An interactive performance that turns the U.S. citizenship process into a live absurd competition. Hosted by Carolina Quiroga, with Tom Chalmers as the game show assistant, audience volunteers become contestants facing mock interviews, paperwork races, loyalty rituals, cultural explanations, and unpredictable bureaucratic tests.
Blending satire, personal narrative, poetry, and participation, each round reveals the strange performances often required to prove belonging: what to explain, what to confess, what to pay, and how long to wait. Funny, sharp, and unexpectedly moving, the show invites audiences to laugh while recognizing how bureaucracy shapes identity, dignity, and the feeling of becoming “American.”
-
Carolina Quiroga is a bilingual storyteller, writer, and teaching artist from Colombia who turns stories into lively encounters between strangers, students, and occasionally suspicious puppets.
Her work moves between myth, memory, satire, and participatory theater, often inviting audiences to help build the story as it unfolds. She has told stories in schools, theaters, festivals, and community spaces across the country, and was Artist-in-Residence at Story Parlor in 2024.
Whether summoning fairy-tale characters, re-imagining immigration paperwork as a game show, or persuading a room full of adults to play along, Carolina believes stories should breathe, surprise, and occasionally misbehave.
-
Tom Chalmers is a Massachusetts native, a Columbia grad, a former Artistic Director of Groundlings East/Gotham City Improv, and a proud member of the popular comedy troupe, Reasonably Priced Babies.
He has been seen on screen in national commercials, a slew of short films, and a few feature-length films screened at Sundance. On stage, he has done standup, sketch, improv, storytelling, one-act and full-length plays, and even an opera. He has taught at NYU, Warren Wilson, Flatiron Writers Room, Asheville School of Improv, and right here at Story Parlor.
He believes there is no better place to be than on stage, expressing oneself verbally and physically to share a story that informs and entertains.