Publik Private

Overview

This bilingual solo performance grapples with history like a best frenemy. The Darb is an earnest millennial clown with one big hope: if they can connect to thier queer ancestors thier own role in life will become clear. The Darb unearths two gender non-conforming ancestors who’s lives they hope to learn something from. Le Monje Alferez is a conquistador at the turn of the 17th centuryfor who ran away from parental expectations of piety and a simple life in the convent and toward the brutal conflict of the Arauco war and other South American atrocities. The Publik Universal Friend is a self-proclaimed genderless profit from a New England Quaker family who rose to prominence around the time of the American Revolutionary War. What The Darb discovers in embodying their lives and it’s implications for how to move forward in today’s world cannot be unseen. This deeply researched and enriching conversation across five centuries of American colonization uses puppets, poetics and projections to honor the gender diversity of ancestors while refusing to look away from their transgressions.

Alma's Engine

Alma's Engine is the processed focused creative ministry of Eppchez! Since 2016 Alma's engine had been developing and producing new work by Eppchez across a variety of mediums—spreading whimsical and earnest dis-ease with every work of art.

Eppchez! is a Quaker, gender-expansive, Cuban & Jewish theater maker, musician, and designer. Eir positive obsessions include crushing white supremacy, banishing antiblackness, and repairing this mess; belting surprisingly evocative lyrics; moving like a creature, a clown, an emotive somatic being; unexpected, true stories in speculative worlds; and the design needs of gender-expansive people. Aside from eir work with Alma's engine Eppchez performs in the cabaret scene as Topsy Pendejo and has collaborated with such Philly companies as Pig Iron, Simpatico, Bearded Ladies, Swimpony, and Applied Mechanics among others.

Credits

Creator/Perfomer: Eppchez!, Director: Gil Johnson, Stage Management: Eleanor Safer, Sound design/composor: Eppchez Yes, Director of Photography: Madeline Bishop, Camera assistant: Darby Irrgang, Projectionist: Austin Blakely, sound: Christian Kircher, Video Editor: Eppchez Yes