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How to
Say
Goodbye
Every Day
Add a Title
A Mira Production
7 PM READING & TALKBACK
1841 Parker Street, Berkeley CA
Jan 9, 2025
READING
THE
ABOUT the show
based in the California Bay Area and Sacramento
Mira Players
Alison Griffith
Angela Buencamino Phung
Carli Baker
Chieri Ono
Jessilee Windhaus
Johnny Castro
Kyle Cox
Nathan Sackheim
Sydney Lozier
Sydney Peterson
a play with music created in the California Bay Area and Sacramento
How To Say Goodbye Every Day is an original play with music currently being developed by Mira, a Northern California arts collective, in association with the San Francisco-based Non-Profit, Independent Arts & Media.
The play is a meditation on living as an artist, loss, community, & moving forward, told through the members of the fictional Umbra Theater Company, reunited 10 years after their disbandment, as they attempt to stage an unfinished show to honor a former company member & friend who has recently passed away.
We follow their struggles with aging, reconnection, love, and grief during the pressure cooker of a condensed rehearsal process, as a mysterious narrator guides us through their journey and our own, revealing truths both humorous and difficult.
Suffused with memory, music, laughter, and heart, How To Say Goodbye Every Day is a semi-autobiographical journey. This show-within-a-show is based on writer Johnny Castro's own experience with the loss of a friend and mentor in August of 2023, and a reflection of what the grief stirred up, brought back, and stripped away.
The show includes a colorful pastiche of artistic and theatrical conventions. It includes balletic and daring movement sequences, a Super 8 faux found-film component, a live band performing original songs written by Johnny Castro & Sabine Camino, choral vocal arrangements, and a roller skating narrator.
Can the Umbra Theatre Company Members gel and pull off their show in time? Can we? We hope you’ll consider supporting us to make it happen.
Mira Players
Alison Griffith
Carli Baker
Jessilee Windhaus
Johnny Castro
Kyle Cox
Nathan Sackheim
Sabine Camino
Sydney Lozier
Sydney Peterson
Music
The original music in How to Say Goodbye Every Day is an ode to the early 2010’s time period the show takes place in, with indie folk & choral arrangements lending a dreamlike quality to the production when combined with the movement set pieces and film components. Johnny Castro and Sabine Camino have reached into their bag of pop americana songwriting tricks to craft straightforward, heartbreaking earworms.
Land Acknowledgement
Mira recognizes that our work resides within the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, as well as tribal land of Nisenan people. We live, work, and create art on the tribal lands of California’s Indigenous people and we believe fully in Land Back efforts happening throughout California that recognize Indigenous sovereignty and push towards reconciliation after generations of oppression, genocide, and cultural suppression. We sit in solidarity with rematriation work led by the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, the Muwekma Ohlone’s Trail of Truth, and the Nisenan’s efforts to restore the federal status of the Nevada City Rancheria. We acknowledge that Native and Indigenous people are still here and that our work would not be possible without the use and occupation of Native land.