current projects
73 seconds
May 2026
Conceived, written, and performed by Jared Mezzocchi
Directed by Aya Ogawa
A solo performance about the fragile line between the personal and the cosmic.
In 73 Seconds, multimedia artist Jared Mezzocchi cracks open the quiet mysteries of his family’s past. What begins as a son’s attempt to better understand his mother soon spirals into a decades-spanning excavation of memory, legacy, the stories we inherit, and the ones we almost never hear.
Mezzocchi, celebrated for his genre-defining projection design and hailed by The New York Times as “a leader in the virtual world,” now steps into the spotlight. Using analog technology from the 1980s—overhead projectors, VHS camcorders, and tube televisions—he constructs a live documentary, blending intimate storytelling with lo-fi magic.
Directed by Obie Award-winner Aya Ogawa, 73 Seconds is an inventive, deeply felt new work that asks how we piece together the past—especially when it resists being remembered.
Developmental workshop supported by the David M. Milch Foundation at the Catskill Arts Center.
Prelude: A day to remember forever
october 2026
Written by Chuck Mee
Adapted & Directed by Anne Bogart
Presented in Partnership with En Garde Arts, Brooklyn Academy of Music, & Downtown Brooklyn Alliance
A public place. A private feeling.
In honor of its 40th Anniversary, En Garde Arts reunites with two of its foundational artists, Anne Bogart and Chuck Mee, in a standalone production that exemplifies forty years of turning unexpected places into unforgettable stages.
Prelude: A Day to Remember Forever unfolds on The Plaza at 300 Ashland Place, where strangers collide and couples unravel. Intimacy happens out in the open; awkward, electric, and impossible to ignore, while towering sculptural costumes move through the plaza like the emotional architecture we carry.
This Prelude leads to the full production’s world premiere at La MaMa in June 2027.
Come curious. Stay close. Love will be there, doing what it does best: making a scene.
The Matter of the Disappearance of Michael Anthony Smith, Jr.
December 2026
Written by Bill Martin
Directed by Seth Bockley
A homecoming. A haunting. A choice.
When a soldier long presumed dead walks back into his family’s life, the reunion isn’t a miracle…it’s an aftershock.
In The Turtle Story, written by Bill Martin and directed by Seth Bockley, love, faith, and delusion collide as a veteran tries to heal the home he left behind. Set in the hills of Western Massachusetts, this new play moves between the real and the mystical. There, the woman who moved on faces a choice: protect her new life, or open the door to the past.
Uncommon Voices
Projects in development
objects of decadce
Created and written by Chisa Hutchinson
A site-specific commission by playwright Chisa Hutchinson, this new play takes on the fraught history of museum curation and its deep ties with colonization and historical extraction. To be performed immersively at a New York City museum, Objects of Decadence asks questions about ownership, history, and preservation.
Taxilandia:
fort greene, bed-stuy, east new york
Created and Conceived by Flako Jimenez
The 2025 JDFA recipient, Flako Jimenez, is commissioned to create a new version of his hit piece, Taxilandia, an immersive play that delves into the specific and localized impacts of gentrification on artists and communities by driving audiences in a dollar van through Fort Greene, Bedford-Stuyvesant, and East New York.
TOKITAE
Created & Directed by Taibi Magar
Puppetry Design by Amanda Villalobos
Tokitae by Taibi Magar (OBIE, Is God Is, 2018), developed in consultation with the Lummi Nation, tells the story of captive orca Tokitae and the quest of the people of the Lummi Nation to return her home to the Salish Sea. Through a collaboration with award-winning puppeteer Amanda Villalobos, Magar incorporates puppetry and projection design to bring Tokitae to life. Magar received En Garde Arts’ 2024 Joan D. Firestone Award, and TOKITAE will have its first workshop in the fall of 2025.
Spanglish Sh!t
Book and Lyrics by Samora La Perdida
Music by Josiah Handelman, Matthew Zwiebel, and Mobéy Lola Irizarry
Produced by En Garde Arts
The revolution will be bilingual.
SPANGLISH SH!T tells the story of Brujita, a trans Puerto Rican witch.on a journey through memory, myth, and migration—from the lush hills of Puerto Rico to the cul-de-sacs of suburban New Jersey.
As her journey unfolds, so does a deeper reckoning: with colonization, queerness, family, and the whitewashed ghosts of her past. Bold, bilingual, and fiercely funny, SPANGLISH SH!T is a spellbinding new musical that collides political satire with Caribbean folklore, and ancestral memory with radical imagination.
Samora la Perdida (she/they) is a trilingual creator and performer. She starred in the 2022 Off-Broadway productions of Soho Rep’s Notes on Killing Seven Oversight, Management and Economic Stability Board Members, Quiara Alegría Hudes’ My Broken Language at Signature Theatre, as well as Tina Landau’s A Transparent Musical at the Mark Taper Forum in 2023. Her TEDxTalk, “Do Latines Need to Speak Spanish? Finding Your Lost Mother Tongue,” features spoken word and music from her upcoming bilingual brujería musical: Spanglish Sh!t. Spanglish Sh!t has been developed with Berkeley Rep, NYSCA and En Garde Arts. Her queer Spanglish rap opera, pato, pato, maricón, debuted at Ars Nova ANT FEST in 2018. Its tour of tristate area public schools was documented in the BRIC TV series Going in With Brian Vines. la Perdida graduated from LaGuardia HS as a YoungArts Presidential Scholar in the Arts, and from Carnegie Mellon University with a dual degree in Drama and Global Studies.
Who cares?
Created and written by Camila Madero
In her newest project, tri-lingual Argentinian American actress, playwright, and illustrator Camila Madero captures the delicate and vital realities of intergenerational friendship. Inspired by real life experience and testimony, Madero tells the story of the deeply human bond between Carol, who navigates the fog of dementia; Lonny, her fiercely devoted husband, battling his own health issues while bearing the burden of primary care-giving; and Dalia, a young woman who must navigate her artistic ambition through an eye-opening encounter with the realities of elders aging, friendship, and care in the U.S. today. As these three New Yorkers are drawn together by a serendipitous chemistry and a shared passion for beauty, humor, and language, Madero’s piece explores intergenerational friendship as a lifeline in choppy waters.