Director: Alex Torra 

​Ensemble: Aram Aghazarian, Rachel Camp, Benjamin Camp, Sydney Camp, Danielle Currica, Makoto Hirano, Pippa Keenan, Mel Krodman, Marcie Mamura, Iris McCloughan, Shavon Norris, Megan Quinn

Creative Producer & Production Manager: Jillian Jetton

The 10-year mark of Philadelphia’s audacious 24-year performance experiment.

10 years ago, Philadelphia’s Team Sunshine Performance dared themselves to do something no theater company has done before: invite the same ensemble every 2-3 years to remake the same show… for 24 years. The Sincerity Project is an ambitious and audacious multi-decade theater piece that changes with each iteration in response to shifts in the creators’ lives and in the world. Each iteration serves as an original piece of theater that allows the artists and audience to sincerely engage with the passage of time. 

A decade into this experiment The Sincerity Project has taken many forms, yielding and morphing to the changes in the artists’ lives and in the world. Over these 10 years, ensemble members have found life partners, witnessed the death of their parents, become parents, purchased homes, moved cities, and stepped more deeply into their queerness and trans identity. 

Disrupting the forward momentum of contemporary life, these regular returns create a container to pause and reflect on the harrowing, beautiful, and complex realities of being alive. Audiences are invited to join in this collective pause, writing a letter to their future selves that will be available to read at every future installment. By year 24, some audience members will hold 12 letters in their hands. 

For the first time in the 10 years The Sincerity Project #5 (2024) focuses on Lead Artist and Creative Director Alex Torra, on his journey to become a parent. Through the eyes of two pre-teens and ten adults with a vast array of relationships to parenthood, this installment asks: how do you prepare to raise a child in today’s world? And what are queer, radical ways to imagine a family?

Venue

FringeArts
140 N. Columbus Blvd.
Philadelphia, PA 19106

Performances

Tuesday, December 10 at 7pm
Wednesday, December 11 at 7pm
Thursday, December 12 at 7pm
Friday, December 13 at 7pm
Saturday, December 14 at 1pm & 7pm
Sunday, December 15 at 1pm

The Sincerity Project’s first installment took place in December 2014 at FringeArts and is now celebrating the 10-year mark. Since this first performance, the project has consistently featured celebrated performers Aram Aghazarian, Benjamin Camp, Rachel Camp, Makoto Hirano, Mel Krodman, Iris McCloughan. In 2021 and now in 2024, Sincerity will also feature Danielle Currica, Marcie Mamura, Shavon Norris, and Megan Quinn. Lastly, this specific iteration features two young performers, both connected to Sincerity through adults involved in the project: Sydney Camp (age 9) and Pippa Keenan (age 11). 

Each installment of The Sincerity Project has reflected the shifts in the lives of the artists’ and in the world since the last installment. The project’s first two installments, in 2014 and 2016, captured various aspects of the ensemble’s lives, including early adulthood, hope for the future, and loneliness. In the third installment (2019), the project focused on grief as two ensemble members wrestled with the loss of their fathers in the same period of time, and the fourth (2021) focused on how we might begin to process the life-altering events of 2020 and 2021. 

This latest installment uses Alex Torra’s upcoming potential parenthood as a lens to explore what it might be like to raise a child in our complex and often chaotic world. Alex, who is adopted and hopes to adopt in near future, started this process by asking the two children (one of whom was also adopted), “What makes a good parent?” Through their experiences and perspectives and those of the rest of the ensemble – some parents, some childfree by choice or circumstance – this installment will continue to explore, as it has for a decade, the queer, radical, and imaginative ways that “family” can be chosen, built, and sustained.

Team Sunshine Performance is a Philadelphia-based organization founded in 2010 by artists from varied performance backgrounds (physical theater, contemporary dance, and classical theater), who came together with the intention of creating original works of experimental yet approachable performances. In operation for over a decade, Team Sunshine has honed an effective brand of collaborative play-making that incorporates wide-ranging aesthetic styles and ideas generated by a collective of performers, directors and designers alike, garnering critical acclaim and a stalwart popular following. Each new work builds on Team Sunshine’s successful history of socially-engaged projects and its rigorous approach to cultivating genre-defying, investigative performance works and events that balance joy with deep investigation, contend with urgent social issues, facilitate critical discourse, and pose creative solutions. 

The company views its full-length performances as flagships of their work. Examples include: PUNCHKAPOW, an exploration of male fragility/friendship; JAPANAMERICA WONDERWAVE, a touching and humorous dance-theatre elegy; HENRY IV: YOUR PRINCE AND MINE, a Shakespearean spectacle featuring a 100-person cast of community performers from 36 neighborhoods in Philadelphia; THE SINCERITY PROJECT, an iterative, 24-year experiment in vulnerability and aging (currently in its fifth installment); THE SOCIETY OF CIVIL DISCOURSE, an interactive debate/soapboxing event; and ¡BIENVENIDOS BLANCOS! OR WELCOME WHITE PEOPLE!, a bilingual play featuring an international cast focusing on U.S-Cuba relations (6x Barrymore Award nominee including Best New Play). Current projects include: THE GREAT AMERICAN GUNSHOW, focused on gun culture in America; YOUR OPTIMISM IS NOT REQUIRED, a project envisioning a hopeful future in the wake of our intersecting climate, social, and political crises; and OÍR MI LLANTO, an exploration of spirituality and ecstatic states in queer, Latine bodies.

You can find Team sunshine on instagram @teamsunshineperformanceco or facebook @TSunPCo 

Current Sincerity Project Members

Neil Bardhan, Katie Brady, Ellen Chenoweth, Amanda Chudnow, Barbara Domue, Jerene Good, Jesse Gottschalk, Liz Green, Stephanie Harmelin, Christie Hartwell, Jillian Jetton, Arthur Larrabee, Laurie McCants, Joshua McLucas, Ky Mettler, Brian Ratcliffe, Erin Read, Elizabeth Scanlon, Cliff Schwinger, Roxana Torra, Susan Walker, Teresa Wilensky

For more information on joining The Sincerity Project Membership, please visit our website.

Alex Torra is a 2023 Princess Grace Special Project recipient for The Sincerity Project #5 (2024) – 10th Anniversary. This project was financed in part by a Swarthmore Faculty Research Support Grant and a grant from the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, acting through the Commonwealth Financing Authority. Certain previous iterations of The Sincerity Project have been supported and presented by FringeArts. 

Support for Team Sunshine Performance provided by Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance, with support from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts (include logos of GPCA and PCA), the Philadelphia Cultural Fund (include logo), Independence Foundation, and the Philadelphia Foundation. This grant is being made from The Jay and Deen Kogan Fund.

Asian Arts Initiative, Jackie Andrews, Destiny Barnett, Angel Canady, Anna Flenner, Cameron Jankowski, Natalie Le, Donovan Lockett, Liz Marenkova, Matt Nelson, Eden Nguntling, Chloe To, Tenia Weeks, Kristen Long, Dave Keenan, Sarah Gladwin Camp, Ann Callahan, Anthony Camp, Alexandria Capone, Donkey Dover, Ellie Furstenberg, Jake Hooker, Lucy Jackson, Emily Johnson, Tim Kelly, Charles Meyers, Bonnie Paul, Mia Rotondo, Benjamin Smallen, Alan Smith