Jared Mezzocchi

73 Seconds

May 11, 2026

The title refers to the catastrophic 73 seconds between the Challenger’s launch and explosion, and Mezzocchi turns those seconds into the play’s governing existential paradox. Had Rosemary not become pregnant, might she have boarded that shuttle instead? The playwright comes to see himself simultaneously as the force that prevented his mother’s cosmic aspirations and the accidental reason she survived. Few memoir plays confront the absurd intimacy between guilt and gratitude with such honesty. The production recognizes how families construct themselves around contingencies so enormous they become nearly impossible to contemplate directly. Mezzocchi’s very existence becomes entangled with one of the most traumatic public tragedies of the 20th century. [more]

Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God

October 15, 2025

Jen Tullock in the one-woman play “Nothing Can Take You from the Hand of God” at Playwrights [more]

The Wind and the Rain: A story about Sunny’s Bar

October 14, 2024

Director Jared Mezzocchi uses the proximity of the actors to the audience to its best advantage. We don’t even question when one of our ranks is pulled out to play Young Sunny. It adds to the sense of community that is the cornerstone of this production. Kudos to Mezzocchi and the four actors in intuitively divining who in the audience is most right for participation. As the play dashes back and forth in time, the actors are kept moving, narrating as they go along. Again physical life clearly dictates whether they are in character or in narration mode. Mezzocchi incorporates projection design to complement the telling of the history of the ever-changing neighborhood. It provides a welcome steady stream of point-of-reference when one considers the land was once dry tundra in the shadow of a glacier twice the height of the Empire State Building. [more]

Poor Yella Rednecks

November 16, 2023

Although playwright Qui Nguyen declared early in his earlier play "Vietgone" that “all characters appearing in this work are fictitious,” in his sequel "Poor Yella Rednecks" now at Manhattan Theatre, co-commissioned with South Coast Repertory, the playwright played by Jon Norman Schneider begins by interviewing his 70-year-old mother Tong Nguyen about how his parents built a life in America as Vietnamese refugees. Directed by May Adrales who also directed the earlier play in the same exuberant fashion, the resulting flashbacks are raucous, raunchy and poignant. In what was originally announced as a quintet of plays, "Poor Yella Rednecks" is now described as the middle play of a trilogy. [more]