The Sincerity Project #5 (2024)
The 10-year mark of Philadelphia’s audacious 24-year performance experiment.
10 years ago, Philadelphia’s Team Sunshine Performance dared themselves to do something no theater company has done before: invite the same ensemble every 2-3 years to remake the same show… for 24 years. The Sincerity Project is an ambitious and audacious multi-decade theater piece that changes with each iteration in response to shifts in the creators’ lives and in the world. Each iteration serves as an original piece of theater that allows the artists and audience to sincerely engage with the passage of time.
A decade into this experiment The Sincerity Project has taken many forms, yielding and morphing to the changes in the artists’ lives and in the world. Over these 10 years, ensemble members have found life partners, witnessed the death of their parents, become parents, purchased homes, moved cities, and stepped more deeply into their queerness and trans identity.
Disrupting the forward momentum of contemporary life, these regular returns create a container to pause and reflect on the harrowing, beautiful, and complex realities of being alive. Audiences are invited to join in this collective pause, writing a letter to their future selves that will be available to read at every future installment. By year 24, some audience members will hold 12 letters in their hands.
For the first time in the 10 years The Sincerity Project #5 (2024) focuses on Lead Artist and Creative Director Alex Torra, on his journey to become a parent. Through the eyes of two pre-teens and ten adults with a vast array of relationships to parenthood, this installment asks: how do you prepare to raise a child in today’s world? And what are queer, radical ways to imagine a family?
