“Could You Tell Your Life Story In the Space of a Moment; the Length of a Sonnet?
   Playwright Jose Rivera attempts to answer that question for sixteen different individuals in a moving yet amazingly unencumbered play he has titled SONNETS FOR AN OLD CENTURY. In a moment somewhere between life and afterlife, these individuals are assembled. One man, who has been waiting for them, tells them that they have one final chance to tell their stories, and that their words will go out to the universe.
   This is a deceptively simple work. Yet it builds in its intensity as each storyteller brings his or her own story to life. These are people that we would meet on the street; they are ordinary souls. But their stories are not. They focus power center-stage with their individual stories and what they learned from them. There is not a plot here; there are sixteen individual plots. And each story, small as it might be in and of itself, fills the space, and our ears and our minds, with feeling; joy, fear, rage, love, sorrow; and makes each one expand to fill this void. We as listeners are forced to face these ravaging emotions, even as we contemplate the death of the storyteller. This work is simple, and simply potent in its impact. And while it seems to do without the trappings of stagework, set, plot, scenes, etc, it is powerfully theatrical.”
Alan R Hall, Front Row Center