14 | LEHIGH ALUMNI BULLETIN While earning her bachelor’s in theatre, she embarked on a business minor and later realized that she could integrate business principles into her career that meshes an understanding of performance and the economics of nonprofits. She first encountered MTC after being blown away by a student production of David Auburn’s “Proof,” which was originally produced by the company, and set her sights on working there after graduation. During her rise through the organization, she experienced many milestones, including her first show as a producer, Simon Stephens’ “Heisenberg” starring Mary-Louise Parker, which went to Broadway; as well as remounting “How I Learned to Drive” again with Parker—another show she originally saw at Lehigh. “To be able to sit in the audience at Lehigh, and then years later work with the original artists was an amazing full-circle moment,” she says. Along the way, she’s also worked with a number of Lehigh alumni, most recently costume designer Dede Ayite ’07, who won the 2024 Tony Award for Best Costume Design of a Play for her work on MTC’s production of Jocelyn Bioh’s “Jaja’s African Hair Braiding.” For her inaugural season as artistic director this fall, Hunter has planned a rich slate of productions including a 10th anniversary remount of Bioh’s “School Girls” on Broadway; a world premiere, “Montauk,” starring Laura Linney, MTC’s new artist-in-residence; and a revival of Clifford Odets’ 1935 ode to working-class struggle, “Awake and Sing!” She’s also announced plans to incubate two brand-new musicals, an ambitious new undertaking for the nonprofit. “I feel like just yesterday I was walking down the stairs into that first audition at Zoellner,” she says. “There’s no difference between the bold audacity of going into an audition and the audacity of staging new plays as artistic director. I’m always focused on what’s next and eager for the next challenge.” Reimagining the Curriculum Sicre has been equally as bold in the path she’s carved for herself in the theater world. She came to Lehigh as an international student born in Ecuador to Spanish and Peruvian parents, and spent a period of time attending high school in New Jersey. During her first year, she juggled theater with track, often racing from practices to rehearsals for two oneact plays, “Molly’s Dream” and “The Successful Life of 3” by Cuban-American playwright María Irene Fornés, directed by Pepper. From there came roles in “Bound and Unbound” and “Dutchman” by Amiri Baraka, but she fell in love with stage management working on Zora Neale Hurston’s “Spunk” and August Wilson’s “Fences.” Lehigh’s commitment to producing work by playwrights of color was a seminal influence on Sicre. “The fact that we produced a Black show every year I was there was incredible,” she says. “When a predominantly white institution tells me they can’t, I say, “Yes, you can.ʼIt’s all about reaching out and building trust.” Her talents earned the attention of a Hollywood TV producer who put her on the short list for a show, if only she lost 20 pounds. “It was crazy—I was all packed muscle at the time,” she says. “I realized then I didn’t want to do acting for a living if it meant I couldn’t eat.” She switched to focus on teaching, minoring in education while earning degrees in journalism, theatre and history as a five-year President’s Scholar. Years later, her experience teaching in Florida crystallized her desire to work with young people, especially after bringing the students to the Florida Theatre Conference with a powerful bare-bones production addressing the AIDS crisis in the Haitian community. In graduate school at NYU, she took a course on AfroLatine history and culture. During that time, she saw the production of David Lamb’s “Platanos Y Collard Greens,” a meet-cute comedy exploring the collision of African American and Latine culture in New York. She wrote her dissertation on the play and its impact in theater, as well as AfroLatine representation in theater, becoming the first scholar of AfroLatine theater. “I was so angry,” she says. “How had I never been taught about this? I decided I was going to write about something no one else was writing about and stop the erasure.” Over the past 15 years, she’s done just that, writing various articles and book chapters on AfroLatinidad, creating an encyclopedic database of 75 AfroLatine playwrights. More recently, she’s launched a project to bring visibility to Latin American musicals since Lin-Manuel Miranda’s 2008 “In the Heights,” and is creating a soonto-be released anthology of hundreds of examples. Daphnie Sicre ’98
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