In “Little Boy / Little Man,” currently playing at the Geffen Playhouse, the immigrant dream isn’t gilded; it’s bruised, blistered, and defiantly alive. This raw, heartfelt exploration of identity, brotherhood, and belonging unfolds with a pulse that’s as rhythmic as it is tragic. The story centers on two Nicaraguan brothers, Fito Palomino (Marlon Alexander Vargas) and Bastian Monteyero (Alex Hernandez), whose journey through the fractured promise of America becomes both elegy and anthem.

After losing their mother to illness and their grandmother to a violent home invasion, the brothers drift into adulthood on parallel but divergent tracks: Fito, a street poet and performer clinging to art as a form of survival; Bastian, a call center worker trying to sand down his accent and reinvent himself as someone more “American.” Yet, even as they stumble through love, disappointment, and economic precarity, their bond remains the play’s aching heartbeat.

“The experience feels less like watching a play and more like being invited into a living, breathing act of remembrance.”

Fito’s dream — to start an organic farm and restaurant, to create something rooted in care rather than commerce — stands in stark contrast to the ruthless machinery of capitalist survival that eventually consumes him. When he’s killed by their former high school bully, now a police officer, during a street performance, the tragedy feels both personal and systemic — a meditation on how America mythologizes reinvention while punishing those who actually attempt it. In a wrenching final gesture, Bastian reclaims his brother’s last name, choosing heritage over assimilation, identity over erasure.

The production matches the story’s emotional ferocity with staging that blurs the line between theater and ritual. A live band with Dee Simone and Tonya Sweets weaves in and out of scenes, their music underscoring memory and emotion as smoke, light, and sound fuse into a language of their own. The physicality of the performers — their humor, their ache, their improvisational intimacy with the audience — makes the experience feel less like watching a play and more like being invited into a living, breathing act of remembrance.

“Little Boy / Little Man” is funny, raw, and devastatingly human. It’s a portrait of the immigrant experience stripped of sentimentality and suffused instead with grace — a reminder that in trying to become someone new, we sometimes rediscover who we’ve been all along.

— Javier Schialer

“Little Boy / Little Man” at the Geffen Playhouse through November 2nd. More at https://www.geffenplayhouse.org/