A cartoonist’s world comes to vivid life in BILDAD, the next production of the El Paso Community Foundation Jewel Box Series at the Philanthropy Theatre.

Created and produced by El Paso’s Barbed Tales theater group, BILDAD will be performed at 2:30 pm Sunday, April 16 in the Philanthropy Theatre, above the box office on the second floor of the Plaza Theatre Performing Arts Centre.

Tickets are $15, on sale at the Plaza Theatre Box Office (where no service charge is assessed) and Ticketmaster.com (service charges apply).

BILDAD is a surrealistic comedy written and directed by Ryan Dean Mullenix, a speech teacher at Parkland High School. It’s about Del Ostrander, who aspires to be a successful newspaper cartoonist. Using live actors and projections, BILDAD lets the viewer into Del’s world of sarcastic felines, egotistical authors, and reality bending ideas.

Barbed Tales is a theater, video and podcast group founded in 2017 by Ryan Dean Mullenix and his wife, L. Noelle Mullenix, a theater teacher at Eastwood High School.

In its seventh season, the Jewel Box Series was created in partnership with El Paso Live in 2014 to host local performing artists in that jewel box of a venue, the Philanthropy Theatre. Go to epcf.org or call 915-533-4020 for more information. To donate to the Jewel Box series, go to epcf.org/jewelboxseries.

The 2022-2023 Jewel Box Series will end with Eden Performing Arts’ production of Mitch Albom’s Tuesdays with Morrie, directed by Hector Serrano, at 2:30 pm Sunday, May 14.