A POEM & A MISTAKE to Play 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival
Sarah Baskin performs 17 characters under the direction of Michelle Bossy at Asian Arts Initiative.
After runs at Edinburgh Fringe, Adelaide Fringe, and the Avignon Off Festival, the one-woman show A POEM & A MISTAKE by Cheri Magid will play the 2026 Philadelphia Fringe Festival as part of the Cannonball Hub. This one-woman play re-examines Ovid's Metamorphoses and questions what we inherit from the stories passed down to us. The strictly limited engagement will play Asian Arts Initiative from September 23-25, 2026.
A POEM & A MISTAKE is a modern-day story of transformation. When Myrrha, a grad student in the classics, confronts her professor over the fifty sexual assaults in Ovid's Metamorphoses, their combustive exchange sparks a cascade of magical events. What starts as a tale of a timid grad student and her professor upends itself and dynamically morphs into an explosive tale of gods, goddesses, boyfriends, girlfriends, tricksters, and fiends, while lighting and sound transport us from a classroom to a mythic field to everywhere in between. With elegant storytelling and a powerhouse performance by Sarah Baskin featuring 17 characters and 120 transformations between them, A POEM & A MISTAKE examines what we inherit from the stories passed down to us and cuts to the duality in all of us: aggressor and victim, teacher and student, god and mortal.
Written by Cheri Magid (writer on the Emmy award-winning children's television show Arthur, Associate Arts Professor of Dramatic Writing at NYU Tisch), A POEM & A MISTAKE was also made into an art film originally presented by by Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne. It was featured in the BBC Radio 4 podcast Modern Metamorphoses. It will also be published as an art book by in-ter-sti-tial press.
The production features Sarah Baskin, an award-winning actor and filmmaker hailing from Montreal and based in NYC. Sarah has worked extensively on stage and screen. Film/TV credits include Netflix's A Family Affair (opp. Zac Efron and Joey King), 'Ramy', HBO's 'Gossip Girl', 'The Equalizer' (opp. Queen Latifah), 'The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel', and several independent films which have played at Telluride, TIFF, NYFF, Sundance, and Cannes. Movement direction is by Broadway's Patrick McCollum (The Band's Visit, Angels in America, The Shark is Broken, Oh, Hello! On Broadway, The Lightning Thief), with sound design by Tony Award-winner Fitz Patton (Choir Boy, The Rose Tattoo).
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