Cast and Creative Team Set for WHO CARES: THE CAREGIVER INTERVIEW PROJECT at Voices Festival Productions

Voices Festival Productions has revealed the cast for its upcoming world-premiere production about the embattled heart of caregiving, Who Cares: ♥ The Caregiver Interview Project, co-written by Ari Roth, A. Lorraine Robinson, and Vanessa Gilbert, and directed by Kathryn Chase Bryer. The production will run January 9 - February 2, 2025, preceded by free workshop readings November 17 - 18 as part of Alzheimer's Awareness Month, alongside a Community Care Roundtable, Tuesday, November 19 involving DC theater and cultural institutions working on projects related to care partnering. All VFP events will take place at Universalist National Memorial Church.

The Who Cares ensemble cast features Kelly Renee Armstrong (Tempestuous Elements, Arena Stage), Lise Bruneau (Macbeth, Taffety Punk), Todd Scofield (Romeo and Juliet, Folger), Joelle Denise (Our Lady of Queens, 2024 Chelsea Film Festival), Kendall Arin Claxton (Letters To Kamala/Dandelion Peace, VFP), and British- American Laura Shipler Chico (Museum Pieces, Tristan Bates Theatre) making her American stage debut, along with understudies Rachel Manteuffel, Llogan Paige, and Robert Bowen Smith.

The creative team includes David Elias (Stage Manager), Nora Butler (Assistant Stage Manager), David Smith (Lighting Designer), David Lamont Wilson (Sound Designer), Brandee Mathies (Costume Designer), Heidi Castle-Smith (Scenic Designer), Tyra Bell (Props Designer), and Robert Bowen Smith (Movement Consultant).

Who Cares: ♥ The Caregiver Interview Project is based on interviews with local colleagues, elder justice advocates, and close friends whose lives have been disrupted - but also transformed - by unexpected caretaking for loved ones contending with memory loss. Often funny, always intimate, and powerfully informed, Who Cares moves from church basement support group, to comedy club, to rockstar book event, revealing fault-lines in families, with bonds challenged and strengthened, forming newly generative communities of care. The play consists of verbatim testimony adapted from interviews, alongside original stand-up material from Jim Meyer and excerpts from the work of MacArthur "Genius" Award recipient Marie Therese Connolly and her book "The Measure of Our Age: Navigating Care, Safety, Money, and Meaning Later in Life."

After attending a first Zoom workshop reading of Who Cares one year ago, John Stoltenberg of DC Theatre Arts shared, "The real theme of this piece seems to me to be our mortality. Caretaking frames it, illuminates it, points to it, but really this dramatic experience is an encounter with the common precarity of all our lives."

Artistic Producing Partner at VFP, A. Lorraine Robinson, whose story of caregiving for her sister helps to anchor the theatricalized support group at the center of Who Cares, shares her unique insight: "Facing an unexpected catastrophic illness of a loved one is the most overwhelming experience, which can thrust you into situations that you never imagined, have no idea how to comprehend, and no tools to face. You realize that people all around are experiencing these struggles of caregiving everyday, invisibly, because our society doesn't discuss it, and no one really understands, until they are thrust into it."

VFP Founding Artistic Producing Partner, Ari Roth notes, "Who Cares has benefited from an extensive workshop process (and will continue to this fall) and has been enriched by the participation of wonderful actors at each workshop stage. We're thrilled with this committed cohort that will be doing the production this winter and are struck by the intergenerational range of backgrounds and ages that will bring such a disparate group of individuals into a moving support circle. It's a truly diverse ensemble united in pain and difficulty in caring for loved ones, each with a complicated condition."

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