Snapshots of Life for Stage & Television
Helmed by writer and producer staci backauskas, the mission of Space & Grace Productions is to entertain while offering the audience an opportunity to reflect on their lives and choices.
From an early age, staci used television as a buffer from reality. Sitcoms like All in the Family, M*A*S*H, Soap and The Golden Girls and dramas including Hill Street Blues, Moonlighting and The Waltons, drew her in because of their ability to weave together humor and poignancy.
Theater came into her life as a teen when she began ushering with her mom at the Pittsburgh Public Theater. She was privileged to see world-class theater like 'Night Mother with Sylvia Sidney and Judith Ivy, Twelfth Night with Leonard Nimoy as Malvolio and social justice pieces like Quilters and Sizwe Banzi is Dead, which inspired her to value authenticity rather than fear messiness.
The lives depicted in the shows and plays she watched were as chaotic as the one she found herself living and they continue to inspire the stories she creates for both stage and television.
Where Fat Girls Haven't Gone
Welcome to a world where size doesn't matter...
Based on the novel of the same name, Where Fat Girls Haven't Gone is a multi-season 30-40 minute dramedy (think Broad City, Shrill, The Mindy Project). Giletta Montrose has been fat her entire life. An actor who dreams of playing every female role Shakespeare wrote, she's tired of being cast in cleaning product ads and settles for being the host of a new reality show called Where Fat Girls Haven't Gone. A girl's gotta eat.
Every week, she does a stunt where fat girls are usually left out - she kayaks down the Hudson, jumps out of a plane and is the romantic lead in pop rock video. But even the paycheck, an apartment in Gramercy Park and the ability get a table at any restaurant in Manhattan isn't enough. Will she have the courage to be who she really is and leave the best gig she's ever had for a dream that seems impossible?
Bible, pilot and one episode available for review.
Choices: A Play in Six Chapters
What happens when you avoid the mirror?
Development began in 2016 for this 100-minute play containing six separate chapters. Kicking off with Confinement where two characters argue the benefits and cost of staying in their relationship, Normal follows and depicts a renegade nun, a bartender and a recently dumped millennial discuss the myths and realities of marriage and family. In Shelter, a former nun thinks she wants a pet but ends up reflecting on her decision to leave the convent. Veneer reveals the price for keeping secrets and the fallout when they're accidentally uncovered. The penultimate play in the series, Endgame, follows the consequences of one of the secrets divulged in the previous play, and Freedom gathers five characters from the earlier stories for an attempt at an honest conversation about adulting, relationships, and how love might really just be science.
Each play shows a different piece of at least one character from a previous chapter, until the truth of their connections both unravel and come together, offering the opportunity for the final five to be victims or accept responsibility for their lives.
Staged readings have taken place over 2025 and the play is preparing for the workshop phase.
Back in the 'Burgh
When a single, middle-aged artist moves home to care for her mother, she confronts and transforms both herself and the relationships she ran away from twenty-five years earlier.
This half hour dramedy (think Stick, Shrinking, Ted Lasso) provides a voyeuristic look into the life of Elsie Kampsen, a quasi-successful visual artist in her late 40s who hides her anger and sadness behind the masks of humor and non-conformist superiority.
Although she once felt safe in the cocoon of resentment constructed from the fragments of her life – four part-time jobs, no health insurance, occasional food stamps, being single and childless, the bloom has fallen from her artist “rose” and she's terrified to grow old with no savings or family of her own.
When her brother and sister proposition her to move back to Pittsburgh from Philadelphia to live with their aging mother, Elsie convinces herself the return will finally give her the stability she needs to become successful. But the panacea of free rent, a small stipend and time to paint melts into a backdrop of medical crises, frustrations with the healthcare system, and emotional buttons pushed by the people who installed them.
Now more desperate than when she arrived, Elsie feels even worse about not choosing a “normal” career and lifestyle, and resists accepting the truth: change requires effort. As the relationship patterns and chains of belief that form the core of Elsie's turmoil are uncovered, she tries, in fits and starts, to find the courage to change the things that prevent her from being happy. To succeed, she must choose to take responsibility for how she has participated over feeling justified and superior.
Through caring for her mother Elsie cracks open the shell she's built to protect herself. Still afraid of losing her edge, she vacillates between evolving and clinging to what she considers independence. As she grows, she begins to see that giving breath to her softer side doesn't take away from her strength, in fact it buoys her in ways she couldn't have imagined.
She slowly begins to make different choices and try new things, which provides her with a different perspective on her siblings and childhood. But the changes she makes have unintended consequences for her family: They now either have to make changes of their own or watch Elsie walk once again.
Both a pitch deck and show bible are available, along with the pilot.