¡Bienvenidos! Welcome to the rolling world premiere of Phanésia Pharel’s Dead Girl’s Quinceañera. It’s a gift for a creative team to grow with a production, and one that is not often available to playwrights. Thank you for supporting a theater that believes in the growth of new work and the importance of welcoming new voices to the stage.
Dead Girl’s Quinceañera is a celebration of young women’s imagination, initiative and courage. Although all four characters in this play identify as Latina, each one arrives with a different personal experience and history. In their collaboration and friendship, they transform their Quinceañeras, celebrating the tradition but subverting it—finding their own path while not losing their roots or their identities.
In Carol Gilligan’s 1982 landmark study of young women’s development, In a Different Voice, she notes that “during the transition into teenage years, girls often face a cultural conflict between their direct inner experiences and external expectations to be polite, selfless, or compliant…” In her study, she explored the importance of girls maintaining their voices to retain their selves: without voicing their fears and their strengths, they too easily became passive, compliant and lost. This sense of young women’s empowerment in a difficult world is at the center of this production’s vision: more than ever, we need to celebrate the power and agency of young Latina women in our midst.
¡Qué placer compartir este trabajo con ustedes! We hope you enjoy the ride.
Melia Bensussen
Director of Dead Girl’s Quinceañera
