◾
How to
Say
Goodbye
Every Day
Add a Title
A Mira Production
ABOUT the show
based in the California Bay Area and Sacramento
Mira Players
Alison Griffith
Angela Buencamino Phung
Carli Baker
Chieri Ono
Jessilee Windhaus
Johnny Castro
Kyle Cox
Nathan Sackheim
Sydney Lozier
Sydney Peterson
a play with music created in the California Bay Area and Sacramento
How To Say Goodbye Every Day is an original play with music by Creator & Writer Johnny Castro, currently in independent production in The Bay Area in association with the San Francisco-based Non-Profit, Independent Arts & Media. The work was originally developed with Mira, a Northern California arts collective from December 2023-January 2025.
How To Say Goodbye Every Day is a moving meditation on loss, community, moving forward, and what it means to live as an artist in this moment - all told through the members of the fictional Umbra Theater Company, reunited 10 years after their disbandment as they attempt to stage an unfinished piece of experimental theater to honor a recently deceased company member. Memory, grief, and catharsis evade and shadow them in equal measure. We follow their journey through the pressure cooker of a condensed rehearsal process, as a mysterious narrator guides them and the audience, illuminating humorous and challenging truths about life and death.
Suffused with memory, music, laughter, and heart, How To Say Goodbye Every Day is a semi-autobiographical work. This deeply personal yet relatable show-within-a-show is based on writer Johnny Castro's own experience with the loss of friend and artistic mentor Doniel Soto in August of 2023, and a reflection of what the grief stirred up, brought back, and stripped away.
The show utilizes a rich pastiche of artistic and theatrical conventions. It includes balletic and daring movement sequences, a retro faux found-film component, choral vocal arrangements, a roller skating narrator, and a live band performing original songs written by Johnny Castro & fellow Mira Collective member Sabine Camino.
Can the Umbra Theatre Company navigate their inner worlds and come together one last time? Not without you. We hope you’ll consider supporting us to make this vision a reality. No donation is too big or too small. Thank you 💚
Music
The original music in How to Say Goodbye Every Day inspired by the early 2010’s time period the show takes place in, with indie folk & choral arrangements lending a dreamlike quality to the production when combined with the movement set pieces and film components. Johnny Castro and Sabine Camino have reached into their bag of pop americana songwriting tricks to craft straightforward, heartbreaking earworms.
Where
We've Been
Land Acknowledgement
Mira recognizes that our work resides within the territory of xučyun (Huichin), the ancestral and unceded land of the Chochenyo-speaking Ohlone people, as well as tribal land of Nisenan people. We live, work, and create art on the tribal lands of California’s Indigenous people and we believe fully in Land Back efforts happening throughout California that recognize Indigenous sovereignty and push towards reconciliation after generations of oppression, genocide, and cultural suppression. We sit in solidarity with rematriation work led by the Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, the Muwekma Ohlone’s Trail of Truth, and the Nisenan’s efforts to restore the federal status of the Nevada City Rancheria. We acknowledge that Native and Indigenous people are still here and that our work would not be possible without the use and occupation of Native land.