as such clearly multi-faceted humans. Gonzales’s careful direction of Chitto’s script perfectly refrains from stereotype on so many levels, that we are free to experience what the playwright intended with this play. Add this up, and you’ve got a production that feels both politically resonant and profoundly personal.
The production is backed by a purposeful, pared down set that consists of a rounded platform reminiscent of a Cochiti Pueblo drumhead. It is the centerpiece of this play staged in the round. Maggie Armandariz’s scenic design and Luis Sandoval’s lighting provide a beautiful backdrop for this simultaneously touching, serious, and funny show.
PUEBLO REVOLT ultimately understands that history is not over. Colonialism is not some safely sealed chapter from long ago, but something whose echoes still shape identity, belonging, culture, and survival right now. Dillon Christopher Chitto wisely refuses to reduce Native people to symbols of tragedy or resistance alone. Instead, these characters are funny, awkward, tender, queer, frightened, loving, impulsive, hopeful human beings trying to figure themselves out while history crashes around them. That may be what makes the play feel so quietly urgent. It doesn't ask what heroes do during revolution, but what ordinary people do when the world around them begins to change. In Ground Floor Theatre’s deeply moving production, humanity becomes the heartbeat of the story.
PUEBLO REVOLT
by Dillon Christopher Chitto
Directed By Carl Gonzales
Ground Floor Theatre
979 Springdale Rd
Austin, TX, 78702
May 7–23, 2026
Ground Floor Theatre believes in theatre for everyone regardless of ability to pay. Tickets are always Pay What You Can. Click here to get yours.
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