bursting
saturated
tender
Playwright - Director - Designer - Producer - Songwriter
Video: Starring Vi To; Filmed by Jordan Chafe; Directed and Edited by Ella Talerico; for promotional use for Fruit. by Ella Talerico at the New York Theater Festival, 2023.
I’m interested in how, why, and where humanity finds the fortitude to search for light in a world full of darkness, struggle, pain, heartache, and confusion. I have an undying curiosity in the beautiful intersection between laughing and crying, between the sun and the moon, and it spurs me to create over and over again. I crave to discover all the ways in which individuals and communities create beauty inside ugliness, create stability inside insanity, create hope inside despair. I believe in theater that believes in humanity, igniting fires of hope, sparking individual and communal revolution. I believe the first step to change is having faith that we are capable of change. That we are good. That we are beautiful. That we are miraculous in the ways we cope with and overcome our pain. My work is saturated with color and theatricality; it’s fantastical, strange, and explosive. It’s weird. It laughs at itself. It sits in the beautiful place where the cosmos meet the dirt and muck of everyday life. It’s where Waiting for Godot meets Hamlet Machine meets Fleabag meets The Fantasticks.
Pictured: Madelyn Ockner in Wormball by Ella Talerico at Vassar College (2023); Director: Ella Talerico
Ella Talerico is a lover of all things creative, collective, and alive. She’s a passionate playwright, director, songwriter, poet, filmmaker, producer, actor, and designer. Her work is poetic, saturated, bursting, and tender. She focuses on centering queer and female characters, mental illness, and the perennial battle between hope and despair within us and our community. She’s an alum of Ensworth High School and the National Theater Institute (Summer Theater-makers Playwriting, ‘22), and is currently in her senior year at Vassar College, studying Drama.
Her plays It’s Something for Sure!, Biophilia, Sandbags, Birds with Orange Bellies, Salt. Fruit., Wormball, and A Toaster, Some Breadcrumbs, and a Mediocre Answer have all had amateur productions in the past two years. Her solo performance piece Fruit. was performed at the New York Theater Festival in December of 2023. Her solo performance piece Salt. was performed as a part of Vassar’s Steerman Short Play Festival in 2022, and will also have a performance at Poughkeepsie’s Gallery 40 in July of 2024.
