Richard Termine Photo
Sonia Manzano
The immigrant experience examined in Aditi Brennan Kapil’s Agnes Under the Big Top will be investigated further on Monday, March 14, when Selected Shorts—a Public Radio International program recorded live at New York’s Symphony Space — comes to Long Wharf Theatre.
Those in attendance when Selected Shorts comes to Long Wharf can expect to hear stories “that will have some sort of cultural resonance with the play we’re doing currently,” said Steven Scarpa, the organization’s director of marketing and communications.
Agnes Under the Big Top opens tonight at Long Wharf Theatre and continues through April 3.
Paul Roossin Photo
David Rakoff
While stories for the March 14 Selected Shorts program had not been finalized at press time, Sonia Manzano said she’ll be reading Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz’s Wildwood, which is about the emotional growing pains of a Dominican teenager in New Jersey.
Manzano, familiar to many as “Maria” on Sesame Street, said, “There’s nothing that fascinates me more than children.”
More than that, she said, “It’s the experiences of an immigrant child that fascinate me.”
Manzano, whose parents relocated to New York from Puerto Rico in the 1940s, grew up in a Puerto Rican neighborhood in the South Bronx. Her only connections to a world beyond her community were television and teachers. Manzano revisited that experience — which she said was the same as an immigrant experience — in her children’s book, No Dogs Allowed! (Atheneum, 2004).
“America was the place to come and get a new life and an opportunity,” Manzano said.
For many, it still is. And some find themselves participating in Symphony Space’s Selected Shorts-derived “adult literacy program,” All Write! — to which Manzano often contributes as a performer.
On March 14, Manzano will be joined on stage by Selected Shorts host Isaiah Sheffer and writer and This American Life contributor David Rakoff.