Upcoming Performances of Miracle Tomato:

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April 25 & 26, 2008 at the Basilica Industria in Hudson, New York

for more info wtdtheater.org

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July 2008 in Great Barrington, MA at the Berkshire Fringe

for more info berkshirefringe.org

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September 2008 dates TBA in Walla Walla, Washington

For more information about the above performances or to book a performance of Miracle Tomato

at your Theater or University contact

jessie@jessicacerullo.com

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A traveling story of love, bioengineering and the search for home

AppleMark

Miracle Tomato is a play for one actress and 204 tomatoes. The play is presented by the character Angelina, a waitress-explorer, who is sent by her lover to travel the world and impart the history of the tomato on all who will listen. Angelina, the youngest of triplets birthed in a tomato plot, reveals not only the history of the tomato, but her own, as she employs the assistance of her identical sisters Valentina, a bio engineer, and Josephina, an organic farmer. 80 projected slides assist in telling the history

The tomato is indigenous to South America. Believed to have been ‘discovered’ by Christopher Columbus in the 15th century, it was rejected for consumption due to its relation to the nightshade family and grown instead as a decoration. The first recorded use of the tomato in a sauce finally took place in Sicily in the 17th century. In the 19th century, the tomato was put on trial in the U.S. Supreme Court to determine whether it was a fruit or a vegetable. In the 20th century this vegetable made legal headway as the first FDA approved genetically engineered whole food to be brought into the market. The play, Miracle Tomato, looks at these historical facts (and others) and re-examines them through the experience of the waitress-storyteller, Angelina.

Miracle Tomato is a comedy. But it is a serious comedy. One theme of the play is the theme of time as it relates to us as individuals and as lineage holders or keepers of history. In viewing history through the lens of the tomato, the play takes the audience on a journey that examines vulnerability, appropriation, identity, mass consumption, cultivation, and the changing dynamic of food and family in Angelina’s hometown and in all the towns across the country. A good tomato takes time to grow and Angelina doesn’t have a lot of time with her audience. She is a smoker and can only go an hour without a cigarette. And so the play lasts only as long as Angelina can manage without a smoke. Time presses on as she struggles to give the audience all the information she has before lighting up, packing up and moving on to the next town.

AppleMark AN EXPERIMENT IN THEATRICAL FORM

The raw material for the play takes about 2 hours to perform. However, since the final performance length is half that, the performer must choose what to say and what to leave out. The choice to repeat or delete sections is made in the moment. The events and history in Miracle Tomato are reordered in real time each night. In this way, no two performances are the same. What ‘makes it in’ on any given night is determined, in part, by who the audience is, where the play is being performed and ultimately by the unspoken agreement between audience and performer. Nods, laughs, frowns, interest, disinterest, etc. from the audience are received by Angelina and inform what happens next.

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Miracle Tomato debuted at the soloNOVA festival in May 2007 at New York City's P.S. 122 and played to sold out audiences at Boulder Colorado's Fringe Festival in August of 2007. The Boulder Daily Camera rated Miracle Tomato one of the top 10 performances of 2007.

Miracle Tomato received workshop productions and was created with support from

Naropa University, the Brooklyn Arts Exchange and the Tin Shop residency in the town of Breckenridge, Colorado.

http://www.dailycamera.com/news/2007/aug/10/going-solo/

Some of the books that inspired the play:

Why We Eat What We Eat: How Columbus Changed the Way the World Eats
by Raymond Sokolov

Conquest of Paradise: Christopher Columbus and the Columbia Legacy
by Kirkpatrick Sale

America Discovers Columbus: How an Italian Explorer Became an American Hero
by Claudia Bushman

Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong
by James W. Loewen

The Italian-American Cookbook: A Feast of Food from a Great American Cooking Tradition
by John Mariani

Blood of my Blood
by Richard Gambino

First Fruit: The Creation of the Flavr Savr Tomato and the Birth of Biotech Food
by Belinda Martineau

The Essential Agrarian Reader
Edited by Norman Wirzba

It's a Long Road to a Tomato
by Keith Stewart with illustrations by Flavia Bacarella

Ode to a Tomato
by Pablo Neruda

Prayer to Columbus

by Walt Whitman

Performance photos by Zack Brown, Promo Photo by Pamela Traynor