Today we’d like to introduce you to Angela Maldonado.
Hi Angela, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
After my dad died in 2011, I started taking improv classes. I wanted something to get me out of the house, and I wanted something that made me stay in the moment and connect with other people again. In 2017, a fellow improviser asked me to join the storytelling show Testify. I was already a fan of the show, and my background as a morning news and public media producer gave me the tools to help put on a monthly show and work with our storytellers.
Testify’s founder, Kate Caldwell, built an incredible community at our old Spider House Ballroom location. I loved sitting in the sound booth at the back of the room, laughing, crying, and experiencing all these beautiful stories coming from our performers.
Being part of Testify also made me a better storyteller. The other producers helped me see things in my own stories that I hadn’t recognized before.
I’m always amazed by the amount of work our storytellers put into their pieces and the trust they place in us to help them tell their stories. It takes so much courage to get onstage and tell your story, but there’s something incredibly rewarding about the connection that happens when you’re willing to share a piece of yourself with a room full of people.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I’ve realized that telling stories is one of the ways I make sense of my own experiences and find ways to tell my family’s stories.
The first story I wrote was about my dad. I told about the particular things he would say, how he looked when he came home from work, all those little details that made him who he was. I got to tell that story to him and my mom. I remember watching my mom laugh at things she’d recognized in him through their decades of marriage, and seeing my dad’s shy smile as he heard how I saw him and who he was in our family.
The next time I told that story was at his funeral. I was incredibly grateful that he’d gotten to hear it himself and that I could then share it with all the people who had gathered to remember his life.
That experience showed me how much a story can hold. It can capture all these little details about a person that might otherwise disappear and preserve them long after they’re gone.
As you know, we’re big fans of you and your work. For our readers who might not be as familiar what can you tell them about what you do?
I think the throughline of my creative pursuits is staying authentic to my experiences and culture. For years, I was part of the improv troupe Shades of Brown, one of Austin’s earliest Latino improv troupes. We adapted standard improv formats in ways that made sense for our culture and experiences. We experimented a lot. We created an improvised telenovela format and even performed in luchador masks.
Our lineup changed and we created an offshoot group, the United Güeys.
When one of our founding troupe members, Sandra Ybarra, passed away unexpectedly in 2023, we didn’t feel right playing as Shades of Brown or the United Güeys without her. She was the creative heart of our group, and we couldn’t imagine continuing without her, but we knew we wanted to keep doing what had drawn us together in the first place. We all loved narrative improv and creating full stories together onstage, so we continued doing that under a different name.
After a few members moved away, those of us who remained evolved one more time, becoming the Tex-Mex Specials. The Hideout Theatre later invited us to teach a workshop on developing improv characters grounded in our own cultures and experiences.
Moving from improv into the kind of personal storytelling I do now feels like a natural transition. The form is different, but what draws me to it is the same: finding ways to tell stories that feel authentic to who I am, where I come from, and how I experience the world.
Do you have any memories from childhood that you can share with us?
My mom is the storyteller in our family. We’d take drives as a family on Sundays, and she’d point out places in my parents’ old neighborhood, where they lived as newlyweds, the ballroom they went to dances at when they were dating, and the house they lived in when it was just my two older brothers. She’d also tell me family stories while I helped her cook in the kitchen. Storytelling was just ingrained in the way I grew up. It was how I learned about my family and the people who came before me.
Pricing:
- We have storytelling classes for @255
- Tickets are $12 for the monthly show
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.testifyatx.com/
