Albany, NY -- The UAlbany Performing Arts Center is pleased to present Dan Froot & Company in Pang! for three public performances held on the uptown University at Albany campus. 

Pang! is an original work adventurously staged as a triptych of live radio plays based on the oral histories of real working-class American families hungering for change.  Written with love, humor and intelligence, the work is a response to increasing socioeconomic disparity. It explores social challenges ranging from food insecurity to gun violence to foreclosure to anti-immigrant bias. Pang! aims to raise awareness, decrease stigma and promote cross-class dialogue around circumstances faced by families living below the poverty line.

Performed as if recording a live radio broadcast or podcast, the actors at microphones voice dozens of characters from 18-months to 77-years old; from a Burundian refugee speaking in his home language to a 7-year-old Miami boy whose dialogue is spoken in unison by the entire ensemble.  Pang!’s performers include Natalie Camunas, Krista Gonzalez, Christopher Rivas and Froot.

Over the course of eight months in 2015-16, the company created six book-length oral histories of families living with food insecurity in Cedar Rapids, Los Angeles and Miami. They then collaborated with one of the families from each city to devise the three 30-minute plays that comprise Pang!. The families consulted with the company continuously throughout the adaptation, rehearsal and performance processes.

The stories include a family who makes a harrowing escape from war-torn Burundi and resettles as refugees in Eastern Iowa, a single mom living with her nine spirited children and her cantankerous elderly uncle who are swindled into foreclosure on their Los Angeles family home of 65 years and a seven-year-old boy who sews seeds of hope by fantasizing his family's way out of a Miami neighborhood besieged by violence and beset by racist politics.

“These are not stories about hunger per se. They are stories about families, who happen to be hungry from time to time. These families teach us that hunger and food insecurity are so deeply woven into the fabric of low-income families’ lives that they’re inseparable from other pressing issues that they may face on a daily basis: foreclosure, cultural and language barriers, racism and gun violence, to name just a few,” shares Froot. “Each family has impressed upon us their own reasons for sharing their stories through theatre.”

Froot goes on to say, “I believe life-stories have the power to dispel fear, challenge one’s values and inspire compassion. I want to understand, from street-level, forces that come between the world’s abundance and so many of the people in our midst. There is urgency in the impulse to tell these particular stories. Bringing diverse groups of people together to listen to each other’s stories is surely an end in itself.”

Froot is a producer, writer, composer, monologist, dancer and saxophonist. He received a Bessie Award for his music/theater work Seventeen Kilos of Garlic. He was also bestowed with a City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and National Foundation for Jewish Culture playwriting fellowship for his gangster-vaudeville, Shlammer (2005). Dan’s music concerts, theater pieces and performance events have been presented by leading art centers across the U.S., and in Europe, Africa and South America. He has composed numerous scores for dance and theater companies, has created an ongoing series of collaborative interdisciplinary duets with choreographer David Dorfman and has danced, acted and played music nationally and internationally with the likes of Victoria Marks, Ralph Lemon, Yoshiko Chuma & The School of Hard Knocks, Mabou Mines, David Cale, Ping Chong & Co. and Dan Hurlin. Dan teaches at UCLA’s Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance.

Advance tickets are $15 for the general public and $10 for students, seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff.  Tickets purchased on the day of the show (pending availability) are $20 for the general public and $15 for students, seniors and UAlbany faculty-staff.  All tickets must be purchased on-line from the UAlbany Performing Arts Center’s web site at www.albany.edu/pac.  Information and assistance can be obtained by contacting the UAlbany Performing Arts Center’s main office at (518) 442-3995 or [email protected].

In addition to the public performance, Pang! will also be performed for area high school students on Thursday and Friday, April 20 & 21 at 10am.  Admission is free but reservations are required.  Limited seating is available. Educators wishing to bring groups can contact the UAlbany Performing Arts Center office at (518) 442-3995 or [email protected].  Home school students and parents are also welcome.

Patrons who feel able to do so will have the opportunity to donate non-perishable food items for UAlbany’s Purple Pantry and local community-based pantries.  Collecting such items has been a season long initiative in anticipation of the Pang! performances. To-date, well over 1000 items have been contributed and disseminated in the Capital Region.

The company’s residency and performances are presented with support from the University at Albany Foundation, University Auxiliary Services and UAlbany's StAR Program.

When and Where: Thursday through Saturday, April 20-22, 2023 at 7:30pm on the uptown University at Albany campus located at 1400 Washington Avenue. 

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