Five Sessions (A War in Therapy) by Jaime Estades

Raw, confrontational, and theatrical to its core, Five Sessions turns the stage into a site of resistance and demands the audience stay present.

The playwright, Jaime Estades is a Puerto Rican writer, labor and community activist who has devoted his life to advocacy, education, health, and leadership training. He currently teaches master’s-level clinical and advocacy students at Columbia University (CSSW), Law and Social Work Advocacy, and is a former PhD professor of Social Policy and Research at NYU. Mr. Eddie Torres will direct the play.

"Five Sessions" is not a polite play—it is a confrontation staged in real time. Estades’ provocation lands with surgical force: “Would slaves in the South have felt better about slavery if they had therapy three times a week?” The line functions as a dramatic rupture—there is no answer, only reckoning.

"Five Sessions" cuts straight into the contradictions of the mental-health system and the society that frames it. As a theatrical work, it exposes the limits of therapy when structural injustice remains untreated and state responsibility is deflected onto the individual.

Set in present-day New York City, it traps two persons in a confined theatrical space and dares the audience to witness the collision. Across five charged therapy sessions, Christine Kennedy—a young, white, Ivy-League–trained therapist armed with theory, credentials, and good intentions—faces Vidal “Super” Estrella, a Latino building superintendent, labor organizer, and suicidal man shaped by exploitation, grief, and systemic abandonment. It forces audiences, clinicians, and policymakers alike to confront the inadequacy of care without justice, treatment without rights.

Director: Eddie Torres.

Mr. Torres’s recent theater credits include the California premiere of Water by the Spoonful and the World Premiere of The Happiest Song Plays Last, both by Pulitzer Prize Winner Quiara Alegría Hudes, as well as MacBeth for The Public Theater’s Mobile Shakespeare Unit, and a workshop of Like They Magical for Playwrights Realm in New York City, in addition to an extensive career.

Cast: Belange Rodriguez, Ivan Goris, Bill Blechingberg and Kyle Glenn.

The program is in English with Spanish overtitles.

This production is made in part thanks to the support of NYSCA, APREE and María E. Sánchez Center for Latinx Studies.

General Admission: $35
Students, Seniors & Actor Awards: $30 (please use promo code TAKE5OFF at checkout)

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Host or Publisher Barrio Independent Productions