Blake Pfeil MA ’18

The Caravan is a developmental theatre initiative of Macabre Americana, an NYC-based folk fusion band founded by Laura Dadap, Lacey Madden, and Blake Pfeil.

As an initiative of NYC-based folk fusion band Macabre Americana, The Caravan seeks untold, unheard stories, hidden across the diverse cultural landscape of the United States. Through the power of music and spoken word, The Caravan reimagines those stories in developmental theatre labs and presents them in a public forum. 


The United States is made up of 50 states: 3,007 counties filled with various cultures, beliefs, and fundamental ideals. Consequently, there are millions of untold stories, scattered across this vast nation. Each story plays an important role in the larger narrative that is our country’s history. In recent years, the United States has become more and more divided by politics wherein different communities fail to have an empathetic understanding of one another.

The power of live theatre and music is immeasurable; consequently, the cultural phenomenon of storytelling has increased dramatically in recent years, causing a resurgence of popular folk music to emerge as well. Macabre Americana, an NYC-based folk fusion collective (and developing nonprofit), originally formed to write and share music about the dark side of American history, past and present.

However, as the band dove into its work of reimagining untold stories from the darker side of American history as single songs, it became clear that there was a gap that needed to be bridged. General storytelling, documentary-based theatre, and the folk music resurgence haven’t been connected. Until now.

By reimagining the true stories of the people who’ve lived them, featuring casts of the people who keep them, The Caravan envisions drawing a new map of the United States, not one charted by borders but one connected through cultural understandings and brought to light through the power of storytelling.