PCPA Youth & Community Arts
Following my time in Beauty & the Beast, I was offered the opportunity to continue my work with PCPA in a separate artistic department, PCPA Youth & Community Arts. From January to May, I worked as an intern for the departments and trying on a multitude of hats. Led by Marilet Martinez as Director of Youth & Communty Arts as well as Jill Price, Youth & Community Arts Coordinator, myself and my fellow interns, David Garry Perez, Jr. and Andrew Missael Banderas accomplished a variety of goals in working for the department from January to May of 2025.
Make it stand out
Whatever it is, the way you tell your story online can make all the difference.
Our first stop was to many local schools in the area between middle school to high school ages to teach them a little about the shows PCPA was producing at the time. These shows were William Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and Martyna Majok’s Sanctuary City. Our job was to explore themes, ideas, and concepts central to each of these shows through games, writing and visual art activities. Later on, we accepted a contract with a local school in the next town over where we taught nearly 150 kids between fifth and sixth grade for 5 weeks on the basics skills of improvisation.
We also reimagined our social media presence as a department, creating a multitude of content from Intern Shenanigans to themed interviews, such as “Shut Your Piehole” where we made a pie in real time with Molly Dobbs, our resident artist who was playing Jenna in Waitress at the time. We also created an original reoccuring social media series called “Who Are You and What Do You Do Here” where we highlighted members of the PCPA faculty in nearly every department possible.
During the run of Beauty & the Beast, the department put on its first ever Pride Night; a themed LGBTQIA+ inclusive event with games, activities, food & drink as well as moderated talkbacks by members of the PCPA staff who were involved within various areas of the current show’s production. In my time on the internship, I assisted with the setup, teardown and execution of these Pride Nights for three more productions in the season, Much Ado About Nothing, Sanctuary City & Waitress.
Perhaps the biggest undertaking of our internship was a reimagined version of a Pride Night for our summer production of Holmes & Watson. Jill Price, our Youth & Community Arts coordinator wrote an entirely original murder mystery for a themed immersive murder mystery event at a local hotel: Murder at the Santa Maria Inn. With over 30 guests, we took the guests on a themed tour with live acting and improvisation on an original script.
