An ambitious 24 year performance experiment.

Presented December 10-15 2024 by Team Sunshine at FringeArts

10 years ago, Philadelphia’s Team Sunshine Performance dared themselves to do something no theater company has done before: create a show lasting 24 years. Every 2-3 years the company makes a new installment of The Sincerity Project in response to the shifts in our lives and in the world. In its fifth installment, this ambitious and audacious multi-decade theater piece served as a stopping point, a pause, a moment for us to sincerely engage with the harrowing, beautiful, and complex realities of time’s passing. 

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 the 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, The Sincerity Project #5 (2024) focused on Alex Torra, the project’s Lead Artist and Creative Director, on his journey to become a parent. Through the eyes of two pre-teens and ten adults with a vast array of takes on parenthood, this installment asked: how do you prepare to raise a child in today’s world? And what are queer, radical ways to imagine a family?