Many of you know me as a sketch comedy artist with Chardonnay Comedy. What you may not know is that for the last two years, I have been writing a much more personal (and therefore terrifying…for me) piece of theater about my experience as a mother. It’s called “Eat the Mama.”

Early motherhood had me facing realities about my female body that I have spent my whole life since puberty avoiding. It had me leaking emotions I had worked decades to plaster over. I was an astronaut, separated from a boiling death by a flimsy spacesuit. I was a supernova, consuming itself in darkness. I was a space rock, cold and alone, waiting to be pulled into another body’s gravitational pull. “Eat the Mama” is one juicy bite of vulnerability with a lot of space metaphors.

If this campaign is successful, I will perform “Eat the Mama” in San Francisco over one weekend in September 2023 (venue details TBD). It will be messy, raw, and real. It will also be funny, silly, and a little weird. Help me bring this strange little art baby into the world!

Here’s how you do it: Click “Donate” above for credit and debit transactions. If you’d like to donate via check, please make it out to “Fractured Atlas” with “Eat the Mama” on the memo line. Send your check to Eat the Mama HQ, 22 Moneta Ct. San Francisco, CA 94112.

You can see three short clips from the play here: https://youtu.be/bP_bqS40PLo

Paying artists - especially female artists, who are typically underpaid - what they’re worth is one of my core values. And I have found a fantastic director (and self-described “space nerd”) in May Liang. 

This campaign goal represents the full cost of paying the artists involved:

This is a story I need to tell. I think it might be a story that others need to hear. With your help,  we’ll create a place for mothers who feel othered by our world. For people in female bodies who are more than just that. We’ll bring them all safely home from the isolation of space. Because whether or not we have children, whether or not we have mothers, whether or not we are “mothers,” motherhood is a supernova that consumes us all.

Jessica Mele (writer, producer, performer) is a playwright, performer, educator, and grantmaker in San Francisco. As a founding member of the female-driven sketch comedy group Chardonnay, she has written and produced twenty shows and one full-length musical since 2009. In 2015, Jessica’s short musical “Ingenue!” won PianoFight’s “ShortLived,” the nation's largest audience-judged theater competition. In 2019, she co-developed and co-led the 24-Hour Playwriting Challenge at four national conferences, including SXSWedu and MakerEd. In 2023, she co-developed and co-led “A Fellowship for Grantmakers of Color,” a solo performance workshop for BIPOC members of Grantmakers for Education.

Jessica holds a B.A. from Smith College in Anthropology and French Studies, and an M.Ed. from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. She has completed coursework in theater, comedy, and playwriting at the American Repertory Theater (ART), City College of San Francisco, and MusicalWriters.com and a certificate in TV writing at UCLA Extension. Jessica is the exhausted mother of one verbose six-year-old who can’t stop becoming a person. As a white woman committed to developing a practice of anti-racism, she is determined to name her whiteness in bios to guard against her inevitable blind spots in narrative storytelling.

May Liang (director) is a Stage Director/Theater Artist of Color based in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the Artistic Director of Ferocious Lotus Theatre Company. She has worked with American Conservatory Theater, Berkeley Repertory Theater’s Ground Floor Lab, California Shakespeare Theater, Crowded Fire Theater Company (Resident Artist), Ferocious Lotus Theater Company (Literary Manager, Producer), Bay Area Children's Theatre, Bay Area Playwrights Foundation, Bindlestiff Studios, Contra Costa Civic Theater, Just Theater, PlayGround Center for New Plays (Directing Fellow 2017), San Francisco Playhouse, TheaterFirst, TheaterWorks and Oakland Theater Project. May was a member of the 2017 Lincoln Center Theater Directors Lab in New York City and a member of the Director's cohort for the 2019 Directors Lab Chicago. She was nominated for Outstanding Direction of a Play at the 2018 Theater Bay Area Awards for INSIDE OUT AND BACK AGAIN at Bay Area Children's Theatre. Her most recent work include the West Coast Premier of Endlings by Celine Song at Oakland Theater Project and a staged reading of My H8 Letter to the Gr8 American Theatre at Shotgun Players.

She graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a double major in Theater and Performance Studies and Integrative Biology and currently works at the San Francisco Entertainment Commission. She previously worked at the San Francisco Film Commission - Film SF and was involved in productions such as BALLERS on HBO and SENSE8 and ALWAYS BE MY MAYBE on Netflix. In another life, she was a Campaign Organizer/Activist for immigrant rights with ASPIRE - the first Pan-Asian undocumented immigrant youth organization housed under Asian Law Caucus in San Francisco.