Your Upcoming Trip to Neverland

This blog post also lives on my Substack.

Welcome to springtime! Here in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, it’s just getting consistently warm enough that I’ve considered sitting on my balcony a few times. (One of these days, it’s going to happen!)

But it’s not looking like even when the weather gets consistently nice, I’ll have a ton of time to sit on my porch this month. Here’s what’s going on in Peterfentonland:

We’re Going to Neverland!

I THINK WE’RE LOST will Premiere in Philly April 10-19

We’re starting April off with a bang! Pier Players is a Philadelphia-based theatre company dedicated to promoting, supporting, and giving a platform to the Philadelphia community’s new works and new visions for pre-existing pieces co-founded by my dear friend and 2019 Philly Fringe Festival collaborator Chelsea Cylinder and three of her actress friends (who have in turn also become my friends). Pier Players’ seventh ever production will be the World Premiere of I THINK WE’RE LOST, my unhinged, darkly comedic, not-quite sequel/not-quite adaptation of J.M. Barrie’s classic novel Peter Pan for a young adult audience.

The show will run April 10-19 at Theatre Exile in South Philadelphia. I haven’t seen a rehearsal of this show since the table read, so I’m going into this world premiere next week just as ready to be surprised as any audience member.

Get Tickets

The general press release for this play was run in a number of publications, but here’s the posting in Arts News Now, a publication curated by my dear friend Mandee Hammerstein. You’ll see a quote from me about the explicit connection to Philadelphia I created with this play, drawing on my personal experience: Read the Press Release

The four co-founders of Pier Players and I made an appearance on Call Time: A Theatre Pod a few weeks ago to discuss the upcoming world premiere. One reason I’m incredibly excited to see the premiere is you can tell the joy and love that has brought this team together, and the genuine enthusiasm each one of the Pier Players co-founders has for this play:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ykb__MXw2JU

And finally, Director Madison Caudullo was interviewed for the Philadelphia Gay News about the production of I THINK WE’RE LOST. I really appreciated hearing her share in depth what she’s taken from this script and the ways in which the cast has found meaning in a script that was so personal to me. I knew from our first conversation that Madison would be a great Director fit for this play, and this interview underscored it: Read the Director Interview

Trying Something New:

A Community Theater Musical

So back in January, I let my friends bully me into auditioning for a musical for the first time since high school. 🤦🏻‍♂️🤣

Newtown Arts Company, the same producing company I directed BONNIE & CLYDE at last year at this time and the community theater I workshopped the earliest drafts of CORONATION at, is producing a production of Stephen Schwartz’s PIPPIN. Somehow, my combination of singing, dancing, and acting landed me a spot in the cast! I am playing a number of different roles within the Ensemble, with a heavy emphasis on dance—I’m a featured dancer in one of the more significant (and bold) numbers in the show. Who would’ve thought? Not me, that’s for sure.

Also in the cast are a few familiar faces from BONNIE & CLYDE, including Liam Sullivan (CLYDE) as PIPPIN, Amanda Cutalo (BLANCHE) as FASTRADA, Grace Tate (not pictured above) with me in the Ensemble, and Blue Colacchio (most notably, Blue has also played Class President CANDICE in every workshop of CORONATION I’ve been part of) as the Leading Player. I’ve of course made a few new friends along the way, as well!

I ultimately made the decision to audition and commit to PIPPIN to learn more about directing by going through a new show in a low-stakes setting as an actor. It’s been a very educational experience for me, not always quite in the ways I was expecting, but I’m leaving with the confidence that I will bring all the lessons from this experience and my prior directing skills into my next opportunity. I’d also say it’s been healing to act in a musical at age 30, very confident in my personhood, gender, and sexual identity. I’m doing things I never expected I’d be comfortable doing onstage in this play and while 16-year-old me would probably be mortified, I thoroughly enjoy those moments.

Marketing at Passage Theatre:

Our 41st Anniversary Gala - April 25

Thanks to a half-million dollar New Jersey EDA A.R.T. Phase II grant awarded to Passage Theatre Company, I recently accepted a promotion! 🎉 If you did not already know, I work as the Marketing Associate at Passage Theatre Company in Trenton, New Jersey. I design posters, programs, and digital assets, manage social media for Passage, and facilitate our public communications and press relations. I’ve held this position since August 2023. (My niece was actually born the week I started at Passage, so it’s very easy for me to track exactly how long I’ve worked there). While my title and general responsibilities have not changed, the amount I can do and commensurate salary have expanded significantly with this promotion.

Passage is a BIPOC-led equity theater and Broadway staging house whose mission is to create and produce socially-relevant plays and arts programming that deeply resonate with the diverse communities of Trenton, New Jersey. We are celebrating our company’s 41st Anniversary in April with a fundraiser gala on Saturday, April 25 at the Trenton War Memorial. My dear friend and colleague Monah Yancy (our Director of Advancement at Passage) wrote the following about our upcoming Gala:

“In a time when so many arts organizations have been on the front line fighting to stay above and ahead, Passage Theatre continued to forge forward with the great love, support and strength from the community to make this season a phenomenal success. Freedom Has No Rehearsal is the theme for this year’s celebration as we show we are unafraid and must hold freedom in our hands. The quote from Amiri Baraka, “A man is either free or he is not. There cannot be any apprenticeship for freedom.” This is what storytelling should be; no compromise! Theatre brings people together as they strive to be seen and heard. Theatre is the language the people speak when to share a collective voice as to empower, educate, enlighten and make an impact.

We’re very excited for this Gala, where we will announce Passage Theatre’s 42nd Season. I of course designed the branding for both the Gala and the upcoming season.

Gala Tickets

And… We’re Writing!

Gutting and Rewriting One; Researching for Another

Did you know I wrote a few things before ABANDON ALL HOPE?

That’s OK, sometimes I forget, too.

My third-ever play was titled SEE AMID THE WINTER SNOW, the basic pitch of which was: let’s take a bog-standard holiday rom-com plot, have it be narrated by a sassy Snowman with a thick southern accent, and make it about Santa Claus’ son wooing the village schoolteacher. As a wacky subplot, there is a blackmail scandal in Santa’s Workshop while Mrs. Claus runs for Mayor of the North Pole. Oh, and the whole story is a full-length retelling of Little Red Riding Hood. (I promise, this made sense in my head at the time)

Parts of this script were gold, and the premise was really ripe for sociopolitical commentary that I just wasn’t interested in making in my early 20s when I originally drafted the play. I had an ambitious concept, sprawling plot, and huge cast, none of which I quite had the craft to execute as well as I could now.

Now at 30, I am doing an entire rehaul of the tone and plot, streamlining the cast and significantly cutting down on narrative clutter (no Red Riding Hood plot, I can tell you that much) to focus on what was genuinely really fun and intriguing about this unhinged holiday dark comedy, exploring the prompt as I’d write it as a new play now. The world is different now in 2026, and I have a very different attitude toward institutional power than I did in 2017. I am taking inspiration this time from the musical CABARET, the sitcom Parks and Recreation, and Muppet Christmas Carol. Take from that what you will.

No one has touched the script in a production capacity since we did it in the 2019 Philly Fringe Festival, so to the vast majority of folks, SEE AMID (OR, THE YULETIDE SHAKEDOWN) will be a brand-new play. I aim to have a first draft of this reboot done by April 30. The draft is coming along quick, because when you know where a story is going... well, it comes together quickly.

As for brand-new projects: in the past month, I read My Life With Bonnie and Clyde, the memoir by Blanche Barrow detailing her life on the run with the notorious outlaw couple as part of the Barrow Gang. I fell in love with these outlaws directing their show last year. I’ve been kicking around the idea of writing a non-musical play featuring Bonnie, Clyde, and the rest of the Barrow Gang, so this memoir was a bit of research for that hypothetical (or… somewhat hypothetical) new play project. The fun thing about historical figures is you can write about them even if someone else already did…

Fun fact: this section does not encompass all the writing projects I have in various stages right now, a few others are floating or working; these are just the couple I feel ready to discuss publicly at this time 😉

And that’s all she wrote for April 2026! Thanks for following along on my journey, I literally can’t write if there isn’t an audience, so I promise: you matter to me. Feel free to reach out anytime. Have a great Easter, Passover, or if neither apply, have a great weekend! 🐣💐