This March Cannonball Crash is doing a deep-dive into theatre! Join us as we celebrate theatre in many styles and stages of development. You will see works in progress, a solo clown show, a queer musical, and interactive experiences in the Fringe Arts Bar. Crash Kicks off at 6:30pm with Worklights, where playwrights Brooke Shilling, AZ Espinoza, Tyler Rocio Econa, and L M Feldman will each present 10 minutes of a play in development. After the readings head to the Fringe Arts Bar where you can engage in interactive offerings from Yannick Trapman-O’Brien and Jeff Evans. At 8pm we return to the Theater with Vile by Francesca Montanile Lyons, a solo performance that rides the line between pleasure and disgust, where clown and buffon hold a funhouse mirror to the artist’s self. End the evening at 9:30pm at the cabaret stage for HOMOS! A Solo, Disaster Musical, Bitch a queer post-apocalyptic musical, where Dan Kitrosser plays all the parts. As the days get longer, and the nights get warmer, come join us as we Spring into theatre. 

OPEN SEAS: Worklights
6:30pm-7:30pm 

Worklights brings you four exciting new pieces by local playwrights. Featuring work by Brooke Shilling, AZ Espinoza, Tyler Rocio Econa, and L M Feldman. Come get a 10 minute taste of what these artists are working on, that will leave you wanting more!  

Brooke Shilling will present Pirate Queens.
In this relatively true story, we follow the 18th-century tale of Mary Read, a woman dressed as a boy since childhood. The day she is captured by pirates, she meets Anne Bonny. The two share a unique, piratey love story until their end. Today, you’ll hear the beginning of the play.

AZ Espinoza will present Caribbean King.
Caribbean King is an equatorial, decolonial play in adaptive conversation with Shakespeare’s King Lear in which transmasculine Cord(elia) must coexist with his aging hotelier titan of a father on a Caribbean island that is about to face a hurricane of catastrophic proportions. A love letter to found family and queer community building, the play is structured to center Queer Black Diasporic excellence, including a chorus of drag performers who play the role of the hurricane itself.

Tyler Ecoña will present DEVOTEEBAG.
DEVOTEEBAG by Tyler Rocio Ecoña: Dumped by her longtime partner and caregiver, desperate for excitement, and recently blind-dating randos from Lex, part-time babysitter/solo cam worker Camila navigates life and love as a disabled queer woman in Philadelphia.

L M Feldman will present SHIN TO SHIN.
SHIN TO SHIN is an emotionally intimate and physically evocative new play about circus, healing, partnership, loss, and surviving the unforeseen.

CRASH: Vile
8pm-9pm  

Are you sad? Me too, bestie. Let’s stuff our faces with girl dinner (patriarchal pepperoni pizza pie) and order some face masks for self care (from Amazon because we need them TOMORROW) and watch some tv (that we’ve seen before) while we scroll tiktok (to judge a stranger’s Target haul) all to make sure that we absolutely DO NOT have a feeling (or a memory, or a critical thought.)

In Vile, Francesca Montanile Lyons brings you a solo performance that rides the line between pleasure and disgust, where clown and buffon hold a funhouse mirror to the artist’s self. Here, the laughter is tinged with nausea, and the nausea is tinged with relief. Ingredients include: the decay of late stage capitalism, a skewering of rape culture, the hilarity of depression, plus greasy toes, a balloon penis, extra cheese, and a side of bdsm. 

Content Considerations: consent violation, rape/rape culture, kink, depression, suicidal ideation. You can request more information about how these show up by contacting the artist: www.francescamontanilelyons.com/contact

Scenic Designer & Collaborator: Alicia Crosby
Sound Designer: Tom Carman

Francesca Montanile Lyons (she/her) is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Philadelphia: a performer, director, visual artist, and educator. She conceived of, wrote, and directed ‘Dear Diary LOL’- a play made with the words of real-life diaries of teenage girls in the late 90s/early 2000s- which premiered in the 2017 Philadelphia Fringe Festival, followed by a run at FringeArts and the New Ohio in NYC in 2018 to rave reviews (“…we absolutely need more theater like this.” – Exuent NYC 2019). She was a member of ‘Girl Poop’ (2018-2021), a “delightfully weird” femme foursome specializing in Pussy Pop Rock: short, high-octane ditties inspired by first-person experience set to simple and catchy beats. She also makes cheeky visual art that is often literally cheeky: drawings, embroideries, and animations that celebrate sensuality and eroticism. Across mediums, her work seeks to disempower shame and taboo through playful honesty & voyeuristic delight. Other credits include co-creating/directing ‘Rough & Tumble’ (Canonball Fest in PHL Fringe), ‘Legal Tender’ (PHL Fringe & AntFest), ‘Fourth Quarter’ (FPA Fest), co-creating/performing ‘The Hopefuls’ (2015-2106), and directing ‘All 100 Fires’ by Donna Oblongata (Panorama), ‘Die, Dumping, Die!’ (MuralArts/D3), and ‘Sometimes the Rain, Sometimes the Sea’ (Arts Bank). She has served as Co-Artistic Director of Antigravity Performance Project. Francesca’s teaching artistry has ranged from dramatic story times for infants and their caregivers to adjunct teaching at Temple University & UArts, with plenty in between: visiting school classrooms for theater curriculum with various organizations, bilingual arts and literacy classes with the Barnes Foundation/Puentes a las Artes, and sexuality education with Yes to Consent/Puentes de Salud. MFA in Devised Performance from UArts/Pig Iron School (2016). BA in Theatre Arts & Performance Studies from Brown U (2011).

Late Night Cabaret: HOMOS! A Solo Disaster Musical, Bitch
9:30pm-10:30pm 

Local Queer Dan Kitrosser wrote a queer post-apocalyptic musical but has always hated scheduling actors. So now, just like the chronic masturbator, he’s going to do it himself! In the 2023 Fringie Award winning solo show HOMOS! A SOLO DISASTER MUSICAL, BITCH, Dan will play all the roles and sing all songs about the end of times. But as Dan pieces his ‘end of day’s show together, song by song, reconstructing a deconstruction of disaster stories in this meta-cabaret, Dan’s ridiculous hilarious queer asks show asks if we’re at the end, might we also be at a brand  new beginning?

Dan Kitrosser is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and storyteller. He cowrote the screenplay for WE THE ANIMALS which premiered at Sundance Film Festival 2018, winning the NEXT: Innovator Award, Best Narrative at OutFest 2018 and is nominated for 5 Independent Spirit Awards and a GLAAD Award. His plays include TAR BABY, DEAD SPECIAL CRABS (monologues published in Smith & Kraus Best Men’s and Women’s) and THE MUMBLINGS (optioned for TV series by FOX) and you can hear Dan as the host of the acclaimed iHeartRadio podcast SVETLANA! SVETLANA!, a ten-episode podcast about Dan’s obsessions with Josef Stalin’s daughter. Dan is the 2018 Peter Shaffer Award Winner, a 2016 TimeWarner 150 Fellow, a 2014 Sundance Screenwriting Fellow, a 2014 Harold and Mimi Steinberg Playwriting Fellow, a 2015 TerraNOVA Collective Groundbreaker, a Maryland Filmmakers Fellow and for his writing of TAR BABY, Dan received the Fringe First Award for Playwriting at the 2015 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and a Special Citation from Amnesty International’s Freedom of Expression Awards. Dan just received the coveted Fringie Award at the 2023 Philadelphia Fringe Festival for his show HOMOS! A Solo Disaster Musical, bitch. Dan is the Artistic Director of Writopia Lab’s Worldwide Plays Festival, a festival of plays written by young playwrights from all over the world, now in its 15th year. He received his MFA from The New School for Drama and serves as an adjunct professor at Temple University. He lives in South Philadelphia with his fabulous husband Jordan and his narcissistic dog, Gemma.

In the Bar

Encounter art works in the bar throughout the evening.

Created by Jeff Evans, Idle Hands is a series of interactive exhibits that offer you an alternative engagement for social spaces. If you’re tired of talking to people, but don’t want to go home just yet, come put your hands to idle ends.

Videos by Nia Benjamin.

Nia Benjamin is an agender, queer, Afro-Carribean multidisciplinary artist, performer, filmmaker, set/projection designer, video-synth artist and director of experimental theatre. Their work uses the synthesis of dance, poetry, live music, theatre and video arts to create live performances about the sovereignty, liberation and interiority of Black and Brown, queer and trans* people. Nia is the Co-Artistic Director of Ninth Planet, a Philadelphia based experimental theatre company that makes original works of performance that centers people of color, women, queer and trans* people. Their most recent full-length work, high noon was the winner of a 2022 Fringies Award.