FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Ridgewood Theatre Artists Bring Timely New Play, From America, With Love, to NYC - Off-Off Broadway Stage

Caroline Sánchez-Avakian’s political satire about voting, belonging, and American democracy will appear in the Spark Fall Theatre Festival on October 11, 2026

RIDGEWOOD, NJ — A team of Ridgewood theatre artists is heading across the Hudson this fall for the New York City premiere of From America, With Love, a timely and darkly funny new play written by Ridgewood playwright Caroline Sánchez-Avakian.

The play will be presented as part of the Spark Fall Theatre Festival on Sunday, October 11, 2026, in the 5:00 p.m. performance block at the 28th Street Theatre in Manhattan. The playwright, director, and entire cast are all Ridgewood residents, making the production a distinctly local collaboration reaching a New York City stage.

Set during the final minutes of Election Day, From America, With Love unfolds inside a nearly empty polling place, where a last-minute voter discovers that his name is missing from the rolls. As the poll workers attempt to help him navigate provisional ballots, conflicting rules, unanswered hotlines, and an increasingly absurd bureaucratic maze, a seemingly routine voting problem becomes a larger reckoning with who gets to participate—and who gets to belong—in American democracy.

By turns funny, tense, and deeply human, the play examines the distance between America’s democratic ideals and the lived experience of trying to exercise one of its most fundamental rights. Through characters shaped by immigration, naturalization, family history, and their own complicated relationships with voting, From America, With Love asks what happens when faith in democracy collides with the systems meant to uphold it.

The all-Ridgewood cast features:

• Adam Kaster*
• Rosie Gunther McCooe
• Stephanie Dulli
• Amy Gill
• Allison Scott-Gonzalez

Sánchez-Avakian is a playwright, actor, director, and Emmy-nominated television host and correspondent whose career has spanned theatre, media, international development, and advocacy communications. Drawing on her background as a first-generation Cuban and Spanish American, her plays explore identity, belonging, memory, and the ways ordinary people navigate political systems. Her recent works include 1939 and From America, With Love.

The production is an Equity-approved showcase.

Performance Information

Sunday, October 11, 2026
5:00 p.m. performance block

28th Street Theatre, 2nd Floor
15 W. 28th Street
New York, NY 10001

Tickets: Purchase tickets through Ticket Tailor

Media Contact:
Caroline Sánchez-Avakian
www.carolineavakian.com

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*Equity Member appearing with permission of Actors’ Equity Association without benefit of an Equity contract in this Off-Off Broadway production.