ABOUT THE PLAYWRIGHT 

Amy Schwabauer is an award-winning actor, playwright, and toy theater creator based in Cleveland, Ohio. In July 2024, her workshop/festival production of I Wear my Dead Sister’s Clothes won the Char and Chuck Fowler Audience Choice Award at the Borderlight Theatre Festival. In 2022, she won the CAN Journal Best Visual Theatre Award for Coco and Gigi, a toy theater show co-created and performed with Jill Levine. Her solo show This Is Not About My Dead Dog, won her Cleveland Scene‘s Best Actress award in 2017. Other recent credits include: performing and co-creating Stage Frights (Imposters Theater 2023); Bell, Book, and Late Nite Drive Thru, co-created and performed with Carrie Williams (CPT Pandemonium 2021, Borderlight Festival 2022); co-creating, performing, and touring the toy theater production The Events of the Warren County Fair as Observed by a Young Astronaut with Mike Geither (2015–2019). In 2020, she created and performed in Playing with a Purpose, a YouTube series for kids edited by Jasmine Golphin and produced by Lake Erie Ink with support from the Cleveland Foundation. Amy spent much of her early career on CPT stages. She performed in classics such as Akarui, directed by Raymon Bobgan; The Loush Sisters; The Secret Social; and Fire on the Water, as well as a variety of pieces for Pandemonium over the years. She is a current member of the Dobama Playwright’s Gym and the Chicago Midwives Artist Collective. For more information about Amy and her various projects, you can visit her website at AmySchwabauer.com. 

ABOUT THE DIRECTOR 

Ray Caspio is a multidisciplinary artist creating performance installations noted for their deep presence, authentic intimacy, improvisational, communal nature, and “expansive sense of cosmic unity.” Their work responds to the aggression and division of sociopolitical narratives artificially dividing the individual from themself and a collective well-being. Caspio’s work ranges from confessional to camp and has been performed at Cleveland Public Theatre (CPT), The Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA), Theater Ninjas (Associate Artistic Director 2012–2015), BorderLight, 78th Street Studios, and Playhouse Square. Ray served as a performer-creator in numerous devised works and performed in contemporary plays at Playhouse Square, CPT, Dobama, Theater Ninjas, convergence-continuum, Talespinner, and Playwrights Local. They appeared on Best of Theatre lists for Cleveland Scene (2014 & 2017) and WCPN/NPR’s The Sound of Applause (2014, for the conception and performance of the immersive cabaret exploration of gender, sexuality, and marriage equality, TingleTangle), with Scene profiling them as “The Thespian” of 2014. Caspio studies Michael Chekhov’s psychophysical performance technique through MICHA, The Michael Chekhov School, and Chekhov Studios Chicago and International. Ray is certified through MICHA to teach Chekhov. Caspio has also trained at the Celebration Barn and Second City Chicago. They taught for CMA, Baldwin Wallace, Playhouse Square, Dobama, Cleveland Play House, Ohio City Theatre Project, and MetroHealth Arts in Medicine. An illustration graduate, Ray’s drawings and paintings are in private collections in North America, Australia, and Europe. Select exhibitions have been with Maria Neil Art Project, Artists Archives, Yards Projects, LGBT Center of Cleveland, and the Tom of Finland Foundation. Ray received a 2016 Creative Workforce Fellowship, a Playhouse Square LAUNCH Residency, a 2022 SPACES Satellite Fund grant for THE WALL funded by The Andy Warhol Foundation and co-produced with Ohio City Theatre Project, and a 2024–25 CPT Premiere Fellowship for THE BUCKTOOTHED F△GG⊙T (or THE NIJINSKY INCANTATION). Ray is now based out of Chicago. They previously co-directed I Wear My Dead Sister’s Clothes at BorderLight with Amy Schwabauer and Carrie Williams, where the work received the Char & Chuck Fowler Audience Choice Award. Caspio is an inaugural 2025–26 Joan Yellen Horvitz Directing Fellow at CPT.