Ingrid De Sanctis

For two weeks, Eddie and Louie, estranged middle-aged sisters, unite to care for their mother in hospice. As they navigate the challenges of their impending loss, they also confront the fractures in their relationship and the inevitable passing of their mother.

Louie and Eddie's mother is entering hospice care. Despite having made a promise long ago to be there for her in her final days, the challenge lies in how two middle-aged sisters can come together when they haven't spoken in two years. They grapple with the complexities of their impending loss and the inherent difficulties it brings. In the process, they confront their own broken relationship. Can the past be set aside during these crucial final weeks?

Jewels returns to New Jersey after her father’s death and joins her mother and her sister Tess to prepare for the funeral. She returns home at the same time a hurricane is heading towards the Jersey shores. During these seven days, she also decides to visit four women: victims, lovers, and friends of her father, a Pentecostal pastor who lost his church and family in sexual scandal twenty years earlier. As she breaks their code of silence, Jewels finds herself in a poetic and magical world of Bible verses and hurricanes and a collection of childhood characters from Moses and Tinker Bell to Cinderella and the Little Mermaid. Together, Jewels and her friends, search for the faith she lost and the father she thought she knew.

Simply put, Sarah & The Dinosaur is a play about a girl, her cancer, and a dinosaur.
This is not your typical cancer play. Sarah & The Dinosaur is an unorthodox, funny, heartbreaking, and honest narrative of one woman and her journey with cancer. In Sarah's world, this cancer has come to her in the form of a Dinosaur. It doesn't look like Barney. It follows her everywhere. It feels guilty. It wants to leave, but it is so hungry. Through all of this, Sarah fights her Dinosaur and struggles to make peace with what it means to live with terminal cancer.

Sarah and the Dinosaur is based on the real Sarah Elizabeth Pharis and her blog InfinitySquared as she learns to live with cancer. Sarah is a kindergarten teacher who must come to terms with the reality that the cancer in her eye has spread to her liver and no cure in sight. The dinosaur is the cancer that follows her around and she must come to terms with living with cancer not dying with it. Not yet.

Torba is a play based on an American peace worker’s four years in the Balkans, specifically working with refugees following the war. In no way does the play represent just one specific political perspective, rather if focuses on the survival and strength of the characters. When idealistic Amy arrived she was ready to do her so called peace-work as the war was just ending. Very soon she realizes as she meets the people; she herself is transformed which is quite contrary to the transformation she was going to do on them.

Torba means ”bag” in Serbo-Croatian. The characters have literally had to pack all their belongings in bags as they were often forced out of their homes or had to flee for safety. Their lives are in a stand still and the play explores this relationship between the past, present and future. As they are in the present they pull something they grabbed from their homes as they were leaving. The story they tell is so real to them that characters come alive from their past and at moments interact with them. The structure of the play explores time and space reflecting how so many people were displaced during the war and had to find strength from their past and from each other.

The play moves from establishing the two worlds, Amy’s world and the world of the war torn Balkans to the merging of those worlds. As the play progresses Amy becomes more immersed in their world, she blends with the characters and becomes part of their scenes. She is the translator for the group who meets a wife who just lost her husband, runs a creative writing circle for those who have been sexually assaulted. She continues to be the receiver of their unique survivor stores and learns of the precious items in their bags.

The cast is an ensemble with one actor playing Amy otherwise the other actors switch roles throughout. Amy’s friend, the priest Ivo, is played by the same actor and the other consistent character throughout the play due to his significance in her experience. The play is a series of vignettes and monologues. In the end when she packs to go home in the end of the play, she doesn’t know where to begin. She packs their stories since that is what she will take home with her and what has changed her life.

Torba is based on peace worker Amy Gopp Vigne and her work in the Balkans in the 1990's.

WALLS DESCRIPTION:
When newly-engaged couple Abigail and Carver receive DNA tests as a wedding gift, they interrogate what it means to marry someone of a different race. Home on a Friday night working on their wedding vows, they explore their past and its impact on their future. Into the wee hours of the morning, they grapple with their identities as the family legends and stories interrupt their idealized future: the dock of Weymouth, England leaving for the New World, the shore of Africa taken on a slave ship, a captured soldier in the Revolutionary War, brothers and sisters during the Civil War, leaving Barbados for a new life, or a dance in 1944 before soldiers depart. In this non-linear drama of histories unfolding, can Abigail and Carver forge a new story together? Will they overcome the past? Is it possible? Original concept by JMU alumni, Paul Holland. Developed and written by playwriting professor Ingrid De Sanctis with selections from the 2018 Advanced playwriting class.

As her daughter Martina is turning fourteen Arden is forced to come to terms with the events of her fourteenth year. As she tries to grapple with holding it together her work as a sculptor suffers and she can’t get the hands just “right”. While confronting her past and possibly the man who violated her--her daughter is on a separate journey unbeknownst to Arden. How does Arden protect her daughter from texting, instagram and social media overall? How does she save herself and her marriage?

A Body in Motion was developed through interviews and transcripts from the book Transcending: Survivors of Violent Crimes by Howard Zehr. Through a collage of stories and dreams, the characters in the play fight to move beyond the violence.

Writing supported by a SOROS grant. IN addition to touring throughout the US from 2000-2001, there was a funded tour to prisons and communities throughout Pennsylvania supported by Prison Society of PA and Victims’ Advocates of PA, 2002. Translated in Spanish and performed in communities in Chile.