A newly-minted citizen reflects on the costs

 

Ah, summer. The brave wear sandals on city sidewalks. The cowardly avoid the subway platform turned public sauna. Anyone tough enough to stay in town has the whole city to themselves plus endless options of free entertainment at Open Streets, Summer Stage, public parks and pools, festivals in all 5 boroughs, and Open Call at The Shed. 

The year’s installment in the annual Open Call series, which alternates between visual and performing art, is a theatrical turn. (Here’s my write-up of last year’s visual art exhibit, Portals.) For 2026, The Shed team commissioned 4 new productions by early career playwrights and performers and each production ran for 2 days on consecutive weekends in July. (There will be one more invite-only production in the fall.) Read my review of another Open Call show, HUMAN.

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I grew up facing the flag to say the Pledge of Allegiance every school day, but I didn’t hear the Oath of Allegiance until I saw FITO. While the pledge serves to mostly remind us of our shared American values, republic, under God, indivisible, liberty, justice the Oath you recite to become a naturalized citizen requires that you be ready to risk it all. 

 

In FITO, an “interactive concert play” by playwright, performer, and musician Rudi Goblen, a man named Fito prepares to become an American. He’s suited, holding his right hand up, when the Oath begins to play and scroll across the backdrop. Absolutely and entirely renounce… support and defend against all enemies… I will bear arms… I will perform non combatant service… without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion. What an ask: join today, die tomorrow. This is what we ask of our newcomers. He flashes back to all it took to reach this day and say this Oath, and tells his story through a playlist of percussion-heavy musical numbers.

 

 

Rudi is a Nicaraguan-American b-boy with a Yale MFA and you hear every corner of that spectrum in FITO. He brightens, hitting every consonant sound when he speaks to the audience like a children’s television host to recite a recipe for making your own personal monster. (Spoiler alert: it’s you.) He softens when Fito tells the story of his mother surviving a motorcycle accident while 4 months pregnant just to make it to the U.S. He locks in when he spits about freedom, while a black and white photo montage of ICE, Border Patrol, and Kristi Noem flickers in the background as a reminder that none of us is safe from being detained illegally, citizen or not. When the vocals end, the instrumentals continue and Rudi takes the flowers from the altars on stage and lays them out, first in a wide circle, and then in another smaller, concentric one.  

 

In FITO’s world, America is the land of opportunity — and that opportunity costs. Corroding factors like assimilation, poverty, desensitization, and police harassment make their presence known immediately. But no matter the cost, Fito still elects to recite the Oath and join our deranged national country club. This is a better ending than the alternative. Goblen shared that the Fito character originates in his play Littleboy/Littleman about brothers Bastian and Fíto. The concert play represents a reprise for Fito, one where he makes choices that result in his obtaining the citizenship his mother wanted so badly for him. 

 

 

It may be tempting to wonder which aspects of FITO are auto-biographical, but that would be beside the point. Fito is as auto-biographical for Rudi as it is for anyone who moves to this country with a dream. They all have stories to tell. Mr. Goblen has been trying to bring this work to wider audiences for the last 7 years, and the director, Teo Castellanos, argues that it’s actually been much longer, that Rudi has been working on FITO since the first time he participated in theatre. Mr. Castellanos met Mr. Goblen in Florida and have continued to collaborate ever since. Both stressed the importance of creating space for men of color in the theatre world where we can continue to practice our cultural traditions of storytelling without feeling limited by the conventions of Shakespeare’s era. Even their choice to stage FITO barefoot inside a circle was a callback to the cypher and an effort to decolonize storytelling. 

 

Overall, the intentions of FITO were clear even when they weren’t fully realized in performance. I didn’t realize Rudi was playing a character (Fito) until he acts out a conversation with his mother where she refers to him by that name, the title also didn’t make sense until that point. The opening number about relinquishing your own opinions so that America can provide you with their own was lyrically powerful, but not enhanced by the adjoining breakdance performance especially since I couldn’t tell if the dancer was speaking or listening. The methodical placement of the flowers proved a sentimental, but anti-climatic, ending that could benefit from some additional context for audience members who are uninitiated. I got the sense, from the vibes in the room, that more than a few people were confused.

 

 

There is an audience for the theatre landscape that Mr. Goblen and Mr. Castellanos are shaping. There is a need for first-person accounts of the current political hellscape we occupy, if for no other reason than to offset the self-congratulating “look how far we’ve come” narratives of shows about American identity (I’m looking at you, Ragtime and Mexodus.) Most of all, Rudi Goblen’s FITO proves that there are countless modes of storytelling — lyric, verse, prose, beatbox, drumbeat, breakdance, silence. While this country tries to round off our edges to squeeze us into a singular way of being, Mr. Goblen understands that liberated is the most American way to be.  

 

blacklove 🖤 and starlight 🌟 

 

The Shed’s 2026 Open Call production of FITO took place on July 24-25, 2026. FITO was written by Rudi Goblen and directed by Teo Castellanos. The show was performed by Rudi Goblen, Andrews “NonMs” Mujica, and Daniel “Felix” Garcia. The Shed’s Open Call programming is free to attend.