Rose-Ingrid Benjamin to Debut WHITE AS SNOW at NYC Fringe This April
The production will be presented as part of the 2025 New York City Fringe Festival with FRIGID New York at Chain Studio Theatre.
Lakou Loulouz will present White As Snow written and performed by Rose-Ingrid Benjamin, directed by Kyle Brown, featuring musical direction and compositions by Katie James. The production will be presented as part of the 2025 New York City Fringe Festival with FRIGID New York at Chain Studio Theatre (312 W 36th St. 4th floor, New York, NY 10018) with performances on (April 7, 10, 12, 14, 18).
A Queer ex-preacher traces the arc from altar to aftermath in this lyrical blend of spoken word, humour, song, and story. White As Snow is a tender reckoning with faith, family, identity, and the ways we come home to ourselves.
The creative team includes:
- Kyle Brown (director)
- Katie James (musical director and composer)
- Cherissa Richards (dramaturg)
- Makambe K. Simamba (dramaturg)
Rose-Ingrid Benjamin (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, writer, and performer from Ottawa, Ontario, and a member of the Haitian diaspora in what is commonly known as Canada. Their work weaves together comedy, theatre, music, and storytelling to explore the intersections of faith, identity, and belonging, informed by their lived experience as a Black, queer, first-generation Canadian and a survivor of spiritual abuse. Their solo show, "White As Snow," a deeply personal exploration of faith deconstruction and resilience, will be presented at New York and Edmonton Fringe festivals in 2026. Rose-Ingrid has also performed stand-up across Canada, the U.S., and Europe, including the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Ottawa Fringe, We're Funny That Way Comedy Festival, Laugh Riot Grrrl Fest (Los Angeles), Portland Maine Comedy Festival, and the Sweet & Salty Comedy Tour — Canada's first comedy tour comprised of women of colour. Beyond the stage, Rose-Ingrid works as a speaker and strategist, she has worked with the National Arts Centre, where they spearheaded Black Out Night programming and co-curated the inaugural NAC Hip Hop Theatre Festival. Their practice is guided by decolonial, trauma-informed, and anti-oppressive values, and is committed to creating stories and spaces that centre equity-deserving communities.
Kyle Brown is a Toronto-based singer, actor, and theatre artist whose work is born of faith, heritage, and a deep commitment to storytelling. The son of Trinidadian immigrants, he began his artistic journey in the church before moving into professional performance. His stage credits include Jesus Christ Superstar and the internationally acclaimed Come From Away, performed in Toronto and on the Australian National Tour. Kyle received a Dora Mavor Moore Award nomination for his work in Tyson's Song. As a director and dramaturg he brings a thoughtful, collaborative approach informed by his experience across music, performance, and narrative interpretation.
Katie James (he/she) is a musician, improviser, songwriter, composer, multi-instrumentalist, gamer, actor, writer, journalist, poet, librettist, and teacher. She brings with her a wealth of experience across all facets of the industry, gained on multiple continents from Second City Chicago to Broadway to The Royal Swedish Opera Hall. Throughout his career, teaching has been a constant, starting with teaching musicianship and piano classes when he was 14, to becoming the youngest ever Teaching Assistant to the Theater Department at his alma mater of West Virginia University, as an undergraduate Junior, on through Point Park, Carnegie Mellon, and New York University's Tisch and Steinhardt schools.
As a teacher, she focuses on allowing the students to have a safe space to fail and get back up while offering a sturdy backbone in technique, theory, and what she likes to call “Rules You'll Eventually Break.” Lately, her teaching work mainly resides in programs geared toward historically unresearched and marginalized populations, working extensively with Matt Steffens, Jaime Lozano, and Luis Salgado and their organization Revolucion Latina (Dare to go Beyond!), as well as with George Strus and Tony-winner L Morgan Lee's Breaking the Binary. Along with her theater work, James has a long background in live music, sharing the stage with the likes of Jenna Devries, Cat Barker, Victor Wooten, The Deftones, and Nicki Minaj. He's performed with some of Broadway's greatest, most recently co-conducting the Broadway run and National Tour of Freestyle Love Supreme, with regular guests like Wayne Brady, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Chris Jackson, Amber Ruffin, Tina Fey, and Daveed Diggs. Her improv career has taken her through national and international tours with Lisa Flanagan's one-woman improvised opera La Donna Improvissata, T.J. Mannix's one-man improvised morality play Limboland, Northcoast's improvised historical hip-hopera Anybody, and world tours with Baby Wants Candy. James' home production studio lies in Long Island City, where she has been learning from 3x Grammy-winning engineer Denise Barbarita and producing tracks that have been heard across TikTok and the world, including the recent Chicago run of the X-Men Musical, Mad Avenue and artists such as Tre Watson, Shutterdown, Brianna Barnes, Billy Pilgrim, Starship Mantis, and many, many more. You can catch him twice a month, Music Directing “New York's Gayest Frat Party,” Broadway Sessions, with Wicked veteran Ben Cameron at Green Room 42, where a different Broadway cast brings in their deepest cuts to sing full out every Thursday night!
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