Create Awareness about Femicide.

We are raising money for the Staged and Filmic Reading of my play titled "Pájaros" (Birds), which is a play to create more awareness about gender violence and femicide. Femicide, unfortunately, is a pressing issue in the world at large, and Theater and Art can help us create conscience about it. Director Luis Caballero will create a spellbinding hybrid (theatre and film) experience that brings to life the world created in "Pájaros" (Birds). Appealing to the savvy New York and Puerto Rico Theater scene as well as the underserved Latino market, we believe that Birds could be a success with the ability to tour easily within the United States, The Hispanic Caribbean, Latin America, and Spain.

With your contribution we will be able to support the travel and accommodations budget for the actors in Puerto Rico to travel to NYC, and the actors in NYC to travel to Puerto Rico.

Synopsis: 
Two friends, Luisa and Claudia, have the dream of leaving the atavistic, and violent context of the coastal town in southern Puerto Rico where they live. They plan to go to New York with Claudia’s family, who has lived in Loisaida for many decades, to set up a hair salon. However, the context of violence puts a halt to their dream. Through this story, Pájaros seeks to reveal one of the most pressing social and ethical dilemmas in contemporary Puerto Rican society and the world at large: femicide. “Pájaros” relates to the experience of Puerto Ricans on the island as well as that of Latinos in New York through the depiction of the continual diaspora of Puerto Ricans to this city and their historical participation in the United States’ wars; in this case the war of Afghanistan.

 
Jennifer Duprey, Ph.D. Cornell University, is Associate Professor of Iberian and Latin American theater, Catalan and Transatlantic Studies at Rutgers University, Newark. She also teaches graduate courses in Iberian theater at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. Duprey is the author of The Aesthetics of the Ephemeral: Memory Theaters in Contemporary Barcelona SUNY UP, 2014 (Nominated for best book in Catalan Studies by the North American Catalan Society, 2015) and Whose Voice is This? Iberian and Latin American Antigones (Hispanic Issues 2012). Her academic articles are published in several journals in United States, Spain, England, and Puerto Rico. In 2014 she delivered a conference paper at the Coloquio Internacional Espacios Urbanos en el Teatro Español de lo siglos XX y XXI in Munster, Germany. This was an academic event where the Spanish playwrights Carmen Resino and Diana de Paco also delivered a conference paper. The foremost Catalan playwright Josep Maria Benet i Jornet was Duprey’s first mentor in dramatic writing. In the United States, she has taken courses in creative writing with Joane Mackowski (UC, Cornell). Since she was a little girl theater has been part of Duprey’s life and imagination. She truly believes that theater can unveil realities that otherwise would not be seen. "Pájaros" (Birds) is her first play.

 Luis Caballero, M.F.A New York University, is a writer, actor, theater, and film director with over 35 years of experience. He has directed the famous production GALA Puerto Rico…¡fuá! whose cast was nominated for the Helen Hayes Award in 2013. Caballero has directed in his natal Puerto Rico, in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. Among his credits as a theater director, are the Off-Broadway DC-7: The Roberto Clemente Story; María, No Exit; The House of Bernarda Alba, Las máscaras; Boy George se está dejando barba (Centro de Bellas Artes-Best Director Award); Don Quixote; The Rice Story, Bedtime Stories (The musical), Resurrection; Puerto Rico…¡fuá! (HOLA Prize for Best Director); Lorca, Puerto Rican for a Day; and La Lupe: My Life and My Destiny (Puerto Rican Traveling Theater, NYC). Other Off-Broadway productions are Don Quijote en Nueva York, and They Call Me La Lupe at the LAB Theater in the Public Theater. His credits in film include La Gringa: A Tale of a Town; El Color de la Guayaba (winners of the Rincón Film Festival and selected for the Chicago International Film Festival) as well as Romeo & Romeo. His most recent plays as theater director include the staging of Humberto Robles’ Frida Kahlo: Long Live Life as part of the 2018 United Solo Festival at the Theater Row, and The Riot by Leo Cabranes Grant as part of the 2019 Fuerza Fest Latinx LGBTQ Arts Festival at the Julia de Burgos Performance Art Center. Currently, Caballero is working on his next film title La canela. He has won six awards as Best Director and Best Playwright.