Help Bring The Adoption Game to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival!

 

Hey y’all! My name is Rayne, and I am an award-winning Black, Queer multidisciplinary artist from Southwest Philadelphia. In 2019, I founded Upstream Performance Collaborative, a scrappy, Barrymore Award–winning theatre company dedicated to boundary-breaking new works by emerging and underrepresented artists.

 

At Upstream, we create vital theatre that rejects norms, champions play, and interrogates truth: Against the current. To the source.

 

Our work is rooted in the belief that artists deserve the freedom, resources, and support to follow their passion projects. Upstream builds honest, artist-centered processes led by generous collaborators, ensuring everyone involved leaves with a stronger sense of ownership, pride, and confidence in their identity as an artist.

 

That commitment shaped COMET, Upstream’s first solo play exploring childhood abuse between a daughter and her father through memory, movement, and mixed media. COMET went on to earn Upstream Performance Collaborative the Barrymore Award for “Outstanding Original Production”, affirming what becomes possible when an emerging artist’s singular vision is met with trust, care, and meaningful creative collaboration.

 

Now, Upstream is proud to continue that work by supporting emerging playwright and performer Andrew Watring as Andrew brings the world premiere of  The Adoption Game to the Philadelphia Fringe Festival!

 

What happens when the child at the center of an adoption story finally takes control of the narrative?

 

This September, Upstream Performance Collaborative is proud to produce the world premiere of The Adoption Game, a darkly funny, deeply personal, and interactive solo performance written and performed by Philadelphia artist and transracial adoptee Andrew Watring.

 

Presented as “America’s one-and-only adoption-themed game show,” The Adoption Game transforms the theatre into a live studio audience complete with applause signs, prizes, commercial breaks, audience participation, and an irresistibly polished host named Andre Devon. Beneath the spectacle, however, is a vulnerable exploration of transracial adoption, belonging, family-making, and the question at the heart of the piece: Who gets to tell the story?

 

Andrew Watring is creating this piece to provide recognition, space, and catharsis for transracial and international adoptees while challenging the narratives non-adoptees often impose upon them. Adoption is frequently presented as an uncomplicated story of rescue, gratitude, and love. Although love may be present, those narratives can erase grief, displacement, racism, cultural separation, and the adoptee’s right to hold complicated feelings about their own life. 

 

The Adoption Game uses humor, play, discomfort, and direct audience engagement to begin addressing (and hopefully healing) some of that harm.

 

Andrew will be joined by a team committed to developing the work with care, including director Gabe Moses, a multifaceted theatre artist and company member at People's Light Theatre Company, and dramaturg Liana Irvine, who, like Andrew, is a transracial adoptee.

 

Why do we need your support? 

 

Independent theatre is built through the labor of artists, and those artists deserve to be compensated.

 

The Adoption Game has received $500 in initial support from the Cannonball Festival's Immersive Track Cohort, but that funding must currently cover the playwright-performer, director, dramaturg, composer, sound designer, projection designer, costume designer, design materials, and other production expenses. 

 

At the present funding level, several collaborators would receive stipends of only $50 to $125, inclusive of their design budgets.

 

We are raising an additional $2,000 to build a total production budget of $2,500. Reaching this modest goal will allow us to increase artist stipends, support the show’s interactive game-show environment, and provide the technical and material resources necessary to bring this ambitious new work to life. Our projected budget prioritizes increasing stipends for each core artist, with the remaining funds supporting props, costumes, projections, sound, accessibility, marketing, and unexpected production needs.

 

Your contribution will directly support:

• Increase compensation for Andrew and the creative team

• Costumes, props, prizes, bracelets, signage, and game-show materials

• Original music, sound, and projection design

• Rehearsal and production expenses

• Marketing, accessibility, and audience-engagement materials

• The continued development of a new work centering adoptee experience

Every contribution makes a difference!

 

Whether you give $10, $25, $50, or $100, you are helping an emerging artist move a deeply personal project from its first draft to its first audience. 

 

You are also supporting a model of independent theatre that values its collaborators, takes artistic risks, and makes room for stories too often told by everyone except the people who have lived them.

 

Please donate and share our campaign with your friends, family, fellow artists, adoptees, educators, and anyone invested in bold new theatre.

 

The audience is waiting. The applause sign is flashing. It’s time to play The Adoption Game!