On Wednesday night, the opening notes of Also Sprach Zarathustra echoed across the black-box theatre of the Eastwood Performing Arts Center. Images of Argentina flickered across the screen: Lionel Messi, Pope Francis and dulce de leche, before settling on yerba mate.
Natasha Nutkiewicz, who goes by the stage name Natasha Nua, stepped into the light, wearing a safari suit with a gourd of mate in her hand.
“Who are you?” she asked the audience before turning inward: “Who am I?”
The Mate Monologues is a one-woman show written and performed by Nua, a USC School of Dramatic and Cinematic Arts alumnus, and produced by her production company, The Bardo Productions. The play, which first premiered in September of last year, marked its Los Angeles debut on Wednesday, March 4. The performance takes her audience on her journey to explore identity and belonging, all anchored by her partner in crime, yerba mate.
“I’m in search of where I belong and my true identity, because [like] many immigrants, I feel like I’m not from here, not from there,” Nua said.
In true Argentine fashion, the evening continued with complimentary empanadas, Argentine ice cream and, as she proudly pronounced it, “SHER-bah MAH-teh”
Yerba mate, a caffeinated herbal beverage, is Argentina’s national drink. Grown in South America’s subtropical forest region, the plant carries a great significance for Argentinians.“You’re putting water, energy and nutrients and then you’re sharing it,” Nua said. “When there’s no more water, it comes back to el cebador, the person in charge of preparing the mate, and then they put more water, and then you keep passing it around, so it dissolves the boundaries between people and that’s what I’m trying to bring.”
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, the 25-year-old actress grew up in a culturally diverse household with both parents in the entertainment industry. Her Spanish mother, Mercedes Martí, is a journalist and her Polish father, Edward Nutkiewicz, is an actor who owned an avant-garde theatre called El Bardo Teatro. As young Nua grew up traveling between Spain and the United States with her family, she said she rarely experienced living in a permanent home with her own bedroom. Instead, she said, her sense of belonging came from the theatre.
“I grew up in the theater, so that was beautiful and my dad, he writes and adapts plays, but he’s never really directed,” she said, eyes widening as she spoke of her father. “But when I asked him, ‘Hey, can you direct [The Mate Monologues]?’ he didn’t hesitate.”
The play is co-directed by her father and Eleu, an independent filmmaker and performer, marking his first time stepping into the director’s role.
Yet, her childhood was interrupted at the age of 12, when insecurity and corruption in Argentina prompted the family to move to Miami. That rupture between countries, languages and identities is ultimately why Nua created The Mate Monologues, she said; to process her immigrant experience and invite audiences into a shared search for belonging.
“As an artist and actor, moving to Los Angeles from Brazil, chasing that dream of life, but then not feeling at home here, I feel like that was the part that resonated with me most,” said Fernando Siqueira, an attendee at the show who is originally from São Paulo.
While the story is rooted in her upbringing, the craft behind it was sharpened at USC’s SDA and SCA, where Nua trained as an actor and storyteller. There, she earned a bachelor’s degree in theatre with a cinematic arts minor in 2023. Nua said the program opened doors to the film industry and helped her develop her skills in live performance.
“She was in [my class] called ‘Performing Identities’, and it’s about how you can tell a personal story through these different kinds of performances, but also to think about what makes you uniquely you, and how do you express that through performance,” said Rena Heinrich, an associate professor of theatre practice who attended the Wednesday show. “She got the message and she took all those different aspects and put it together.”
Ultimately, Nua says The Mate Monologues is about recognizing yourself in someone else’s story.
“We’re all human. We all go through the same thing, and that’s the beauty of theater,” she said. “That catharsis of we can all feel this together, and we can all release it together, and then we can all build a new identity,” she added, raising her hands and pushing them gently outward, miming the act of letting something go.
The show will have its final Los Angeles performance on Friday, March 6 at 7 p.m., offering audiences one last opportunity to experience the intimate, ritual-infused journey she has brewed from memory and meaning.