The Precursors
Written by Luis Sorolla
Translated by Don Bogen
Directed by Chloe Budziszewski
Previews in Syracuse!
Don’t miss out on our preview showings for The Precursors. We have been working hard the past few months to bring this mysterious story to life.
Come support us by attending a show! Previews will take place at Le Moyne College in the Marren Studio Theater on the second floor of the performing arts building. Performances are May 29, 30 and June 5, 6 at 7 PM with an additional outdoor performance on June 7th at 7PM outside the performing arts center! Bring your own chair/blanket for the outdoor performance.
Tickets are available at the door and are pay what you can(with a suggested donation of $10). All proceeds go directly to our expenses for Montreal Fringe.
We hope to see you there!
Meet Our Team!
Chloe Budziszewski
Chloe is a 22 year old theater artist from Buffalo, NY. She’s been heavily involved in all things theater, both on and off the stage, for as long as she can remember. She is eternally grateful for the opportunity to share the story of The Precursors with the Montreal Fringe and hopes you’ll join us as we tell the stories, we tell them all.
(Chloe/Director/Designer)
Elena Kantor
(Technical Director/Stage Manager/Designer)
Elena is a theatre artist and designer from Syracuse, NY, with a background in technical theatre and mathematics. She has been involved in many theatre productions around Syracuse both as a designer and working backstage. She is very excited to be bringing The Precursors to Montreal fringe!
Mary Medina
Mary is a 21 year old actress from The Bronx, NY. Mary has been training in Theatre at Le Moyne College and has credits in Orlando, Fame, Yerma, etc. She loves all things art and can make some killer cookies. She is thrilled to be a part of the production of The Precursors and would like to express pride for the whole team.
(Mary)
Alfa Balde
Alfa is a freshman at Lemoyne College studying Communications and Theatre. He has started working in the arts since sophomore year of high school and never looked back since. He has been in major productions in his time at Lemoyne such as Almost Maine and Witch. He has also been a finalist in the August Wilson Monologue Competition where he played as Troy from Fences.
(Alfa)
Moxie Dwyer
Moxie Dwyer is a 21 year old multimedia artist from Syracuse, NY. Moxie has been participating in theater in dance in Syracuse since she was a toddler. She loves all things performance and all things creepy. She is beyond excited to bring this production of The Precursors to Montreal Fringe Festival ‘26.
(Assistant Stage Manager/PR Head)
Help Us…
Tell Every Story
We are aiming to raise a total of $6,000 in donations to help support our participation in the Montreal Fringe Festival and ensure the success of this project. Every contribution will go directly toward sustaining the work and the artists involved.
Our fundraising goals are broken down as follows:
$3,000 to secure housing for the duration of the festival
$1,500 to cover gas and public transportation costs
$1,500 to support marketing and promotional efforts for the show
Your support not only helps us get there—it ensures that our work can be seen, shared, and celebrated. Every donation plays a meaningful role in bringing this production to life.
We will update the burning match as we reach our goals!
The Precursors follows the daily lives of three children who are left in the forest by their parents with a single mission: “tell every story.” As time passes, the difference between reality and fiction grows increasingly unclear, and they are forced to figure out for whom exactly their stories are intended.
About the Project
We thrilled to share that The Precursors will be traveling to the Montreal Fringe Festival this upcoming summer! The Montreal Fringe is an international performing arts festival celebrating accessibility, diversity, and artistic freedom.
The English premier of the show was presented at Le Moyne College this past September in collaboration with the Spanish Embassy. Following the success of The Precursors debut, we are eager to return to this world and continue developing and sharing the story with a new audience!
We are incredibly excited about this opportunity to once again bring the work of Luis Sorolla and Don Bogen to an international stage and to continue sharing Spanish cultural storytelling abroad. The story of The Precursors is timeless and universal. It is a story of everything that has already happened and everything that is yet to come. It is a story made up of countless stories.
As an independently produced production, we are currently fundraising to help cover the essential costs of attending the festival, including lodging, travel, and festival fees. We will have several exciting fundraisers in the coming weeks in addition to our donation page.
Any contribution, no matter the size, will directly support us in bringing this production to Montreal and continuing to share Spanish cultural heritage with wider audiences.
The Precursors is a Spanish play by Luis Sorolla, translated to English by Don Bogen.
The play follows the daily lives of three children who are left in the forest by their parents with a single mission: “tell every story.” As time passes, the difference between reality and fiction grows increasingly unclear, and they are forced to figure out for whom exactly their stories are intended.
The story explores storytelling, memory, and the human impulse to narrate a world beyond time.
Luis and Don together in Madrid
A prologue by Miguel Valentín:
“I think about the possibility of what comes next. The possibility of what
comes next.
Chekhov’s axe. If someone pulls out a gun in the first scene, it means that in
the last scene someone else is going to chop down a tree. If someone cuts
down a tree, it means that in the next scene a servant will be left alone.
Chekhov breaks the causality so present in his works and replaces it with an
accident. A foreseen accident, but an accident nonetheless.
As I write this, I think all the time about what I’m going to write next and
about the long road to the future where these words I’m writing now will
already have been written. It is a path that is always walking itself, it doesn’t
matter that there is no path, we will take our next steps on thin air. Even if
our own expectations carry us forward, we will remain the ones who
dreamed of being different, we will continue dreaming of another ending. We
will continue putting away the gun and taking out the axe.
We are the ghosts of this place’s future.
We are the precursors of the next scene, the next gesture, the next word, the
next moment.
We will always do something else, trying to make what was planned fade
away and thus feel a little less disappointed by the confirmation of what we
already expected, or of what we didn’t expect and didn’t want either, or of all
the possible pasts we will invent to justify everything we dreamt of the future.
I run my hand gently through the air, a foot off the ground, and stroke a dog
that no longer exists; I crouch down and embrace the air, right where I think I
once stood as a child; I cast these words into the void so that one day they
may become part of the air that perhaps an older version of myself will
breathe, alone in these woods where this tent once stood and where others
camped before that, and where perhaps there will be houses and asphalt, or
perhaps a silent desert, or perhaps a cold stone.”
A poem by Luis
A list of all the things that happened, are happening and will happen
here.
A gentle breeze blowing some leaves.
A woodpecker staring intently at something off-screen. There.
A rock, first without moss, then covered in moss. There.
A group of young people on their first trip. They appear over there and leave
over there.
A farmer who’s had enough.
An empty, crumpled plastic bottle.
A bush gently shaken by some hidden animal. There.
A ladybug.
The spirit of some faith that will be invented 500 years from now. There.
Rain falling on that side, but not on this one.
A mother and her son, searching for mushrooms without luck.
A hedgehog. There.
An old woman standing there, looking back and able to say she has suffered,
that she has cried, gazing tenderly at her past unhappiness. And resting.
A huge, blue, old, luxurious, beautiful, Russian tent.
Silence.
The stars on a clear night. There.
A tree falling, alone, with no one nearby to see it fall or to hear it fall, and
therefore not knowing whether to make a sound or not. It remains
suspended in the air.
A woman looking for cell phone reception so she can send her father a
birthday message, before she forgets again. She writes the message there.
Two Spanish Republican soldiers sharing their last cigarette. Sitting there.
Two ants from two different colonies communicating through complex
chemical processes.
A sparrow pecking.
A lost watch.
A stem that grows, blooms, and dies.
The same plastic bottle, empty and crumpled.
The sound of the river reaching this spot for a few seconds.
Someone standing there, putting something into a glass jar.
A cynical, exhausted doctor who feels guilty, sitting there, thinking: “Those
who will live a hundred or two hundred years after us—the people for whom
we—we—we cleared the way—will they say nice things about us? They
won’t even remember us.”
Another gentle breeze carrying away more leaves.
A dog named Whale chasing its own tail.
Silence.
Water trickling down the stone.
The sound of a branch snapping under the weight of something in the middle
of the night.
A miracle. There.
A dead squirrel.
The remains of an apple someone ate. There.
Two people laughing. There.
A lifeless desert, of rocks and sun as far as the eye can see.
A child drinking from a canteen.
A stray wasp.
A round red tent right here in the middle, where a somewhat older,
depressed man says to a somewhat younger, somewhat less depressed
woman: “It’ll stop raining soon, and everything out there will be clean and
fresh. But not me. There’s a thought I can’t get out of my head. It torments
me. It’s always suffocating me, silently and slowly. The thought that my life
has... irretrievably... been lost. The past is gone, wasted on trivialities, and
the present... God, the present is too ridiculous to even mention.
Look: here is my life. Here is my love for you. Where do you want me to put
it? What do you want me to do with it? These are my deepest, truest
feelings, and they’re being wasted, they’re perishing, like a ray of sunshine
that has fallen into a ditch.”
A bird’s droppings carrying seeds that will grow into a tree. That tree.
A little girl slowly tying her shoelaces.
The same empty, crumpled plastic bottle.
The same empty, crumpled plastic bottle.
A horror story told using a single flashlight. There.
A cocoon that will soon become a butterfly.
Snow covering everything.
Silence. Suddenly, as if falling from the sky, a distant, trembling, sad sound is
heard, like the string of an instrument snapping.
Someone cutting down a tree.
A young couple breaking up.
A huge full moon.
A fox sniffing through trash that’s been left lying around.
A radio playing in the background. Somewhere over there.
A sunrise.
A massive wave sweeping everything away.
A strange smell wafting over from over there, one that no one recognizes. It
lasts five seconds.
A sigh heard at 5:21 in the morning.
A larva that will soon become a cocoon.
A young couple making love. Right there.
A glitch in the fabric of space-time that goes unnoticed by all creatures
except for a squirrel, who doesn’t understand.
The falling rain.
Melting ice. Right there.
A fawn running.
A UFO that lands here and leaves three days later.
All of this, a glacier that in time will become an ocean.
A bear cub basking in the sun.
An old man reading a book of poetry. There.
A snail dragging its shell. There.
A chestnut.
A chase.
A moment of indescribable happiness that will be remembered forever by the
five people and the cat who shared it. There.
The moon exploding into a thousand pieces.
A leaf falling slowly.
An 11-year-old boy playing portable Parcheesi with his father and who, just
as the doctor said, two hundred years later knows nothing about the doctor,
nor the depressed older man, nor the somewhat younger depressed woman.
A flock of birds, making a lot of noise as they fly.
Another dog, this one named Aligator, chasing its tail—surprisingly, at the
exact same spot where the other dog, named Whale, chased its tail.
The same empty, crumpled plastic bottle.
A servant, happy, eating an apple. There.
A teacher taking her class on a field trip so they won’t think about the war.
Two crickets doing a concert. There.
A group of teenagers picking mushrooms.
Two trees whose branches are touching for the first time in 100 years.
A dog, this one nameless. He is looking at us.
The rain falling again.
Grass growing in slow motion.
A flashlight running out of batteries.
The end of the world. There.
An apple tree. There.