I never asked for a gofundme
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Walter Mercado Presents: A Queer Puerto Rican (not just) Christmas Spectacular
We all need a little help sometimes. Identity is confusing. Dating is HARD. Some of us go to therapy. And some of us – wait until it gets bad enough that our dead abuela (who’s lookin HOT, btw) sends Walter Mercado and a couple other Puerto Rican ancestors/icons our way on Christmas Eve to get us back on track by taking us on a tour of our past, present, and future.
Meet Zee. It was just supposed to be three dates, but Walter has other plans.
Oh, and sobre todo mucho, mucho, mucho ...
Not yet. Feliz Navidad!
Avant Barde Theatre, Scripts in Play Reading Festival - Staged Reading (January ’24)
Austin Film Festival 2023 Semi-Finalist
Lift Every Voice New Play Festival, American Stage (March ’23)
Workshop Production, IU Bloomington, Fall 2022, directed by Raelle Myrick-Hodges (as Decolonizing your mind with Walter Mercado)
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Unqle play is the story of unqle and fave, both gay, one sober, one not, one cis, one not, one dying, one not, navigating their relationship, their history, and their shared queer (he hates that word, btw) legacy within the context of one epic last conversation. It is a 90-minute negotiation of terms of what it means to tell someone’s story, how much we can ask of those who leave us, and what it means to say goodbye.
Bear witness to a moment of history as two loving combatants spar through tightly held generational ideas of queer liberation using drag, Sondheim, and Catholicism, all in service of a goodbye that does justice to it all.
unqle play
Fulton Theatre Festival of New Work: Stories of Diversity - Finalist (August 2023)
Kennedy Center American College Theatre Fest. Winner – Latinx Playwriting Award (2023)
Kennedy Center American College Theatre Fest. Dist. Achievement – Paula Vogel Playwriting Award (2023)
The Jane Chambers Playwriting Award Finalist (2022)
Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semi-Finalist 2022
IU Bloomington At First Sight Festival 2022
Millie is back home in Mobile, AL for a prestigious fellowship she couldn’t pass up. Her east coast Puerto Rican partner, Avery, just had top surgery. Quasi-aunt to Millie and righteous woman of God Teresa overhears Millie at CVS and assumes Avery has breast cancer. Cue casseroles, care packages, and checkbooks – a gofundme to SAVE AVERY! I never asked for a gofundme is a new queer comedy about gender and religion that asks what it means to be worthy of care.
Developed at the New Harmony Writers Conference (2023)
Dramatists Guild Foundation National Fellowship Finalist 23-24
Diverse Voices Playwriting Initiative at Illinois State University 2024 Finalist
Max is a precocious kid, overachieving and a little anxious, sure, but mostly well adjusted. She’s got a lot going on, but she’s on top of it. Adult supervision not required. Besides, adults are overrated and for the most part, unhelpful.
When Max starts receiving mysterious threatening notes at school, she embarks on her own hunt for the culprit, which leads her down a path from which she might never find her way back, as a simple whodunit threatens to leave us all wondering what it means to be a kid in a chaotic world.
30 Seconds is a play about memory that asks if we’re all just seeing what we want to see and challenges us to look at who we’re willing to believe and why.
30 Seconds
Alleyway Theatre, Maxim Mazumdar New Play Award, Finalist, 2022
Renaissance Theaterworks’ Br!NK Residency Award 2021
PLAY/write: The Jackie Demaline Regional Collegiate Playwriting Competition, Honorable Mention 2021
Coe College Playwriting Festival Winner 2021
Eugene O’Neill Theater Center National Playwrights Conference Semi-Finalist 2021
Bay Area Playwrights Festival Semi-Finalist 2021
IU Bloomington At First Sight Festival 2020 – Staged Reading
Lee is one of the CIA’s finest assets, but the grind is starting to get to her. Her only friends are her boss at the CIA and her arch-nemesis MI6 agent Olivia Windsor Davies. When her newest mission sends her to a small town in Georgia to infiltrate a community theatre posing as something called a – dramaturg? – she wants nothing to do with it. But she soon realizes that there’s more to saving the world than she imagined, and she will need all of her training and instincts to make it to opening night.
Waycross: a hybrid stage-audio play
Presented on WFIU Public Radio- July 2021
The Kennedy Center Latinx Playwriting Award, Distinguished Achievement 2021
Click HERE to listen to Waycross!