Not My Grandmother's Daughter

Solo Show · ma chan productions - written and performed by harley brooke walker - produced and directed by michael franco · Ages 10+ · United States of America

one person show

Not My Grandmother’s Daughter is a newly revised work that explores the relationship a young woman has with her mother through the relationship she has with her grandmother. She interconnects the history of their hands through generations with the help of shadow, sound, and paper mache. A love letter through time. 

The show is crafted by Harley Walker, a first year graduate student studying Puppet Arts at the University of Connecticut. After spending a summer with her grandmother collecting her memories and stories via voice memos, she began to dream up a way to share her grandmother’s extraordinarily magic life and to better understand her own mother daughter relationship. Through the use of shadow puppetry, which has the ability to bend through space and time, life and death and remains one of the oldest art forms in existence, she found her grandmother’s voice and her own.

This show is a work of self revelatory theater. The version you see will never be repeated because the nuance of shadow makes it so. It is a vehicle for catharsis and a way to explore new ways of looking at family dynamics. 

Content Advisory: Loss of a parent

Production Team


michael franco *

producer/director

harley walker *

writer/performer

kayla silverio *

poster artwork

emiliano rios *

shadow theater fabricator

* Fringe Veteran