Erica Cruz Hernández* (Annie Cannon) she/her, is thrilled to be working with Central Square Theatre! NYC credits: NYU Skirball, Clubbed Thumb. Regional credits: Mojada (Indianapolis Shakespeare); Coriolanus, Much Ado About Nothing, A Christmas Carol, Une Tempête, The Comedy of Errors, Romeo and Juliet, Pericles, The Tempest (American Shakespeare Center); The River Bride, Hamlet, Cymbeline u/s (American Players Theatre); The Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure (Illinois Shakespeare Festival); Soldaderas (Goodman Theatre/Aguijón Theater). TV/Film: Law & Order: SVU, Chicago PD (NBC); Power Book IV: Force (STARZ); independent features En Algún Lugar/ A Place to Be (Iconoclast/Amazon) and the upcoming supernatural horror, Legado. Erica has also had the pleasure of assistant directing the musical Fun Home (Renaissance Theater) and a production of Jen Silverman’s The Moors (American Players Theatre) and is currently on faculty with the American Musical and Dramatic Academy NYC. She is a recipient of the Kate Neal Kinley Fellowship as well as the first in her family to pursue higher education and holds an MFA from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. AMOR a mi familia y mi Jess!

A native of Brooklyn, where everyone was indignant before breakfast, Phoebe Potts learned to tell stories to get her family to like her and to understand thorny issues. In Too Fat for China, Potts uses humor and honesty to tell the irreverent story of the terrible things she did for love.

Her comedic theater performance debuted on National Adoption Day, Nov. 23, 2019 and is a sequel to Potts’ graphic memoir, Good Eggs (Harper, 2010), which charts her travails with infertility and the endless rounds of treatments and miscarriages she and her husband endured. Roz Chast, the New Yorker cartoonist, called Potts’ memoir “sometimes funny, sometimes sad, but always honest, intelligent, and completely involving.”

Potts’ day jobs have included union organizing, public art after school programs and teaching and learning Torah with children and adults through “Visual Midrash.” Potts lives with her family in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

Ken Urban (Director) is an award-winning playwright, screenwriter and musician. His stage plays include THE MODERATE (Central Square Theater), DANGER AND OPPORTUNITY (Drama Desk Winner, East Village Basement), A GUIDE FOR THE HOMESICK (Off-Broadway at the DR2, Huntington Theatre Company, Trafalgar Studios in the West End), THE REMAINS (Studio Theatre), SENSE OF AN ENDING (59E59 Theatres, London’s Theatre503), NIBBLER (The Amoralists and Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), THE CORRESPONDENT (Rattlestick Playwrights Theater), THE AWAKE (59E59 Theatres, Chicago’s First Floor Theater), and THE HAPPY SAD (The Public Theatre/Summer Play Festival). His audio plays include VAPOR TRAIL (2022 Tribeca Festival and Playwrights Horizons’ Sound Stage) and A STICKY MEMENTO (NPR’s Playing on Air). He is a four-time recipient of the prestigious MacDowell Fellowship. Awards include Venturous Theater Fund Finishing Commission, EST/Alfred P. Sloan Science & Technology Project Commission, The Blue Ink Award for Playwriting, Weissberger Playwriting Award, New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Independent Reviewers of New England’s Award for Best New Script, Headlands Artist Residency, Millay Arts Residency, Dramatist Guild Fellowship, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts Fellowship and the A IS FOR Playwriting Award for plays about reproductive justice. He is an alumni of New Dramatists and an affiliated writer at the Playwrights’ Center. Ken wrote the screenplay for the feature-film adaptation of THE HAPPY SAD, directed by Rodney Evans. His plays are published by Concord Theatricals/Dramatists Play Service. He leads the band Occurrence and their music is released on Archie & Fox Records, a label that Ken runs with sound designer and musician Daniel Kluger. His first TV pilot THE ART OF LISTENING was optioned by ITV and Madison Wells Media. Ken taught writing at Harvard University, Princeton University, Tufts University and Davidson College. He is currently the Senior Lecturer of Theater and Director of Dramatic Writing at MIT. He is a proud member of the Dramatists Guild and the Writers Guild of America, and also a voting member of the Recording Academy.

Jared Mezzocchi (Director & Multimedia Designer) is a two-time Obie Award-winning theater artist, working as a director, multimedia designer, playwright, and actor. Based out of New York, Mezzocchi’s work has appeared at notable theaters nationwide, including Geffen Playhouse, Vineyard Theater, The Kennedy Center, Playwrights Horizons, TheatreWorks Hartford, Arena Stage, Woolly Mammoth (company member), and many more. In 2016, he received the Lucille Lortel and Henry Hewes Award for his work in Qui Nguyen’s Vietgone at the Manhattan Theatre club. In 2020, the New York Times spotlighted his multimedia innovations alongside the pandemic work of four other theater artists, including Andrew Lloyd Webber and Paula Vogel. His work on Sarah Gancher’s digital production of Russian Troll Farm was also celebrated as a New York Times critic pick, and praised for being one of the first digitally native successes for virtual theater. In 2023, this digital production of Russian Troll Farm won Mezzocchi his second Obie.

Most recently, Mezzocchi directed The Wind and The Rain: a Story about Sunny’s Bar at En Garde Arts and Vineyard Theater which was performed on a barge in NYC and called “Highbrow Brilliant” by New York Magazine. This past Fall 2025, Jared directed Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God at Playwrights Horizons, co-written by Jen Tullock and Frank Winters, performed by Jen Tullock.

Mezzocchi is a two-time MacDowell Artist Fellow, a 2012 Princess Grace Award winner, and recently celebrated his retirement at The University of Maryland, where he taught in the MFA Design program for the projection and multimedia track, a curriculum he created in 2012 that graduated 17 MFA students in Multimedia Design.

Over the pandemic, Mezzocchi founded Virtual Design Collective (VIDCO), which has aided in the development of over 50 new digital works over the 18 months of quarantine. This year, he is finishing his book, A Multimedia Designer’s Method to Theatrical Storytelling, which will be published through Routledge. Mezzocchi has a BA in theater and film from Fairfield University, and an MFA in performance and interactive media arts from Brooklyn College.

​​Paula Plum* is a stage, TV and film actress whose on- screen work
includes  “Next Stop Wonderland”, “Mermaids”, and “Irrational Man”. At last year’s 4th of July Celebration on the Esplanade, she performed with the Boston POPS in the Keith Lockhart 30th Anniversary Concert. Recent stage appearances include “A Winter’s Tale” with Commonwealth Shakespeare and “Romeo and Juliet” with Actors’ Shakespeare Project. Television credits include voicing characters on “Squigglevision” (ABC), “The Dick and Paula Celebrity Special” (FX), “Hey Money” (Oxygen) and “Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist” (Comedy Central). Her original plays include: Memorial, Wigged OUT!, and What Lips My Lips Have Kissed. Her solo show, Plum Pudding, garnered her critical praise and the 2003 IRNE award for Best Solo Performance. Paula was honored by the Boston Theatre Critics Association with the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence and for OutstandingActress for Miss Witherspoon, Lost in Yonkers, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and The Children. Ms. Plum trained at Ecole Phillipe Gaulier, Paris,The London Academy of Music and Dramatic Arts and is a Cum Laude graduate of Boston University’s School for the Arts, where she was honored as Distinguished Alumna in 2003. Ms. Plum is also an acting coach @paulaplum.com. She is married to actor Richard Snee.