Joe Torsella goes from Pa. treasurer to the Philly Fringe Fest in his first one-man show

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Joseph Torsella was elected Pennsylvania treasurer in 2016. The longtime Democratic fixture lasted one term, losing his reelection bid.

Now six years on from that unsuccessful run, he is reentering public life, this time on stage.

“Declaration,” a one-man show written by Torsella, 62, features a former elected official named “Joe,” who is not-so-loosely based on Torsella. It has a two-week run at the Arden Theater as part of the Philly Fringe Festival.

Like Torsella, “Joe” suffers a political loss and must rediscover his footing. His bedrock is the Declaration of Independence, with which “Joe,” like Torsella, has had a changing relationship through different stages of his life.

“He understood it, probably badly as a kid, as a public figure, as a father, but ultimately as a citizen,” Torsella said in an interview during rehearsal. “What the play is about is finding one’s civic voice after losing the things that you thought entitled you to one, like office.”

The play also marks the return of Nick Stuccio, the founding director of the Fringe Festival who stepped down two years ago. Stuccio is executive producer of “Declaration.”

Torsella and Stuccio have known each other since they were teenagers at the Wyoming Seminary, a prep school near Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. Stuccio says Torsella gave him his first taste of theater when he cast him in a high school production of Neil Simon’s “The Good Doctor.”

“Joe at 15 had a lot of initiative and we went to this very stodgy high school,” Stuccio said. “I was like, ‘Wow, look at this guy, this student that’s going to do this in our school. That is so cool. I’m going to audition for this.’”

“I was a terrible actor,” he said. “Joe, do you remember how bad you thought I was?”

“He was great,” Torsella said.

“I was bad,” Stuccio said. “But I also watched you be a producer. You were a fantastic producer because we had no money.”

From theater to politics, and back again

After high school, Stuccio studied dance and joined the Pennsylvania Ballet for eight years before founding the Philly Fringe.

Torsella’s life took a different route.

“I applied to a school that I won’t mention that rejected me for theater. I ended up going to [The University of Pennsylvania], which I loved,” he said. “My first year there I did theater but ended up majoring in history and economics and turned away from theater.”

After college, Torsella proved a political whiz kid, serving under former Philadelphia Mayor Ed Rendell as a deputy mayor when he was 29. He later became the founding director of the National Constitution Center at 34. Torsella unsuccessfully pursued seats in the U.S. House and Senate, before being elected Pennsylvania’s treasurer.

Through all of that, acting never left his thoughts.

“I always said that when I had time and opportunity I really wanted to get back to it. I used to say it to my kids,” Torsella said. “I remember our youngest daughter elbowing me when we were watching something, and she essentially said, ‘When is one day going to be day one?’”

Torsella dipped his toe back into theater earlier this year with a role in William Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” with ActorsNET of Bucks County. “Declaration” is his first original script.

“It’s a really personal play,” he said. “It isn’t a history lesson. It isn’t a memoir, but it’s very much inspired by things that I’ve lived through.”

A personal journey into today’s politics

“Declaration” was inspired by two things: the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, and the current presidential administration.

“I’m absolutely talking about where we are right now,” he said. “The show is talking about a set of problems that have faced us in the past and will certainly face us in the future, and is doing it in an explicit but maybe not specific way.”

Torsella does not name names, but said “Declaration” reflects his response to the Trump administration without being a political diatribe.

He takes his cues from the Declaration of Independence.

“We all know, or think we do, the kind of gauzy beginning,” Torsella said. “But most of us don’t read through the middle, the bill of indictment against [Britain’s King] George III and all the specifics, as Jefferson said, the ‘facts to submit to a candid world.’”

At the core of the Declaration of Independence is a list of 27 complaints against the king, including the monarch placing his will over the rule of law, obstructing the naturalization of foreigners and forcing the legislature to meet in obscure places “for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.”

Torsella was reminded of the indictments when reading an article by journalist Leisl Schillinger, who described teaching the Declaration of Independence to her classes at the New School in New York. For several semesters during President Donald Trump’s first administration, she has asked her students to identify which of the document’s grievances have current parallels.

In 2017, Schillinger’s students found 12 historic indictments that could have been applied contemporaneously. Each subsequent semester the students identified more.

“But this term,” Schillinger wrote in 2019, “the students found at least one (and often several) contemporary parallels for every single one of the 27 charges made against George III in the Declaration of Independence. Call it the Indictment of Donald J. Trump.”

Torsella said Schillinger’s article drove him to look again at the Declaration of Independence.

“I went back and I read it and my jaw dropped,” he said. “It was staggering how contemporary it sounded and how alive it sounded and maybe how, you know, dangerous it sounded.”

Torsella said theater can speak to politics in a way he never could as a politician.

“It’s more about the ‘Joe’ character, right?” Stuccio said. “His journey and his fragile intimacy around this character, more than the politics, right? It leads with this journey about this individual, wouldn’t you say?”

“But the politics are in it,” Torsella said. “I don’t want to run away from the fact that this piece, in part, grows out of concern. What I don’t think it is, is partisan, or a polemic disguised as a play. It’s very clearly a play that is about the journey of this character Joe. But I think his journey is discovering what [Thomas] Jefferson called ‘these inescapable truths.’”

“Declaration” runs at the Arden Theater from Sept. 10-20.

Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly reported the religious affiliation of the Wyoming Seminary. The school was founded by the United Methodist Church.