Creator
Often, when creating a work of theater, I play many roles simultaneously, including "Director," "Performer," "Writer," "Dramaturg," "Designer," "Producer," and more. That's why I call myself a "theater maker" or a "creator of new works," which encompass all of the above.
These are a few projects that I have created from stardust, inspiration, hard work and collaboration.
O, Tomato!
O, Tomato! is a saucy, sensory, clown dance theater celebration of a widely-beloved, yet often misidentified, fruit. Created in partnership with local urban gardeners, O, Tomato! invites audiences to play, move, laugh, sing, squish, slice, and savor within community. Ay, tomate! O, Tomato! will premiere in the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival as part of the Performance for Young Audiences Cohort of the Cannonball Hub.
Read Me A World
Read Me a World is an experiment in public art, creative placemaking, and building a common infrastructure for public acts of intimacy and connection.
With the support of a cohort of Facilibrarians, readers of all ages and reading levels are invited to connect with their expressive voices and to read aloud to loved ones within unique, artist-designed, pop-up reading nook installations throughout Philadelphia’s Liberty Lands Park.
Read Me A World will premiere in the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Free Fringe Philly, and as a “Panel Pick” in the Performances for Young Audiences cohort of the Cannonball Festival. The event will be offered free of charge to all participants.
This exciting project has received support from The Office of Arts, Culture, and the Creative Economy’s Neighborhood Arts Program, the Stockton Rush Bartol Foundation’s Stockton/Marrazzo Micro-Granting program for teaching artists, the Cannonball Festival, and a broad community of friends, fans, and loved ones.
Here at Home
Princess Mildred arrives at her home warming party disappointed to find that the place her Princey has chosen to settle down is not exactly the perfectly pink castle she was anticipating. She employs her romantic imagination to transform the lifeless home into a sumptuous palace. But when the Prince turns out to be more lemon than knight, our Princess embarks on a profound exploration of one of our most fundamental desires--a place to call home.
Here at Home premiered in a storefront art gallery on a busy street in Philadelphia as part of the 2015 Philadelphia Fringe Festival and has since toured to Bloomsburg Theatre Ensemble, Phillips Academy at Andover, the New York Clown Theater Festival at The Brick, and Feast Arts Center in Tacoma, WA.
Click on the link below to read a review from the show's 2015 premiere in Philadelphia.
Click on the link below to read an article about the show’s 2016 presentation at Phillips Academy in Andover, MA.
The Up Close Festival — (Pizza Rat)
The Up Close Festival was instigated by interdisciplinary artist and educator Peter Musante along with longtime collaborator Summer Shapiro as an experiment in using immersive theatre to engage young New Yorkers with the histories of the spaces they inhabit.
The festival ran at NYC’s New Ohio Theater in 2018 and 2019. In 2018, I created a short, interactive beat poetry performance for the character of Pizza Rat—internet sensation-cum-humanized-beat-poet-custodian of “The Archive.” Pizza Rat returned to host the festival the following year.
During the deep lockdown days of the Covid-19 pandemic in the winter of 2020, I produced a remote, Zoom-based concert version of The Up Close Festival—A Little Light.
Click on the link below to read a review of the 2018 Up Close Festival.
Auntieland
Comediennes Rose Luardo, Marisol Soledad, and Rebekah Rickards invite you on a joyous, jiggly journey through AuntieLand. Petting her caiman while sipping scotch in the Tiffany lamp light of a smoke-filled room. Shaving her legs while applying her lipstick while dishing life advice in stilettos on her red motorcycle. Three cheers for the ladies who pour you your first beer, get stoned with you, overshare about their sex lives, talk you through your parents’ divorce, sleep in ’til noon, and cheer on your burlesque performance. Come for the family secrets, stay for the wisdom, condoms, and wine. Auntie is your biggest fan.
Auntieland premiered in the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival as part of the Cannonball hub at the MAAS building.
Click on the link below to see more photos from the production.
The Seven Ravens Project
The Seven Ravens Project is a theatrical adaptation of the Brothers Grimm tale, "The Seven Ravens"--a story of a young girl's epic quest to reunite with her long-lost brothers and reverse a curse. Her journey takes her past the edge of the world and through the cosmos, where she encounters the sun, the moon, and the stars. The Seven Ravens Project mashes up this fantastical Grimms' tale with the true, heroic, tragic and triumphant stories of contemporary child migrants and refugees across the world. Featuring a diverse, international, multilingual cast of women physical performers, and incorporating song, movement, puppetry and projections, The Seven Ravens Project sheds light on one of today's most pressing sociopolitical issues through the lenses of allegory, fantasy and play.
The Most Important Place In The World
In 2022, Nathaniel Justiniano and I created this devilishly satirical bouffon show targeting colonization with a Diasporic Puerto Rican lens. Two fabulously windswept tricksters, who are equal parts hurricanes and prophets, take the audience on a dance-filled fiesta celebrating USA's torrid love affair with Puerto Rico. The show features Naked Empire Bouffon Company’s signature style of in-your-face physical comedy, lip sync, puppetry, outrageous costumes, and an anything-goes relationship with the audience to create an immersive, joyous, and sometimes disturbing rollercoaster ride of biting anti-colonial satire.
Click below to see The Most Important Place in The World named one of the Philadelphia theater community’s favorite works of 2022 in the Philadelphia Inquirer.
MK+A Rewatch Podcast
Sharing one role on a popular 90s sitcom, lovable twins MK + A rose to stardom before they could even talk. Now, 30 years on, 'You're Invited' to their first public appearance in a decade. In front of a live studio audience, MK + A navigate a crash course down memory lane of their famous fictional childhoods. Part illustrated audio concert, part psychological thriller, MK + A Rewatch Podcast asks: What dark realities lurk beneath our tendencies towards fandom and our hunger for nostalgia? The creators of Doras Gently Used Dreams Store and Auntieland combine the digital tools of modern content creators with physical theater virtuosity to generate an absurd and stinging dive into the lucrative business of remakes, reboots and rewatches. Conceived by Morgan McKenzie Kauffman, Directed and Co-created with Marisol Rosa-Shapiro.
MK+A Rewatch Podcast premiered in the 2024 Philadelphia Fringe Festival as part of the Cannonball hub.
Click below to read a review from Matthew Sekellick at Plays Unpleasant.
Hello, Neighbor!
Normal families are all alike. But every crazy family is crazy in its own way. Actor-creators Tara Demmy, Alex Orthwein, Kaitlin Kaufman and I explored the world of one bouffon family at home in an immersive playscape in Hudson, NY. Click on the link below for more on the bouffon form, as illuminated by teacher and scholar, Giovanni Fusetti.