When applying for one of the five visiting artist slots at a Flynn storytelling festival, Gina Stevensen submitted an account of making the semifinals in a Burlington backyard queer Jell-O wrestling competition last summer. “I found this sort of internal sense of confidence and pride in who I am that then helped me with the next part of the day,” Stevensen said, “which was driving to Maine to visit my parents” for a difficult discussion about Stevensen’s gender identity and new pronouns.
A jury selected Stevensen to tell the story of that momentous day at the second-annual *snap* First Person Arts Festival, held Friday to Sunday, January 24 to 26, at Flynn Space in Burlington.
The three-day event unspools like it did last year: opening with a headliner, continuing with the five visiting artists and closing with an open-mic story slam. Susanne Schmidt, Vermont’s regional producer and a national instructor for the Moth StorySLAM competition, returns to give a two-day storytelling workshop.
New York City-based headliner Ryan J. Haddad will perform Hi, Are You Single?, his 90-minute, solo, autobiographical show exploring the complications of romance for a gay man with cerebral palsy. Haddad, who played a recurring role on the Netflix series “The Politician,” was named one of four rising playwrights by the New York Times in 2023. He won the 2023 Obie Award for best new American play for his autobiographical work Dark Disabled Stories, which played at the Public Theater in New York City.
“When people get onstage and tell you their story … something about that opens something inside you.” Jay Wahl
By presenting artists at all levels — amateur, rising and professional — *snap* is designed to celebrate and nurture the ancient art of storytelling. Flynn executive director Jay Wahl said the inaugural fest served as a reminder “that when people get onstage and tell you their story, when they really share their experience and their joy and their heartache and their perspective on the world, something about that opens something inside you.”
What surprised Wahl most last year was that some people attended all three performances and participated in the workshop. “I just didn’t realize that there were going to be a handful of folks who really were hungry for this,” he said.
More than 50 people applied for the five visiting artist slots, double last year’s number, Wahl said. Each will tell a true story. In addition to Stevensen, the sole Vermonter, storytellers include Emmy-nominated actor, singer and writer Kaitlin Becker, best known for her title role in the children’s show “Meekah,” a spin-off of “Blippi”; actor and playwright Charles Day, who has appeared in several off-Broadway plays; theater artist and professor John Michael DiResta; and Cassidy Layton, an actor and musician who recently made her Carnegie Hall soloist debut.
Stevensen, 35, moved to Burlington’s Old North End from New York City in 2020. They write in a coffee shop with friends and in an open third-floor home studio, where pitched roofs delineate separate functions: a reading nook, a sleeping nook and an office nook. The author of several plays, Stevensen is best known locally for Breakfalls, which premiered at Vermont Stage last spring, and for Front Porch Follies, the variety show they cocreated and performed in at Burlington’s New Year’s Eve celebration, Highlight, for four years in a row.
When creating theater, Stevensen doesn’t aim solely to entertain, they said: “I go to theater as the place to sort through and work through some of the big questions in my own life or that I see in the world.”
Performing an autobiographical piece alone onstage is a scary new venture for Stevensen, and their account of backyard Jell-O wrestling is about brave communication. Stevensen’s parents were having a hard time understanding the artist’s self-discoveries, Stevensen said. The child they had known as a princess-loving little girl, boy-crazy teen and married young woman had come out as queer, explored polyamory, gotten divorced and, finally — “the hardest one for them — at least lately,” Stevensen said — come out as nonbinary.
Stevensen appreciates the opportunity to develop the story with feedback from an audience and from Flynn staffers, who offered script meetings to each of the five storytellers.
“I’m nervous,” Stevensen said. But they acknowledged benefiting from other writers and performers “sharing their most messy, true, vulnerable selves. And so I feel inspired by that and eager to … step into that role.”
The original print version of this article was headlined “Oh, Snap! | First-person storytelling festival returns to the Flynn”
This article appears in Jan 22-28, 2025.
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