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 is a playwright, screenwriter and musician. His stage plays include 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 play VAPOR TRAIL was selected for the 2022 Tribeca Festival’s Audio Storytelling series and released as part of Playwrights Horizons’ Sound Stage that fall. 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, 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 Dramatists Play Service/Broadway Licensing. He leads the band Occurrence and they have released six albums 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 is the Senior Lecturer of Theater Arts and Director of Dramatic Writing at MIT. He has taught writing at Harvard University, Princeton University, Tufts University and Davidson College. He lives in New York City with his partner Johnny.

Jared Mezzocchi (director) 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. In Spring 2024, Mezzocchi directed Sandra at TheaterWorks Hartford. This Fall 2025, Jared will be directing 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 (Director) is a founding member of Actors’ Shakespeare Project. She was Artistic Director of WGBH’s A Christmas Celtic Sojournpartnering with the late great Brian O’Donovan for seventeen years, touring Concerts throughout New England during the Christmas holiday season. She also served as Artistic Director of Gloucester Stage from 2021 to 2023. Directing credits include POTUS (SpeakEasy Stage) Macbeth and School for Scandal, (Actors’ Shakespeare Project), Steel Magnolias (Stoneham Theatre), Jake’s Women (Merrimack Repertory Theatre), Baltimore Waltz and Twelfth Night (Lyric Stage), I’m Not Rappaport, Out of Sterno, The Last Schwartz (Gloucester Stage), The Lady and the Clarinet (New Ehrlich Theatre), Lone Star, Laundry & Bourbon (Back Alley Theatre), Tell Me On A Sunday (Stuart St. Theatre) Romeo and Juliet (Happy Medium Theatre) and The Understudy, and Love Loss and What I Wore (HUB Theater). As the 2009 recipient of the Fox Actor Fellowship awarded to five actors nationwide, Paula conducted a workshop at her host theatre, SpeakEasy Stage, entitled Handling the Hot Moments, exploring the ways actors negotiate intimacy on stage. Her article of the same title was published in the October 2011 issue of American Theatre Magazine. While she is best known to Boston audiences as an actress, Paula is also a playwright, teacher and acting coach. Her most recent play, What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, explores the passions and peccadilloes of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay. With Actors’ Shakespeare Project, she has played Phedre, Lady Macbeth, Cleopatra, Beatrice, Mistress Overdone, the Nurse and the Countess in All’s Well that Ends Well. Paula is the recipient of the Elliot Norton Award for Sustained Excellence, five IRNE awards, four Elliot Norton Awards for Outstanding Actress, and was honored with the 2003 Distinguished Alumna of Boston University’s College of Fine Arts. She is married to actor Richard Snee. Coaching @paulaplum.com.