Raw Bacon from Poland premiered at Abrons Arts Center in June 2017 featuring: Joel Perez, Kate Benson, Jay Smith, Douglas Scott Streater, Paul Boocock, Miah Velasquez, and Isabella Lagares. 

For shoe salesman and aspiring personal trainer Dennis Toledo, a lifetime of trouble assumes a new intensity after a bad tour in Iraq. Though he’s managed to anesthetize the enduring wounds of that service with prescription drug abuse, when he’s arrested on a domestic violence charge and sentenced to Brooklyn Treatment Court, he’s forced to find new ways to handle his volatile tangle of mixed emotions. Further upheaval with his wife leaves him perched on the edge of recovery with an all-consuming drive to win full custody of his six-year-old daughter.

Director: Ben Williams

Set and Costumes: Jacob A. Climer

Lights: Barbara Samuels 

Master Electrician: Dallas Estes

SELECTED PRESS

 "Let fly with the virtual confetti, please, Raw Bacon From Poland, the poignant new drama that opened on Wednesday night at the Abrons Arts Center turns out to be an unexpected celebration of a marriage of true minds. I mean the kind of meld that occurs when a playwright and a performer seem to blend into a hypernatural unity, making artificial words sound realer than real life." Ben Brantley, The New York Times (Critic's Pick)

“Masciotti’s vital… Raw Bacon From Poland …With great empathy and precision… shows just how limited life’s options can quickly become for returning veterans… a compelling and richly detailed portrait of an antihero emblematic of his country, at once ferocious and fragile… As is the case with many veterans… the very qualities that helped [them] survive… deployment have become personal liabilities in peacetime… Raw Bacon from Poland filled us with righteous rage on [their] behalf—how can someone who has risked his life for his country be left so vulnerable when the uniform comes off? “ (Jessica Rizzo, Johns Hopkins University Press, Volume 70, September 2018)

Raw Bacon from Poland is made possible with generous support from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Jerome Foundation and the generous contributions of many individual patrons.