About the Project
“From Crack To Crocs: A Human AF Show” is a developing autobiographical storytelling piece rooted in my experience growing up Nuyorican on the Lower East Side in the 1980s, navigating poverty, religious extremism, and street-level survival while searching for belonging, grappling with inherited ideas of masculinity, and forging a sense of meaning. The show blends dark humor, cultural specificity, and present-moment reflection to explore how systemic neglect, inherited trauma, and the longing for acceptance shape the stories we carry into adulthood.
I was raised between worlds that were both rigid and volatile. On one side was a strict Jehovah’s Witness upbringing governed by fear of demons, corporal punishment, and the apocalypse. On the other was a street reality shaped by addiction, crime, violence, and hyper-masculinity in predominantly Black and Brown neighborhoods, where survival often required silence, toughness, moral compromise, and hiding behind bravado. As a Puerto Rican kid growing up in New York City, I learned early how race, class, and environment quietly determine which options feel visible and which paths seem inevitable. By my teens, I was already selling crack.
By my twenties, I had survived multiple near-death experiences tied directly to that life. These moments did not arrive as cinematic turning points but as cumulative reckonings. The show traces those experiences alongside the cultural and familial forces that normalized danger while offering few models for emotional literacy, healing, or self-interrogation. Chaos became ordinary, and delusion served as a shield.
Structurally, the piece unfolds as a series of interconnected stories that move non-linearly through time, reflecting how memory and identity live in the body. Humor is used not to soften the material but to tell the truth without posturing; laughter becomes a universal connector rather than an escape. I am neither hero, villain, nor casual observer, but a human exposed. The work rejects redemption narratives that flatten BIPOC experience into trauma consumption. Instead, it examines how awareness, accountability, and compassion can emerge slowly, unevenly, and often in resistance to cultural conditioning.
The production is intentionally minimal. A single performer, a stool, video projections, and restrained sound and lighting cues support the storytelling without spectacle. Moments from childhood, street life, and spiritual fear collide through projected imagery that evokes place, memory, and psychological state rather than literal reenactment. Video is used sparingly to suggest the Lower East Side of the 1980s, religious iconography, and interior states, creating contrast between what is remembered and what is felt. These elements support the live storytelling without overtaking it, keeping the performer and audience in direct relationship. The weight of the journey is carried by language, emotion, and presence. Each performance remains responsive to the audience, functioning as a live conversation in which timing, emphasis, and emotional charge shift in real time.
At its core, this show asks what it means for a Puerto Rican person shaped by survival, environment, and confusion to choose consciousness over repetition. While deeply personal, the piece aims for resonance across communities by grounding itself in lived BIPOC experience rarely afforded space for complexity, contradiction, self-reflection, and humor.
Production Team
