Founded in 2001, the Downtown Urban Arts Festival (DUAF) was created to give a new generation of writers a platform for free expression.
Its productions reflect urban life and provide an uncensored stage for emerging voices. Presented each spring at well-known venues, the festival offers audiences a wide range of innovative new works by exciting authors.
One featured writer is Arturo Luiz Soria, a New York City–based actor, writer, and producer. His solo show, Ni Mi Madre, won the 2023 Obie Award for Best Performance and later received an Offie Award at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The play follows an immigrant family torn apart by long-buried secrets, giving voice to working-class experiences of immigration, queerness, and identity. Soria has adapted the words of Dustyn Kurt Gobler to present The White Whale Journal. Here, he takes an intimate approach, following a writer who inherits his brother’s journals after his suicide.
Reading through his brother’s journals, Soria looks for meaning in the blank pages and intentional gaps. He says he wants to uncover the truth and share it, believing it would be dishonest to walk away. By quoting his brother when he says, “the crux of the suicide problem is… guilt for the pain it would cause. But pain feels so good,” Soria confronts the cultural silence around suicide and draws the audience into his brother’s life. In doing so, he encourages empathy for people struggling with suicidal thoughts and uses one family’s story to shed light on the wider experience of mental illness. His brother appears not as a finished story, but as someone still defined by what remains unresolved.
The White Whale Journal runs for about an hour. Because it is performed at Joe’s Pub, audience members are expected to purchase either two drinks or one food item in addition to the ticket price. Soria turns his brother’s story into both a deeply personal narrative and a universal meditation on grief and mental illness. The White Whale Journal is an absorbing work that draws the audience in.
