Full-length play.

A riff on Miguel de Cervantes’ Retablo de las maravillas (The Marvelous Puppet Show), this story reimagines the anxieties surrounding social and cultural belonging in the space of a rapidly gentrifying South LA. In The Woodingle Puppet Show with Host Mr. C, as Constructed by Mr. Asinine with Calculations and Articulations of the Genius Sort, Quarles explores questions of Blackness and the hoops people are willing to jump through to prove that they are “black enough.”

This play was commissioned for the UCLA Diversifying the Classics series in partnership with Playwrights’ Arena.