When Justina Machado returns to her native Chicago, she hardly recognizes him. Machado grew up in downtown Chicago, in the Lincoln Park, Humboldt Park and Logan Square neighborhoods, all of which she, she says, have been gentrified.
“You love good restaurants, you love all this beauty, but it saddens you that your people are being kicked out because who doesn’t want good restaurants, good places, and safety? Who doesn’t want that? The problem is that a lot of my people get kicked out… Taxes and property is like three times what you could buy in the ’80s, ’90s 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”, debuting Friday on Amazon 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 looks completely different. Told she had “magic hands” as a prison masseuse, Ella Roach opened a massage parlor in the same building as a pasty shop. She has the best intentions and wants to lead a normal life, until one day she has to use her special hands to save herself from a dangerous situation. The story builds from there and those empanadas occasionally feature a mystery meat that customers find delicious.
“Dolores says: ‘I’m like you, if everything went wrong,’” Machado said. “You empathize 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 on every dispensary corner. she has nowhere to go. She has no one. And that’s a more common story than we like to think because it’s too painful to think about what happens to someone after she gets out of jail and has to survive. I 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,” Mark said. “I was watching 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 felt like, ‘Oh my gosh, I’m watching a community feed off of 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 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 ran on Broadway in 2015. Mark then pitched the story for television where, he says, “people thought he was crazy. I laughed at the rooms.”
Then he decided he had enough material to make a series. podcast with Rubin Vega. A month after the launch of the first season of the “Dolores Roach” podcast, Mark says there was a bidding war over the TV rights. Mark is now a co-executive producer and co-executive producer of the series.
“In the casting process, we had a Zoom with Justina and she told me: ‘I’m Dolores Roach. This is my part. That I have to do? And I just remember thinking, ‘What do you have to do? We would be lucky to have you. You put the camera in Justina’s face and we innately 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 real leading role.
“I was in every scene and in every shot because this is told through Dolores’ eyes. This is her point of view. So when Dolores leaves the scene, the scene is over. If I wasn’t on set, I was in my trailer or in my apartment in Toronto learning lines, so it was a very different process. A lonelier process, to be honest,” Machado said.
However, leaning into the craziness of Dolores’s situation was fun.
“It’s a lot of fun playing something that’s outrageous and out there. There are no borders. There is no limit to what it does. It’s just the rawness even in the way it looks… I mean, I didn’t like it that much when I saw it afterwards,” Machado said with a laugh. “I was like, ‘Oh, gosh!’ But, it was all free, hardly any makeup, just crazy hair, I loved it. It was very, very liberating.”
