How to Make a Doll at Foothills Performing Arts and Civic Center

Where do brain anatomy, dollmaking, depression, and healing overlap? How to Make a Doll is a solo theater performance by Marisa Caruso that blends memoir, research, and absurdity to explore mental health and the transformative power of creation. Digging through memory, medical texts, and a towering pile of socks, Caruso searches for meaning in the failures of family and Western medicine. Video, puppetry, sound, and text collide in an experience where grief meets humor, science meets art, and, when words fail, where making something by hand becomes a last resort.

In a time when America faces a mental health crisis, this play brings to life one story of struggle and catharsis in an early 2000s home that could represent thousands like it. Isolation, social barriers and modern anxieties are not going away any time soon- How to Make a Doll dives into these quandaries without providing many answers, but with empathy and vulnerability it finds a delicate peace through physical process and play.

Speakers Karen Ogborn and Alex Riba will share their stories before the performance and a panel discussion with the audience and mental health professionals will follow. The Stamford Wellness Center is a multi-service human health agency which provides low-cost mental health counseling, maintains a community fridge and community garden, and partners with other agencies to improve the social, emotional, physical, and mental health of the residents of the greater Stamford, NY area. In 2025 they held 1670 counseling sessions with 90 clients.This project is presented by the Stamford Wellness Center with support from the Community Foundation of South Central New York, CORE Values, the Thomson Family Trust, The Party Theater and the Foothills Performing Arts Center.