Help Bring That Lost Orange Sauce to Life

Lost in the sauce? Good, us too!

that lost ORANGE SAUCE (written by me, Evan Davis and directed by Elena Menendez Sanchez ) is a full-length dramedy about Joe, an aspiring chef, who infiltrates Cookie’s restaurant to reclaim his deceased grandmother’s recipe, the Orange Sauce, while hooking up with DJ, Cookie’s grandson, an aspiring underground ambient-jungle disc jockey with lofty dreams of moving to the big city.

Note from Playwright:

That Lost Orange Sauce exists to incorporates DJing into the form of live drama. We believe everybody must exercise freedom of movement and expression in order to lighten the mental and physical load of the everyday grind.

This play is a love letter to Black queer folks figuring out their place in the world with regard to love, career, family, and spirituality. Being Black and queer means the world is full of creativity, grit, and possibility, yet everyone knows everyone, and I want to reflect those cramped yet enriching experiences in the settings of the kitchen to the underground club scene.

So much of our lives are lived in secrecy. bell hooks uses the word "dissimulating"—concealing/disguising one’s true actions and character, which is a central theme of this play.

This is my first feature-length production. I chose Dream Up Festival because of its commitment to new queer theater and social justice as a modality of art. Lost Orange Sauce queers the traditional Black family drama by infusing the rituals of DJing and ancestral veneration, inviting audiences to interrogate their own relationships to love, spirituality, recipes, and sexuality.

This production is a part of the Crystal Fields Presents Theater for the New City 2025 Dream Up Festival. Performance dates are TBD and will happen sometime between August 24 and September 14.

We need your support.

What is the money going towards?

1.) Paying our cast and crew a stipend

2.) Securing our spot in the festival and rehearsal costs

3.) Hiring a photographer/videographer to document the experience

4.) Catering and on-set needs

No donation is too small. All donors will receive a special thank you in the program.

Playwright and Director Bio:

Evan Davis is a Black playwright born and raised in Middletown, CT. Evan began writing as a stand-up comedian and then transitioned into playwriting. They founded Pushin the Pen, a Black writers collective located between CT and NYC. Evan centers Black ecologies and technologies and uses storytelling as a form of comedic catharsis and ancestral veneration. Recent credits include Songbird at the Garde Center Mayfly Play Festival and the NYU Reality Show at Radio City Music Hall/Skirball Center. They received a BFA in Dramatic Writing from NYU in May 2024.

Elena Menéndez Sánchez is an Afro-latinex multihyphenate artist who is interested in changing the boundaries of what mainstream theater can be and who it can be for. She received her BFA in Drama with a minor in Psychology, and uses that education to create spaces in which she and other people like her can feel safe and have a chance to be artists in a system that mainly prioritizes white, cis-heteropatriarchal stories. Elena was born in Canada and began her performing journey as a dancer at the mere age of 4 years old. She loved the lights and the stage from then, and had always pursued new ways of expression that had not yet been seen by others.