Senor Babyhead
Written & Performed by Analisa Raya-Flores
UNDER St. Marks | 94 St Marks Pl, New York, NY 10009
November 1, 2025
In a delirious three quarters of an hour—a fever dream stitched together from drag, clowning, and existential despair—Señor Babyhead’s Día de Muertos Especial unfolds like a séance disguised as a variety show. Beneath the greasepaint and rhinestones lies something tragic and tender: a portrait of fame decaying under its own heat. Babyhead, once Mexico’s most beloved (and now unmistakably washed-up) sitcom icon, staggers across the psychic wasteland of the Sonoran Desert, pursued by ghosts of both memory and relevance. Along the way, he encounters a littered trail of relics, hallucinations, and spirits—each one a fragment of a past too bright to look at directly.
This is not mere performance but excavation, a ritual of self-exhumation in real time. Señor Babyhead croons, crawls, and cajoles his way through the desert’s mirages, enlisting the audience as uneasy accomplices in his own undoing. The laughter comes easily, then falters; the shimmer of drag glamour dissolves into the grit of something raw and unbeautiful. To watch Día de Muertos Especial is to witness a performer fighting to remain visible in a world already writing his obituary—an act of defiance disguised as a cabaret, a requiem sung with a smile.
In Señor Babyhead, written and performed by Analisa Raya-Flores, the grotesque and the political join hands in a dance as comic as it is damning. The history of immigration in the United States—so often narrated as tragedy or exposé—is here reimagined through the anarchic logic of clowning, the defiant absurdity of drag, and a performance idiom that refuses the audience the comfort of detachment. We are not permitted to look on from afar; Raya-Flores implicates us, seduces us, and finally indicts us. The result, presented as part of FRIGID New York’s The Days of the Dead Festival, is a work of furious play—a fiesta of laughter built atop the bones of empire.
At a certain moment—the sort of theatrical volta that startles the audience into remembering that satire, when wielded with sufficient precision, is a weapon—Señor Babyhead turns its gaze squarely upon the American immigration crisis, that ongoing moral calamity which will, one hopes, someday summon its architects to The Hague to answer for their ingenuity in cruelty. It is here that the show’s humor sharpens into something more akin to vivisection.
Enter, as if conjured from the nation’s nightmares, Kristi Noem, rendered not merely as a villain but as a grotesque emblem of policy-made barbarism. Raya-Flores appears wearing an oversized papier-mâché mask—an unsettlingly accurate simulacrum, capturing even the cosmetic misjudgments that have become part of Noem’s own theatrical persona—and proceeds to launch into a hoedown choreographed to Shania Twain’s “Man! I Feel Like a Woman!” The effect is at once hilarious and hideous: a country-western danse macabre, a carnivalesque indictment of power masquerading as folksy charm.
In this sequence, Raya-Flores achieves something rare: she transforms political commentary into a ritual of exorcism. The audience laughs, yes, but the laughter carries the metallic aftertaste of recognition—of the ways in which policy becomes performance, cruelty becomes branding, and national tragedy becomes, in the hands of the unscrupulous, a kind of grotesque entertainment. It is one of the show’s most blistering moments, precisely because its absurdity is indistinguishable from the absurdity of the reality it mirrors.
The premise of Señor Babyhead, the play, itself is an act of parody bordering on the metaphysical. Señor Babyhead—Mexico’s most (washed-up) television star—is remembered for a role that could only have been dreamed up in the fevered imagination of late capitalism: a grown man pretending to be a baby in order to spy for the FBI. Dressed in a diaper, pompadour, and unbuttoned shirt revealing a soft, comic belly (actually a novelty t-shirt of a hairy chest), Babyhead is a creature both ridiculous and tragic, a self-parody of masculinity and media spectacle. Raya-Flores’s embodiment of him—complete with an oversized baby bottle, a faltering swagger, turquoise eye shadow and lipstick, a drawn-in pencil moustache, and a garish gold chain—turns buffoonery into critique, exposing how racial caricature and celebrity myth bleed into one another. Beneath the absurdity lies a lament for the migrant body as both spectacle and scapegoat.
The conceit of the show—Babyhead’s attempt to reenact the “Día de Muertos Especial” episode of his sitcom—provides the frame for a hallucinatory pageant. Lost in a 127-degree desert, Babyhead encounters three spirits: the first, a migrant who crossed the border in the 1920s and endured Operation Wetback in the 1950s; the second, a pop-cultural apparition whose soundtrack marks a descent into carnivalesque burlesque (the already mentioned Noem centerpiece); and the third, less a ghost than a proposition—the Faustian bargain of assimilation, the promise of belonging at the cost of humanity. Raya-Flores plays all of them, sometimes switching personae mid-sentence, her body a battleground for competing histories. The granddaughter of the first spirit, a vapid TikTok influencer, serves as both interpreter and ironist, her vapid delivery underscoring the amnesia of contemporary discourse. It is a comic masterstroke that allows the laughter to curdle in real time.
Musically, Señor Babyhead oscillates between the sentimental and the absurd: a melodramatic “Without You” gives way to a mournful Linkin Park cover that feels less like parody than elegy. The piece’s interactivity—audience chants, singalongs, even the testing of a can of “Raid Especial, for the sneaky cucarachas”—teeters between conviviality and confrontation. Raya-Flores even asks for a volunteer babysitter from the audience - someone to climb on and over, fall off most ungracefully just to slither back up into the man’s lap. Raya-Flores manages these moments with the precision of a seasoned clown: every laugh arrives shadowed by its own aftertaste.
What emerges from this dense almost-hour of performance is not simply satire but a moral theater of grotesquerie—a kind of Brechtian cabaret for the borderlands. Raya-Flores’s physicality is extraordinary: exaggerated, elastic, but always precise. She moves with the authority of someone who knows that comedy, at its highest pitch, is a form of survival. Señor Babyhead is ultimately about the hunger to remain visible—to outwit disappearance, to dance in the face of erasure. It is, in the end, a requiem in drag, a clown’s prayer for the living and the dead.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on November 13, 2025 All rights reserved.