The Lewis Center for the Arts’ Program in Theater and Music Theater at Princeton University presents Manual for a Desperate Crossing by María Irene Fornés, an epic migratory montage that follows a group of Cuban rafters, or “balseros,” fleeing to the United States in the mid-1990s. The production is directed by Princeton junior Didi Vekri with lighting design and dramaturgy by senior Elena Milliken. Performances are February 20, 21, 26, 27 and 28 at 8 p.m. in the Wallace Theater at the Lewis Arts complex on the Princeton campus. Free and open to the public, tickets can be reserved through University Ticketing. The Wallace Theater is fully accessible with an assistive listening system. All performances will be open-captioned in English along with Spanish translation. Guests in need of other access accommodations are invited to contact the Lewis Center at LewisCenter@princeton.edu at least one week prior to the event date.
Cuban-American playwright Fornés’ one-act features her distinctively stylized prose. It draws from real-life testimonies of balseros, to create a vast landscape of overlapping fears and dreams. The solidity and security of a home lost to a precarious raft, a better future conflicting with an unyielding past, the fight to exist within nature and against nature; these oppositions materialize on stage like narrative tableaus, memorializing the histories of the thousands who have undertaken these desperate crossings.
Members of the cast of Manual for a Desperate Crossing in rehearsal for performances February 20-28 at Princeton University. Photo credit: Photo by Angel Chang Liu
Fornés (1930-2018) is among the most influential American theater-makers of the 20th century. A defining force within the off-off-Broadway movement of the 1960s and 1970s and nine-time Obie Award winner, Fornés—as playwright, director, designer and teacher—had an impact on emerging theater artists of the 1980s and 1990s, especially those invested in staging feminist, queer and latinx aesthetics and experiences. Fornés’ experiments in theatrical form continue to challenge and inspire new generations of theater-makers today, however, her legacy remains remarkably under-acknowledged among contemporary theater artists, students, and scholars. The Lewis Center hosted convenings of the María Irene Fornés Institute in 2018 and 2025.
Milliken’s lighting design and dramaturgy work on the project represents her independent project toward a minor in the Program in Theater and Music Theater. Students earning a minor take the course “Introduction to Theater Making,” four other theater, music theater, music, or dance courses, and provide non-performing support for one or two other program productions. Minors have the option to propose a senior project in spring of their junior year, which might be writing a new work, directing, performing, designing, stage managing, or producing a production; the program’s season is primarily shaped by the interests and proposals of the students in the program. Students’ senior projects are advised by the faculty with support from the professional staff in music, costumes, scenery, light, sound, stage management and producing. Any student can pursue the minor; no application or audition is required, and students with no prior experience are welcome.
An anthropology major from Philadelphia, Milliken is also pursuing a minor in Spanish. Her design work has been featured in numerous Lewis Center productions, where she has also performed and stage managed. In September she directed the theater program’s production of at the very bottom of a body of water. Since her sophomore year, Milliken has been a coach and student leader for Trenton Youth Theater. In addition to her work in the program, she has served as the technical director and production manager for Theatre Intime and as a board member for Princeton University Players. She has completed two internships through the Lewis Center’s Bernstein Arts Leadership Fellowship, one with Civic Artistic programs at the Public Theater in New York City and most recently in literary and producing at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin, Ireland.
The production’s director, Didi Vekri, is a visual arts major from Athens, Greece. She is also pursuing minors in theater and linguistics. Vekri is an active member of the theater and film community on campus, having served as Theatre Intime’s production manager and an executive board member for Princeton Pictures. She developed an interest in production design in her sophomore year and has since worked on numerous shows and films as a set or lighting designer. She is also designing video projections for the production.
The student cast of Manual for a Desperate Crossing includes Ramon Espinoza ’26, Ryan Gao ’28, Luis Miranda ’29, Sophia Raes ’28, Olivia Romano ’29, Lucy Shea ’27, and Amelia Wray ’28.
In addition to Milliken and Vekri, other student members of the production team include Shelley Yang ’28 as set designer, Ryan Gonzales ’26 as sound designer, Soa Andriamananjara ’29 as stage manager with James-Allen Leyba ’28 and James Morales ‘26 as assistant stage managers, and graduate student Nina Li as projections programmer; Suheyla Akman ’28 is shadowing professional costume designer E. Keating Helfrich Debelak. Other professional members of the production team are Jacqueline Holloway as intimacy/fight director and faculty member Chesney Snow as co-producer. Faculty members Elena Araoz, Jane Cox and Yoshi Tanokura are project mentors/advisors.
Visit the Lewis Center website to learn more about this event, the Lewis Center for the Arts, and the more than 100 public performances, exhibitions, readings, screenings, concerts, lectures, and special events presented by the Lewis Center each year, most of them free.
