Many of Chekhov’s masterpieces received their premiere at the Moscow Art Theater over 125 years ago, and so it is understandable to associate the playwright with that of Konstantin Stanislavski, the theater’s director and one of the most influential thinkers about the craft of acting. From him we get the idea of subtext and naturalism as a distinct style of acting (relatively new, considering theater’s 4500+ year history), both of which were considered “experimental” and “avant-garde” during their initial productions in Russia and abroad. The ideas and techniques of both Stanislavski & Chekhov can also be credited for inspiring the Group Theater in America during the early 20th century, whose original members included Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler, and Elia Kazan. Not just “Method acting,” but most realistic acting training in the United States owes significant acknowledgement to these Russians of more than a century ago.

Director Laura Strausfeld said she was “punked” by Lincoln Center’s 1997 production of “Ivanov,” with Kevin Kline starring in the title role. For her, Chekhov’s 19th-century drama about a man plagued with depression struggling to recapture something of his earlier lust for life, revealed something to the future dramatist about her own struggles with despair. “Chekhov is scripture to me,” she says in the production’s press  release. “It´s not overblown to say I owe him my life.”

Ivanov is a complicated character within a tricky play, and on a different level than say “Uncle Vanya” (1899) and “Three Sisters”(1901). In those later works, most of the major themes and ideas are below the surface; Chekhov doesn’t need to spell it all out for the audience, because we feel it, and therefore understand it (this is why we can both laugh and cry at their plight). In “Ivanov” (1887), however, the scenes are less subtle. These characters often say exactly what they mean and feel, and there is less of the “subtext” that we tend to associate with Chekhov’s other, more familiar plays. 

Strausfeld has adapted this four-act drama into The Real Ivanov, a 100-minute “comedy about despair,” at the Lynn F. Angelson Theater. While its plot is pretty straightforward and basic, at its heart this production is a vivid portrait of clinical depression, particularly in how this mental illness can affect those around the person afflicted, as well as how depression is often misunderstood (something that is just as true now as it was then).

Strausfeld has assembled a diverse ensemble to bring this new adaptation of Chekhov to life, opting to frame this story in a more theatrical setting versus a presentational, naturalistic one. I especially appreciated her choice of putting the audience into the mindset of Ivanov (a brooding and sensitive Sam Underwood), which happened a handful of times during key moments of The Real Ivanov. The rest of the cast freezes as the stage becomes bathed in an icy blue light courtesy of Jiyuoun Chang, providing a chance for Underwood to walk amongst them in bewilderment, confusion, disorientation. This happens a few times in the play, but is quite effective at communicating how unmoored Ivanov is from the rest of his people, how disconnected from their reality.

The Real Ivanov is staged in the round, so that the audience always knows that we are witnessing a play. In addition, this arrangement made me think that we were all complicit in Ivanov’s glacial but steady slide into deeper emotional darknesses. The seating-arrangement also evoked a surgical theater, with the audience becoming a group of psychiatrists observing the subjects in the illuminated center.

Such non-realistic staging devices require an ensemble of actors up to the task of performing in a heightened theatrical style that will register to audiences at 360 degrees. In this regard, The Real Ivanov’s cast is mixed: none of the actors are terrible, but some are difficult to hear, even when their faces are clearly visible. Their acting style has genuine moments, clear logic, but is not being heard or understood by the audience, creating a kind of mix-up of approaches. On the other hand, a number of the actors are able to grasp the frequency that Strausfeld seems to be aiming for. Jordan Lage is excellent, for example, at embodying a rakish uncle, often stealing each scene that he is in. Amelia Mason, too, as the woman Ivanov longs for outside of his marriage, is able to be both believable and theatrical in scenes which are predominantly dramatic. Soph Metcalf transforms the minor character of a page into a whole person possessing an entire backstory (even if we only catch glimpses of it); and Spencer Aste proves expert in playing both comedy and drama, as his role as Mason’s father requires both. 

There are many strong scenes in The Real Ivanov. Strausfeld maximizes the theatrical opportunities of the venue by having characters enter and exit from multiple points, as well as keep them on a narrow red carpet stretched out on a diagonal for the climatic fourth act. Some audiences may be surprised at the frequent anti-semitic beliefs held by a large number of Chekhov’s characters in this world, but depiction does not equal endorsement. Besides, this is secondary to Strausfeld’s singular aim: to stage this lesser-known classic in a fresh, often dynamic theatrical environment, and to probe the subject of clinical depression and its effects through contemporary storytelling.

The Real Ivanov
Adapted & Directed by Laura Strausfeld
Lynn F. Angelson Theater
August 17 – September 19, 2026

When the President nominates her to be Surgeon General, Hughes feels like this is “her time” (he’s never mentioned by name, but as the play is set in 1997, presumably this is Bill Clinton?). She’s excited at the prospect of significantly expanding her influence, and to help bolster the healthcare and rights of all women on a national scale. But when a chance remark during a television interview sparks a public scandal, her nomination is suddenly put into jeopardy. Dr. Hughes now has a choice: stick to her principles and calmly use facts to diffuse the controversy; or put on a smile, say all the right things a dutiful wife and mother should say for the rural women of America, and “play the game” to secure the nomination.

Do public figures face different levels of scrutiny, based on gender? Is there a glass ceiling for women in the pursuit of their careers? Are women held to different standards and expectations than their male counterparts? These and other questions float around this disappointing revival production of An American Daughter, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Wendy Wasserstein and playing until September 20th. Produced by La Femme Theatre Productions, Jean Lichty–the company’s Founder and Executive Director, who also gives a wooden performance as Hughes–earnestly wants audiences to draw parallels between then and now. The production’s primary message implies that the United States was on the rise back then, particularly in terms of gender equality, but was ultimately foiled by The Media, Washington Politics, and other faceless forces. 

Comedy is often deployed to address salient political points here, but too often we get the set-up and miss the punchline. An interesting debate or conversation begins throughout the play, but then quickly fizzles out before ever getting into the meat of the issues. There are no stakes, only platitudes, such as “we rise and continue.” This makes An American Daughter more of a polemic than a play: most of its scenes come off less like dramatic exchanges between characters arguing for personal stakes than caricatures offering superficial snarks and quips about identity politics. Morrow (Ryan Spahn), for example, often arrives onstage unannounced and without any clear reason for being there, yet always immediately inserts himself into the action. Wasserstein makes it a point to inform us that he is a gay, Christian, anti-abortion GOP member, yet never reveals the basis of his friendship with Dr. Hughes, who is passionately pro-choice. Is Morrow even a character, or just a dramatic device?

Probably the latter: Morrow fans the flames of the play’s Big Scandal, that Dr. Hughes did not show up for jury duty once (gasp!). This is seized upon by television reporter Timber (a solid Chris Ghaffari), and swiftly threatens to de-rail her smooth path to confirmation. “4 to 1 women think Dr. Hughes is snotty and privileged, according to a recent poll,” he reports. “They want to know why they should show up for jury duty, but not her?”

Surprisingly, at no point does Hughes express outrage at Morrow for causing such havoc on her career ambitions, nor does he express any contrition for his actions. Timber refers to this incident, without irony, as “committing a crime;” is Wasserstein intentionally making this “much ado about nothing” to emphasize the double-standard women endure in politics. “Why are they doing this to me?” Hughes asks with frustration. “Is it because I am a woman?” Often I wanted to shout back, No. It´s because you’re a liberal and a Democrat. How can Hughes, the daughter of a Senator, be this naive about politics?

She gets a lot of unsolicited advice on what to do next. Lyssa’s husband Walter (interpreted with remarkable depth by the brilliant Robert Sean Leonard) urges her to just do whatever she has to win the position of Surgeon General. But Hughes´ initial willingness to go along is turned off after meeting Billy (Will DeVary), a strategist employed by her Republican father, who wants her to come off as more of a homemaker and frazzled mother, and less as an accomplished physician. The smile is more important than her smarts, because what will the rural women voters in Indiana think? 

Why this Surgeon General nomination process is proving to be such a flashpoint for the President or his party is never clearly explained, but I guess that doesn’t matter. An American Daughter is more invested in virtue signalling than challenging its audience to examine the political complexities around gender. Wasserstein poses a series of questions about womanhood here, but balks before providing any answers, resulting in the play that feels afraid of nuance. 

Women are portrayed as inherently heroic and virtuous in An American Daughter–that is, if they are of a certain age, such as Hughes and her friend Judith (a delightful Montego Glover), a fellow doctor who is Jewish and African-American. Distinct disdain is reserved for the younger generation of feminist thinkers, as embodied by Quincy (Carmen Zilles), an author and public commentator who disrupts Hughes´ personal and professional life on multiple levels. La Femme wants audiences to think fondly of Hillary Clinton as an example of how women should ideally be when exercising their agency and making independent choices, and not to consider other, more “messy” and more complicated figures, such as Monica Lewinsky. 

In the end, this uneven play aiming for political provocation comes off as nostalgia for a particular class, and reviving this production in 2026 feels like a plea for the return of neoliberalism. While I too would like to see fiery theater which depicts debates over gender and politics, An American Daughter´s portrayal of women´s struggles in the 1990s ultimately feels quaint. Instead of galvanizing, this history play comes off as unintentionally privileged and with a pretty selective memory of the past.

An American Daughter
Le Femme Theatre Productions
The Irene Diamond Stage at The Pershing Square Signature Center
August 11 – September 20, 2026

Whilst one is in their early 20s living in a major metropolitan city with some type of art bachelors degree, they may be asked to attend a performance in a slightly inaccessible and/or inconvenient location with a curtain time of 10pm. At this point in a human being with these credentials’ life, the task is unavoidable and nearly insurmountable, and no one is better for completing it. And yet we do it anyway, because it’s what a good person would do for the sake of the arts, even if they shouldn’t. The venue I was heralded to on one such night reminded me of the public schools I attended in Brooklyn; lighting too bright and piss yellow, walls and floors so clean they feel dirty in the same way that hospitals are maintained. The actual theater was only accessible by a skinny hallway that seemingly became tighter and tighter the further you walked, until you reached a door leading to pitch black nothing, also known as a theater.

The venue, IRT Theater, is in the same building the New Ohio used to be (RIP DIVA.) Said building is The Federal Office Building, which formerly held archives, records, shipment processing systems, etc. It is now home to Tap Dance Central Inc. and a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, because that’s the New York way. Lydia Riess’ Going Away Party, staged as a part of the ALab Theater Festival in said haunt, is most generally about the elusive New York way; forced desensitization to constant stimulation and reminders of the failings of humanity as a result, and how individuals choose to cope. The girl at the center of this play and the culture she operates within copes through self-centeredness; not maliciously, but as a survival tactic. For example, at the piece’s opening, she narrates her morning routine for us. A man is her closet, which she clarifies for us, stating, “It’s interesting that a man is playing a closet because men are not often asked to be vessels. By asking this vessel to be a man, by asking this man to be a vessel, I am being interesting.” This type of declaration is littered throughout the play, as the protagonist uses Little Ivy-borne language to state away personal and worldly problems.

The set-up is deliciously rudimentary. Alicia (Fiona Tarses, nailing the Tavi Gevinson thousand yard stare/inquiry) is getting over Derek (Felix Teich, wonderfully disaffected) and seeing Someone New (Ian Edlund, earnest and warm). Her best friend Sarah Anne (Madison Hu, so good you could’ve told me she actually was that person) supports her but always has to run, and Derek’s new girlfriend Paige (Anna Lei Negrin, appropriately, confidently naive) is enviably perf. This web of relationships and their ups and downs culminates in the titular party, meant to celebrate a botched move to Houston that sort of happens and sort of doesn’t, and ends up being more so to recognize Alicia’s mental illness, “how your head is becoming your home” Sarah Anne states before unfurling a fabulous banner.

The play’s production design, by Madeleine Rubin-Charlesworth, had a Rookie Mag-esque charm and craft, with patchwork curtains and mismatched garments of bright and pastel hues that are staple to digital natives. I saw Petra Collins’ gaze in the disaffected gazes of the female actors, as they rotely described things they knew or had men explain to them things they knew more about. Vivian Farahani’s direction precisely matched this estranged outlook that contradictorily cares too much, though the spatiality (or more so the lighting or stage itself) often failed to communicate the temporal and geographic shifts Riess’ script so strategically lays out.

The play speaks greatly on and to the “baby woman” identifier, women young and spry who operate sometimes, usually in moments of miscommunication and stress, with the emotional intelligence of an elementary schooler, often as a result of generational wealth and the neglect that comes with that, amongst or alongside other Adverse Childhood Experiences. Alicia has unhelpful phone calls with her Mommy (Katie Honaker in a hysterical voice over), who would rather climb Kilimanjaro than parent. And yet, Alicia lives off their dime. This inherent financial security almost enables her neuroticism. After all, capital enables disorder by attempting to set a rigid structure of expected behaviors. Said rigidity almost always creates discord. Whether rich or poor, we aren’t wired for the culture our economic system has laid out, and everyone suffers as a result.

The thing I most appreciated about Riess’ storytelling and Farahani’s direction was not only their recognition of this state, but their critique borne out of the countless types of interpersonal failings that come as a result of this state. Young adulthood, at its core, is often the point in one’s life when one is forced to truly accept that one has no control, and to have any inkling of control one must sacrifice autonomy. Our economic system makes living inherently transactional, to the point that we must sell ourselves to be taken seriously. At one point, for example, Sarah Anne tells Alicia she’s feeling “fully saturated…Like you’re saying stuff but it’s like I’ve dissolved all I can possibly dissolve. Kind of on this topic and subject and kind of about you for the moment. I’ve reached full saturation and so as you’re sort of like throwing more solute my way it’s not like dissolving into me.” Sarah Anne’s point is fair, if not subtextually telling Alicia that to get the reassurance and relief she seeks, she needs to make a transaction, if not with a counselor than with her. This isn’t wrong, as a friend is not a therapist, but it is telling, as it confirms what many refuse to believe about capitalism; for it to work for us, we must allow it to take from us. Going Away Party explores how humanity is harmed as a result using a microscopic lens. This miniscule viewpoint reveals a much larger picture, one that often seems insurmountable but, seen through this fable, feels processable, an almost Shamanistic act for the troubled demographic that is one’s early-to-mid twenties in New York City.

The play’s conclusion, which I was relieved to witness at 11:30pm, is wise; Alicia nobly chooses self-reliance and a commitment to attempting to deal. She says (or maybe she didn’t, as the press script notes this line might’ve been cut) “I think my body is a vessel inherently capable of handling what comes its way.” Of course the body is a literal vessel tasked with carrying a variety of fluids, but are we truly, from birth, imbued with some quality that makes it all manageable? This conclusion takes a spiritual turn, as is often the type of turn that comes after turmoil, which, even though I do not agree that we are inherently capable of handling this world, makes the statement all the more true.

Here’s one difference between stories and myths: Stories are about the things people do, while myths are about things that are done to people. Agency is essential of course, as is the related concept of responsibility. In myths, protagonists have little choice in how they act (asking whether Gregor Samsa should have behaved differently pretty much misses the point), and because the consequences are driven by external forces, protagonists are often not considered to be “at fault.” Myths like that become cautionary tales. And here’s one curious corollary: stories are generally expected to be at least somewhat plausible, whereas myths, not so much. In fact, when plausibility becomes an issue, the usual response is that the myth never even happened.

Now, true narratives, as opposed to action sequences, are rare in performance work, but because Leonie Bell works at a far more ambitious level of abstraction and sophistication than is usual in downtown experiment, her performances often depend on actual narratives with deliberate, even elaborate, “plot points.” Here, for example, is a (truncated) outline of Slowtanz (2021), an early solo video, shown live online during the pandemic:

An inflatable dinosaur picks out a simple tune on a piano, then moves to a small table, completing a setting for a breakfast. A recording in English introduces a “Mitten in der Nacht” exercise class, followed by music, as the dinosaur dances. A woman unzips the costume, and explains she’s having a bad case of Frühjahrsmüdiskeit (spring fatigue); then uses a loop pedal to create a children’s “Spring Song”, sung as a round in German. When she stops and starts eating the breakfast, a second recording mirrors the original introduction (this time in German) followed by a similarly simple piano tune, then switches to English to tell a story about Rosalind, a T. Rex, who knows she is on the verge of going extinct—that “we are all going to leave to leave at some point” and has “only a bit more time left.” The recording then asks “What does it mean to have breakfast at night? What does it mean to sit alone at night in solitude?” and the woman, placing her palm to her cheek, starts a bi-lingual conversation with the recorded voice, suggesting they just call each other back and leave messages. The voice responds: “Stop. The fact is, it’s going to happen. You’re going to have to create an imagined world that helps you cope with these things. … Contemplating inevitable things you are afraid of seems like a pretty good survival strategy to me.” To this, the woman rubs pieces of bread with jam on her face, and throws the coffee cups on the floor. The recording ends with, “I am sorry for all of you, all that were lost—past, present, and future… but it’s now time to go.” Crickets resume and the woman announces a “Goodbye Song,” a second simple German loop song, during which she climbs back into the dinosaur costume and eventually walks out of the theatre, up Metropolitan Avenue, and into the subway.

What is one to make of this? 

The live performer is clearly a version of Rosalind, so do they both know they are on the verge of extinction, with only a bit more time left? Probably (if not, why even bring it up?), but then, who is the voice expressing sorrow (certainly not the dinosaur), and who are “all that were lost—past, present and future?” If the woman is contemplating inevitable things she is afraid of—like death—is this part of her survival strategy? And is the “Goodbye Song” and her exit down the subway part of that too? Slowtanz then is partly autobiographical—Bell herself is German-American—but distanced, for the story of Rosalind is only an illustration of the artist’s own obsessive thoughts and feelings, and the conclusion is at best a temporary exit—a literal “walking away.” The only possible ”resolution” to the inevitability of death is death itself.

Resolutions and endings play an even greater role in an earlier monologue, Mamimumu (2020), which switches between two unrelated narratives that both end abruptly, and are abandoned unresolved. Bell follows with several additional possible endings, also all rejected, adding, “What is it with this sorting of other people’s memories?” In her own description, she describes the piece as, “a live-media attempt to locate ourselves through history we weren’t there for … a trans-Atlantic processional-protest advocating memories as lineages.”

References to thoughts of loneliness and displacement, displaced thoughts, memories and the memories of others occur in Bell’s many other descriptions: SchmidtSmithSchmidt is a “lonesome search amidst the chaotic + mundane.” A Maybe-Myth of Runny Nuns is “an interstitial attempt to grieve our way through the negative spaces we cannot touch.” I Don’t Want To Interrupt You Guys makes it even more explicit: she calls it “ a physicalized disruption of the defensive spaces we inhabit when we encounter our most vulnerable selves … a yard sale of memories that we may have altered in the interest of feeling connected to anything at all.” 

Here are other elements common in Bell’s work, which build on her own summary on her website: “highly physical theatrical landscapes populated by pseudo-historical, multilingual narratives that center matriarchal lineages, [that] imagine nature as a main character, and consistently involve fake blood, mustaches & nuns.”

• Her first works were solo and about her.  They are now longer, but the casts remain almost always women—specifically mothers and their (sometimes lost) daughters. The women moreover typically act as a group, sometimes as nuns (rarely doing any things nuns normally do, like pray), otherwise as maids (who serve an equivalent group of mistresses). Men barely exist.
• Nature is more than a main character. Rooms, and more generally interior spaces, are rarely even delineated (except as backgrounds in videos), and action is sometimes performed against nighttime crickets and other nature sounds. Even in SchmidtSmithSchmidt, where the women have specifically been banished to apartments, they appear only in the piece outdoors, squatting in “garden allotments,” and then penetrate the forbidden dark forest, where they find trees that are alive and holding a “death party.” 
• Germany is everywhere, but always as an ersatz Deutschland, just as fake nuns who claim to be centuries old are sometimes played by men, and murders with fake blood are always committed by fake nuns using fake axes. Almost everything presented in the work is somehow essentially and demonstrably fake.
• An enormous amount of dialogue is spoken in direct address; in several pieces, the performers express surprise that the audience is “still there,” only to begin performing to them.

The fake and the false seem to reach their pinnacle in the recent We Live to Die, the Grieving Widows Club—three online episodes presented in 2022, 2023, and 2025—where the storylines are so complex and involved that they become nonsensical. Here, for example, are just the first two minutes of the first episode: 

In blackout, a voiceover with obviously fake accents (all characters in the series are played by Bell, often in split-screen) tells a stupid joke , followed by “it’s about to begin.” Footage then appears of Bell in a wig, fake moustache and ruff opening a door, as the voiceover continues, “That was strange. I mean, that was Fred. Fred is our intern. He’s a bit camera shy. And dramatic.” Cut to footage of Fred, on the phone, saying, “Mommy, I did not even sign up for this internship,” as the Narrator, in blackout, resumes with “That part is true. Someone found him at the supermarket in the vegetable aisle.” Footage appears of Bell in a wig, as voiceover continues, “That’s me, our narrator. You can call me Dolores. Ok, we’ll begin now.” Footage of Dolores, as she tries to add a third pair of glasses, calling “Fred!… Fred! Fred!… “ Voiceover in blackout continues, “Welcome to the Grieving Widows Club’s theme song. I mean, poem.” (Footage of “Fred” playing a chord, over and over) Voiceover: “Welcome to the Grieving Widows Club’s theme poem. Grieving Widows Theme Song. Grieving Widow’s Club’s theme, song, poem, animation—I don’t know…” (Fred’s moustache falls off at this point.) “Grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving Widows. The Grieving Widows theme poem.” (At which point the song begins…)

This is truly a Monty Python-level of exposition, and indeed, many of Bell’s pieces are performed as frenetic vaudevilles, with short scenes interspersed with songs and dances. But for all the frequent false tangents, free associations, misdirections, substitutions, intentional miscues and “mistakes,” the actual stories are usually quite serious. In the end, bad (albeit fake) things usually (or if not, almost) happen. Even The Grieving Widows Club—which has no “real” characters—ends as “a horror comedy featuring an ax-wielding maid who murders her mistress in a fit of rage and takes her place,” followed by an even-more-final version where the murdered mistress is played by yet another maid, followed by an announcement that the whole show (wherever that may be now) was a hit!

SchmidtSmithSchmidt (2025) is Bell’s latest and most intricate piece. It is almost a play (she refers to it as “theater,” and the first line is, “A dark stage”). It is large scale, with a cast of seven women (members of LOCAL GRANDMA, the theater company she founded in 2020) and continues the remix of many common elements from earlier work. All characters are still women and played by women (even as “lumberjacks,” in addition to the nuns and the witches). It is not only set in Germany, but the German-American intermix now includes an expat American librarian who lives in Germany (and doesn’t know why), plus a German daughter (Susi) desperately trying to get to America because she thinks her long-lost father lives there. It is literally matrilinear: there are two (and eventually three) sets of mothers and daughters. And, for the first time, it is overtly political. The framing situation involves a group of women from the town who have been banished to a Plattenbau—a prefab, concrete apartment building built by the all-male government—and forbidden to go to the forest. Yet they sneak out at night to squat in the few remaining garden areas, in search of the one last secret sacred grove. And here, buried beneath all the storylines and routines, the songs and dances—and after Susi beats up the lumberjacks, and finds her way into the grove—we come upon a myth: For the secret grove is the home of the witches who are also trees… one of whom (Eunice) is the long-lost mother of another of the township women (who, of course, recognizes Eunice) and therefore also the grandmother of Susi, who is no longer looking for her father in America, because her mother’s told her he still lives in town… 

And it turns out Eunice has returned to the grove to prepare her “death party,” where she will return (as a tree) to the earth from which she came from. And thus it all ends: as a gathering of women, in a grove of trees, drinking Schnapps and having lunch, singing their wiccan song, as Eunice addresses the audience.

The forest is my family. Just like it’s your family. You belong here. I look up at the sky, and then I look down. And I land in this same spot. Four hundred years earlier. I can feel this body I was in and then I feel another body. An older body. A body that is forty, that is three-hundred, a thousand years older than me. But it is me. All of it is me. And I land here. I can feel it. Here.

Once upon a time there was a woman, who exploded into stars. And those stars shine the way for us tonight. I return to whence I came. I return to this earth with a wish, to once again become witness to events, such as funerals, markets, lunches, and voting below my branches. My arms, my leaves. A tree in a sacred grove. I hope to see you there. 

This is Bell’s response to Slowtanz: an imagined world she has now created to help her cope with the inevitable things she is afraid of. And while it may only be a maybe-myth, one cannot imagine anything more different than the outcome awaiting Rosalind and, Bell suggests, you as well. 

Catch Leonie’s latest work Oct 1-18 at The Brick Theater:
Im Dunkeln sieht man besser (translation: you can see better in the dark)
by Leonie Bell with LOCAL GRANDMA

metamorphosis III burrowed into the Collapsable Hole with gnashing teeth and scraped knees. The freaklet brainchild of choreographer Stacy Grossfield, the dance theatre saga unfolded in four episodes between August 2025 and February 2026, wherein dancers Alexandra Albrecht, Nola Sporn Smith, and Hannah Franzen crawled, tumbled, wrestled, and dragged one another through a blood-slick landscape mutating into increasingly surreal versions of itself. metamorphosis III rapidly accrued a squadron of dedicated pilgrims eager to witness Grossfield’s dream logic concoction regenerate, and thus became a periodic communal ritual for many of the downtown set. The final episode brought about the end of a brief but mesmerizing era. To me, the loss was palpable. 

On the occasion of the first anniversary of episode one of metamorphosis III earlier this month, I revisited a conversation I had with Grossfield in the spring. 

Leah Plante-Wiener: We are two months out from the last episode of metamorphosis III, and I’m haunted by it. I want a crash course in metamorphosis. I know that you did metamorphosis 2 a few years back at the Chocolate Factory, and you were working with the same dancers, for the most part. 

Stacy Grossfield: I didn’t know I was going to make a trilogy. I had no idea, but even just the word metamorphosis– this thing is going to keep transforming. I feel like this happens for a lot of people. You keep on working on the same thing, and it keeps metamorphosing.

We started metamorphosis at the Kitchen in 2019. I had started working on whatever that was going to be with Alex and Nola in 2016, but then I got pregnant with my first. We ended up doing metamorphosis in 2019, and then we did a bit of it in January 2020. Everything was looking very exciting, and then it stopped. It was awful. 

I had been talking about a Chocolate Factory show with Brian [Rogers, artistic director of the Chocolate Factory] for years, so that was finally happening in 2024. I had loved working with Alex and Nola, but I didn’t want to do that same 2019 piece. We had kind of done it, but we didn’t do it, and I wanted to do something that felt in the mindset of where I was, and of the time.

LPW: I was at the last episode with Laia Comas, and she said that metamorphosis III “feels like the world”. That was something I was thinking about every time I saw it, especially with the last one, where it’s like, and the lady in the red pantsuit was Erika Kirk! It’s a fever dream distillation of what I see on my phone and the way it makes me feel crazy. The discombobulation, the violence, the fetishization and commodification of bodies, it’s all there.

SG: With the Chocolate Factory show, I was feeling a lot of sadness. I was feeling that in the next project there was going to be anger. One of the first things we did for metamorphosis III was the fight. 

LPW: What’s thrilling about watching Alex and Nola whaling on each other is the tension between how highly choreographed the work is and the constant feeling of danger. They’re slamming into each other, they’re slamming into the walls, everyone involved is covered in bruises. 

SG: I didn’t want to rehearse it.

LPW: Awesome.  

SG: It wouldn’t feel right. Alex and Nola also didn’t want to rehearse it, and I was glad that they were fine with that, that they felt safe with each other. We set a couple of moments to define the end of that part, like, you throw her to the floor and get on top, and she kicks the wall. I also didn’t want to rehearse it because I didn’t want them to be getting hurt in rehearsal. I was like, if you’re going to get hurt, let’s make sure that people are watching. Make it worth it, you know? 

LPW: [extensive laughter] Oh, man. Yeah. 

SG: I didn’t want them to actually get hurt, but I kind of knew they would, and they did. They got hurt the most after episode one, when there was the most adrenaline, and then they understood a little more, and it didn’t happen the same again. 

LPW: You really trust and honor the agency of your performers, who, as dancers, are people whose entire careers are based on this hyper-focus and vigilance of the body. That’s something that’s so present in metamorphosis III–the damage these bodies are enduring, especially Hannah Franzen, who is throwing herself down the stairs over and over again. It seems like there was a teamwide understanding of the physical pain that was going to inevitably happen.

SG: I would ask them to try things, and I got lucky that they would do it without having any hesitation. I chose people who know how to take care of themselves but are interested in pushing themselves beyond what’s comfortable, which is what’s interesting to me. I’m obsessed with discomfort. I think that life generally is uncomfortable on so many levels. I’m aiming for life in between the art, and art between life, where they have that sameness of sensation. 

LPW: You also create that in your audience, especially in the pre- and post-show moments staged outside in the Westbeth courtyard. I’ll never forget the first time I arrived, and these two women in wigs and sunglasses were fighting and smoking cigarettes, and there was an inflatable pool, or the moment when Hannah first sprinted at the audience at full speed and we found ourselves folded into the show. You’re defying regular audience expectations of showing up and being told where to go, being told where our bodies belong. Talk to me about these outdoor preludes and epilogues. 

SG: I was interested in not confining the whole piece to the black box. I love that outdoor area. It started looking worse and worse as the months went on. All this scaffolding went up between episodes one and two, so I just had to go with it. I had this vision of the kiddy pool and how crazy it would be to have a fight in it. I liked that it was harkening to the fight that you would see inside. 

For each of these episodes, I was trying to create more information while staying in the same world; expanding the worldbuilding. Like, next time, I want Hannah to be outside, and I had this vision of her with this blood on her back, and I made up this story that she fell from one of the higher places because she was shot—but she’s not real. 

LPW: She’s a machine.

SG: She’s Westworld.  

LPW: The episodic nature of the show means that every new detail recolors your understanding of the prior episode, like the knowledge that this woman is a machine. There is something machinelike about her the entire time: the blank stare, the way her body moves like no other. Then, we hear that whirring sound coming from her at the top of episode two, and she’s walking into walls like a glitching video game character, and it’s like, of course she’s a machine. She’s this fembot, which, on the topic of having your finger on the pulse, feels so of the now. I mean, we have sex dolls with artificial intelligence programmed into them now.

SG: metamorphosis 2 had twelve performances, and I was there every single time. After a certain point, I was thinking, I love this piece, but I also wish I could change it. Add in some other information. Right when I was thinking about making the next project, David Lynch died, and I was thinking about him. I wanted to make an homage, and something that’s in episodes. He is such an inspiration.  

I’m glad that Jim Findlay at the Collapsable Hole said that I could do this crazy bit where I do four different shows. Then I thought about it: how am I going to add information to make four evening-length works? I think that to make episodes of a dance piece, it doesn’t need to follow logic like it would for television. I needed to have things repeat, knowing that not everybody was going to see all four episodes. I had things repeat, but then they would change, and how they would repeat would change. Things would begin to overlap, which offered really interesting information into what you were seeing. The first time you saw pieces of the original metamorphosis in episode three, that was overlapped with Hannah eating the internal organs.

LPW: That was legendary. You’re looking at the organs, like, what is that? Hannah told me what it was. There was purple sweet potato, tomato sauce, cold noodles. I have a particular obsession with grotesque eating onstage. I felt really seen watching Hannah eat. Like, this is for the girls who love to go onstage and reckon with their eating disorders by eating some nasty shit in front of everyone. 

I have to ask you about using dialogue from Industry for the Alex and Nola fight, which I didn’t realize was the case until we received that piece of paper with all of your references at the end of episode four. That felt like a reward, to be able to track the references throughout the series. You have Industry, that one video of the Russian guys doing the dance. I’m interested in your media consumption habits at large. 

SG: I’m on Instagram too much.

LPW: This is the work of a woman who hangs out on Instagram Reels. 

SG: I’m interested in making work that is a collage. I don’t think about collage as, when you’re sitting down with pieces of paper and fabric and all these different objects, you’re handmaking your material. 

LPW: You go to Materials for the Arts and you pluck it out. 

SG: I’m arranging these found pieces, and the way that you arrange them brings the meaning. It still feels like visual art to me, in the way that the viewer can make their own meaning. A lot of the times when things are arranged in time, especially if you have text, the meaning becomes extremely clear; it is one thing. I’m not trying to do that. I’m trying to make something that is free to interpret. 

LPW: This refusal to spell it out for your audience also speaks to a trust in your audience’s intelligence, which I think is absent these days. 

SG: In metamorphosis 2, I brought in ballet, which I actually choreographed. For metamorphosis III, I wanted modern dance, so I found the modern dance material. It became this thing where I’m like, I want these things to happen, but it’s not important that I actually make them. The thing that’s important is that they exist, and that they’re very pure. I’m not going to make my own version of them. Then, I was interested in having you feel like you’re in this kind of performance, then it gets completely interrupted. You’re experiencing different kinds of performance, and they start to overlap, and overlap more as the episodes move forward. 

LPW: The destabilization of recognition, of giving your audience something that is familiar like ballet and classical music, and then interrupting it with the piece regenerating itself before our very eyes plays against what we get so often in performance. We’re lulled into a sense of familiarity, and then the audience gets to rest on their laurels the entire show. They know the form and what to expect, but you’re denying them that. 

At the same time, though, you are creating your own form that audience members who are able to attend every episode become very finely attuned to. I asked you after episode two about the difference between the first and the second episodes, and what you said to me was, we did it backwards. You’re creating this form, but then you’re putting it on its head. You’re building this familiarity and scrambling it, breaking it, rebuilding it again. 

SG: Between episodes one and two, I had very little time, and then I thought, let’s just try this. It’s in reverse, but the music order stays the same. When we tried it, that was it. It changed everything. Even though it’s all the same, it was completely different. 

LPW: It’s very Lynchian, the pairing of time going forward with action going backward. 

SG: At the end of each episode, something new gets introduced. At the end of episode two, we introduced Hannah in the red suit, and she only had two lines. For episode three, we picked up where we left off. I told the performers, we’re gonna act as if you never left the theatre. So, Hannah has been stuck there, and her character took it to the extreme. 

LPW: The implication is that she ate Gordon [Wells]. 

SG: Yeah.

LPW: A girl’s gotta eat. 

SG: That’s why his body was shoved up in the back.

LPW: Because he’s disemboweled, and that’s not nice to see. 

SG: Episode four, in February, starts with Hannah in the front window of the Collapsable Hole. I couldn’t use the outside, but I could use the lobby area. The idea was making Hannah more of this inhuman female figure, which is obviously also a mannikin. The inspiration for that came from this window I saw in the Upper East side. I took a picture of it and showed it to Hannah, and I was like, I think this is you in your underwear. I had to find a fur coat. I was obsessed with her wearing a fur coat. 

LPW: It’s all so Epstein. Young woman wearing a fur coat, almost naked in a storefront for everyone to ogle at. Again, it’s the finger on the pulse; this is what we’re seeing on the news, the conversations we’re having, and here it is become flesh. 

I think that for a lot of people, discovering Hannah Franzen for the first time was an event. She’s incredibly talented. She’s hypermobile, she’s got crazy stuff going on with her joints. She commits so hard. How did you find her? 

SG: She was in metamorphosis 2. I held an audition, which I’d never done, because I needed ballet dancers and I needed them to be different ages. When I did the audition, there weren’t that many people who had ballet training, even if I wrote it in the listing. Hannah was the opposite. She had a lot of ballet training and stood out like a sore thumb. She was incredible. She was unbelievable. I emailed her, and it felt like forever, but I realized it was just a few hours before she emailed me back. I told the woman helping me run auditions, I don’t know what I’m going to do if she doesn’t want to do this. I need her. Then Hannah said the exact same thing. She was still in college, so she wasn’t even supposed to be doing outside projects. We didn’t work together very much for the Chocolate Factory show, but I immediately knew that I could try things with her and that she’d take it to the next level. 

LPW: She will throw herself down the stairs. 

SG: It was the same with Nola, when we first worked together. She just did an extra part, in a piece where I had a herd of twenty-something people crawl across the stage half naked, and I remembered her. 

LPW: Having Dead Tooth be part of metamorphosis III was awesome. 

SG: I knew that I wanted to have a live band. That’s also a David Lynch thing, in some of his work. If I could have had this as a multi-million dollar production, I would have a different band for each episode, but I love working with Dead Tooth. They’re so smart and they ask such great questions. I had them learn “Damaged Goods” by Gang of Four. 

LPW: [singing] Sometimes I’m thinking that I love you…

SG: I had them only play Dead Tooth songs when the audience wasn’t in the room.

LPW: The aural experience of waiting in the Collapsable Hole lobby and hearing this rock concert going on behind the door–the work that that did to create physical anticipation was really crazy. I’m standing there, and I’m like, why is my heart racing already? Let me in! 

SG: There was a lot of excitement in that. There was also some intimidation. I feel intimidated when I hear that something’s really loud before I’m about to go in. 

We didn’t have the band for episode three. It was originally scheduled that way, because they were going to be on tour in October. My fun task was to figure it out with Jeremy [Kadetsky], who did sound design for all the episodes, and I loved that change.

LPW: In episode three, the music that we had heard live the first two times being piped in through the speaker was such a particular sensation. There it is, there’s Dead Tooth doing Gang of Four. That was a special moment. 

In a funny way, the band is the most quote-unquote “real” element of the show. Their degree of reality is closest to the audience’s. They end up having an anchoring purpose, but then they leave. 

SG: In episode four, I felt like I needed to acknowledge that they weren’t there in episode three. I wasn’t sure if the band came back, but I did want to have a feeling that things ratchet up for episode four, and that if I wanted to have a rock sound, I didn’t want it to be recorded. The acknowledgement is that they’re in episode four a little bit. They play before the audience comes in, and then the doors open, and it’s just silence. 

LPW: It’s scary.

SG: It was dark and quiet when you actually walked in. 

LPW: The expectation isn’t only that because you’re hearing rock music behind a door, you’re going to walk in and Dead Tooth will be playing live, but the expectation is also that that is what will happen because it did in episodes one and two. That’s the reality you created for the show. In episode four, it’s like… Where did they go? We’re just thrown into the work. It was striking. 

SG: We didn’t talk about Erica Kirk at all. 

LPW: We didn’t talk about Erica Kirk! 

SG: She was in there. 

LPW: The second I realized Hannah’s monologue in episode four was the Charlie Kirk eulogy, I gasped. I was so shocked by that, but here’s this blonde woman with the Erica hair and a pantsuit. Of course it’s her. 

SG: I wasn’t intending it to be her from the beginning, but once I realized that was the text we were going to use, it completely fit, because the piece is going through time. It’s showing you Erica before, who she was in her past.

LPW: A robot from Westworld, famously.

SG: Going out on the town scantily clad. 

LPW: There’s this corner of the Internet where people get a kick out of pulling up Erica’s Instagram pictures from 2014, when she was a party girl. 

SG: I’m totally into that. Like, why are you pretending? The pictures aren’t going anywhere. 

This interview has been edited for clarity and length. 

A blow of glitter initiates cheers from the audience. Silver confetti flies forward. Three inflatable kiddie pools of rainbow stripes occupy the center. Multi-colored followspots flash the stage corners in garish hues of emerald and pink as if summoning Cynthia Erivo’s aura. A thorny crown with battery-operated lights glows in the dark. It is as serious as it is camp. The cast of seven dancers prances into formation, moving through an exaggerated warm-up, dropping into splits, casually bringing the audience toward anticipation as tension builds. But toward what do we climax? Gathered in the intimate theater of Dance Place, a community-rooted performance venue in Washington D.C., the audience awaits the coming of this prodigal son–the inaugural recipient of DC Dance Network commission and the director, choreographer, and performer of Ceremonials, the latest evening-length work by dance-theater artist Brendan Drake. This maximalist opening foreshadows the hedonistic themes of the performance; Bakhtin would have much to say.

We arrive at a tableau of renaissance debauchery. The performance is not subtle. An ominous and oversized wooden cross takes center stage. Careful shadows refract it twice more onto the exposed upstage wall–a triptych of crucifixion, martyrdom, and celebrity acumen. The cast wears individualized fits: natural fibers with tailored pleats, athletic streetwear in iridescent sheen, purple cloth draped overhead à la the one and only diva, Martha Graham, remade as the holy Virgin Mary or perhaps Mary Magdalene, a double-strap thong featuring Javi Padilla’s exposed ass cheek. The scene is unmistakably a Grünewald remix. Dancers recline in disinterested postures, ensuring we absorb the offering. Absent is the lamb, however, in this Isenheim altarpiece. The sign of innocence and sacrifice, denied in Drake’s adaptation, hints at a refusal to cast the ravaged body in a premature victory of moral doing.

Ceremonials is not the first work to overlay Catholic iconography with queer, erotic, or debased imagery. My mind leaps from the recent hoopla induced by the drag reenactment of da Vinci’s The Last Supper during the opening ceremony of 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Paris including official condemnation from the Vatican, to Andres Serrano’s Piss Christ (1987) which featured photography of a urine-submerged cross and outcry from U.S. congress on the use of public funding from the National Endowment of the Arts, to the more vintage Sancta Susanna (1921), a one-act opera by Paul Hindemith and August Stramm that featured a scene in which a nude nun clutched a crucifix and spawned debate on the competing themes of religious devotion and erotic acts.

But from within this saturated landscape of sacrilegious art, Drake emerges with an edge: his thesis, it seems, is not simply to expose the queer desire laden in the homophobic veneer of Christian dogma, nor to fingerpoint at its violent exclusions. Rather, Drake invites viewing into the private ceremonies of pleasure in our lives carried out in semi-public spaces. The pacing is slow, confident. Drake does not apologize, gleefully creating as if to say, I don’t see anything sinful, do you? By tasking the queer body with supplanting iconic Catholic imagery, Ceremonials is not (simply) overwriting a long history of erasure. When the queer, vulgar body occupies the central cross, Drake nudges us toward a more nuanced question: whose pain, whose martyrdom, whose bodily expense gets to be celebrated, made holy?

Elsewhere I ponder the distinction between nakedness and nudity before the law, a distinction that art historians appreciate for the Eurocentric aesthetics of Man but that legal frames ignore when addressing cases of obscenity and indecency. Drake provides a partial rebut. What tumbles from this overt tableau are scenes of undeniable pleasure, virtuosity, and exhaustion. The cast descends into twerks, undulations, violent but beautiful ripples of the spine on all planes. In one moment, Drake vibrates alone, his spine surging with quiet precision as he performs an understated and virtuosic hand-job on a ghostly partner. There’s a spit slap upstage that you miss if you blink. Jaws fall open wide. Distorted, abstracted, and performed through the disciplined bodies that concert dance technique inevitably produces, these gestures arrive without sexual charge. Instead of fetishizing a world of hypersexualization, we’re invited to view these rituals with the reverence of an oil painting that similarly presents exposed genitalia, proximate bodies, and divine moments of ecstasy.

A duet between Drew Scammell and Sydney Goldston arrives just as we think we might be watching ill-made dance-theater where anything goes. The quiet unison holds just enough formalism to force the audience to view in awe. A third body begins to shadow another dueted movement in an upstage doorframe. If the clunky “I didn’t see you there” first announced a soliloquy recited by Amanda Hameline, Drake reveals himself as otherwise fluent in soundscapes through the movement tableaus he richly offers. Choral voices climax and fall away to a repetitive beeeeeeep. Heavy breathing from the dancers’ exhausted forms replaces an organ’s pipe sounds. In a rare solo moment of the evening as the lights dim toward a magenta halo, Drake expands his belly as if pregnant, then sucks in as he undresses. The silhouetted moment sears, ripe with implication.

In the final scene, the inflatable pools return. Ceremonies are cyclical, are they not, made to be done again? In the return, however, the bodies find new extremes. A singularly exposed nipple is drawn toward the audience. A performer drinks a milky liquid from a bowl while crouched on all fours; perhaps we all pleasure in lapping at the edge. The cross, again center stage, is turned upside down. Two masc dancers, now nude, are tied to this altarpiece, and perform a subversive intimacy as they caress and violate. Their bare abdomens press into the stake, lips to the wood in a slow make-out session. Others lie prone in the pools, including Drake. Our savior Padilla, still in the thorny crown with cheap lights, drapes a string over him. He carefully ties one end to his choker, the other around his cock, to be led submissively away. In the end three performers rise to their feet, full frontal, one in each pool, only to be bathed in femme sanguis. Crimson fluid streams down.

When society is quick to crucify pleasure, what is left to stand?

How to categorize the uniquely ingenious work of Michael Kinnan? 

On the day I was set to attend Goodbye Horses, a non-theater friend asked me to describe the show. To my shame, I tidily characterized Kinnan’s latest solo piece, subtitled An Unauthorized Retelling of Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs, as a “one-man parody” of Demme’s acclaimed 1991 film. 

Of course, “parody” was not a sufficient descriptor. I knew that full well because I had seen Kinnan’s breakout work Never Let Go, a delightful riff on Titanic presented in 2021 at The Brick (where Goodbye Horses also debuted this July, ahead of an August run at Edinburgh Fringe). Never Let Go was many things, none of them parody: it was faithful reenactment, loving homage and playful satire—somehow all at once.

In reviewing Never Let Go at the time, I noted my relief that Kinnan was driven by genuine “love and fascination” with James Cameron’s epic 1997, rather than contempt. As I wrote then: “Why reenact except out of love?” 

Kinnan has pulled off an equally remarkable trick with Goodbye Horses—albeit in a very different tonal register. Where Never Let Go operated firmly within the realm of camp melodrama, Goodbye Horses is a work of intense psychological horror through and through. 

For me, that required some adjustment. As Kinnan guides us through the opening scenes of Demme’s iconic film, introducing us to FBI trainee Clarice Starling and her misogynist male co-workers, I felt an inevitable desire to giggle and titter. Kinnan’s take on Clarice only adds to the confusion, leaning as it does into a high-pitched voice and babe-in-the-woods energy that feels overly arch. 

But as soon as Dr. Lecter himself enters, Horses finds its footing. Kinnan’s embodiment of Hannibal is simply delicious, as delectably evil as it is disgustingly horny. The strange intimacy and mutual understanding Lecter finds with Clarice, so key to the success of the film, is equally evident in Kinnan’s work—highly impressive when one man is playing both parts. 

As we descend deeper into Clarice and Lecter’s psyches, this moody staging, co-directed by Kinnan and Tom DeTrinis, begins to cast its unsettling spell. Nicole Bernardini’s barebones set provides all it needs to, and Rosana Cabán’s soundscape is suitably unnerving. But the biggest assist comes from lighting designer Kate McGee, whose work with darkness and shadow keeps us permanently on edge.

The trickiest challenge facing Kinnan was how to tackle “Buffalo Bill,” the serial killer Sterling and Lecter are hunting. Bill identifies in the film as a transsexual and skins female victims for the purpose of making a “woman suit,” to complete a kind-of “transformation.” Lecter insists that Bill is not transsexual, simply deluded—though he’s hardly a man you’d look to for sensitive insight on gender theory. 

Kinnan offers no sympathy to the brutish Bill. The killer is a terrifying presence who seems to live in the darkness, evading McGee’s every attempt to illuminate him. Yet when Bill dances to Q Lazzarus’ song “Goodbye Horses” (an infamous scene from Demme’s film), something intriguing happens. A disco ball fills the space with glittering splendor. Kinnan glides around the space, bathrobe flowing behind him. There is an undeniable beauty to the moment. It is also, at the same time, grotesque and unsettling. Kinnan lets all these messy contradictions sit side by side, Bill’s confused relationship to gender mixed in alongside so much else.

Goodbye Horses builds to a gloriously terrifying coup de théâtre, a shocker for a moment that had my audience gasping (then applauding). The ingenuity of this moment, alongside many other striking images conjured along the way, confirm Kinnan as a thrillingly imaginative theatrical magician. What this artist does can’t quite be defined, and in that ineffability lives its beauty. 

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Tess Walsh: How did you initially find lip syncing as a medium? The way you use it pays reverence to the tradition of drag performance but then morphs into something unique to you.

Scout Davis: Initially, the kind of mainstream gateway of Youtube and Drag Race as a teen…I think that was the more obvious first exposure to the form. And then being able to go out while in undergrad in NYC and going to clubs and bars…to see drag artists using [lip syncing] more expansively, especially in Brooklyn…I think it’s been coined by other people or maybe I’m kind of mashing it up with other things, but kind of theatrical sampling where you’re layering one piece of media, maybe it’s a Jessica Simpson song, but then there’s like a meme moment or a reality TV show moment that is like super cut with the original song, and then there’s like a greater kind of mega mix that maybe happens. So that was like one exposure to things in a more entertainment-at-face-value kind of sense. And then getting exposed during that time to more subversive drag artists who are looking at lip syncing as a form in terms of theatrical storytelling…artists like Dickie Bo, who’s a UK based artist who has been in dialogue with me a little bit in the past and been really sweet and kind of a mentor in some ways. Just looking at their Judy Garland pieces, which are really sad and psychological and really kind of excavates her as an archetype and as a figure in terms of a queer tether and what that means today. And then looking at dance theater artists like Crystal Pite, a Canadian choreographer, who has this company that’s done pieces that have been choreographed to spoken tracks or short stories or full novels…this choreographic kind of lip sync experience that really blew my mind. And then there was Dana H. Dee Dee O’ Connell being a master class of all master classes playing Lucas’ [Hnath’s] mom, really expanding [lip syncing] as a form of channeling, and channeling a voice who is like, not necessarily in the room with us, but we’re calling back upon a certain moment in time to re-dramatize something. So I was exposed to a hodgepodge of things in terms of the form, but the output I got with the piece I shared at La MaMa has a genesis to the durational quality in that relationship to lip syncing…Morgan Jenness a long time ago was talking about a drag queen that I forget the name of that they saw back in like, I don’t know, let’s say the early 80s, who had a boombox, put it on play. And it was the cast album of Follies from top to bottom, every character, transition music, everything. It had the full nine yards of the show in a way that was subversive and raw, so that was always like the North Star in the way. And those other references that I was talking about before were guiding forces to get me to where I was in terms of the kind of form and how I was approaching it.

TW: In terms of that piece presented at La MaMa, The Life and Times of Daisy Forbes, it’s an archetypal showgirl story, but the selection of audio, specifically interview snippets and the figures they record (Courtney Love, etc) makes me wonder how much that archive drove the story, or if it was more vice versa?

SD: Yeah, it was kind of a snake eating itself in a lot of ways. I was outlining the events I wanted to happen whilst compiling the material, which was kind of an out of body experience. I’m still reflecting on the rubbing-your-head-whilst-rubbing-your-belly sensation of generating in that way. In that modality, I was able to think about what I wanted…getting to know her [the titular role] in this moment, in terms of her relationship to being performative and having an audience. I wanted to explore the relationship with feeling fully left behind or too late for someone…but I wasn’t necessarily trying to make a clear dramatic rise and fall, per se, but to get a glimpse of what these chapters could have been in her life. And maybe in a fuller production of sorts, getting to drop the needle, if you will, with certain moments…to explore the kind of brush strokes that you get with the material. I was trying to find audio that I was excited by that was going to try at various levels to explore those themes and variations and get me to a point by the end…finding some hefty weight of that cost of performing, whether that be the duration of the piece or amount of voices, to try and get to a sensation of disillusionment, the veil being lifted for myself in terms of what the archetype means for me as someone who tries to find any sense of “thick skin” or “resilience” inside, trying to just stay afloat in many ways. So that was a driving force in terms of what I wanted the materials to be, to give a roller coaster ride of uncertainty for the viewer. It can end up being a trance-like experience. So finding what those stepping stones in that trance might be to get folks into the same level of exhaustion with me, that same sense of being fully depleted that I was definitely, definitely feeling at the end.

TW: Wow that totally tracks. I didn’t even make that connection to the audience’s experience, what it is to go through the piece with you as performer and character. Speaking of said character, I’m wondering what early media representations of showgirls and that culture make their way into the piece. How did your fixation on that figure come to be?

SD: The monologues that I wrote that are not existing media are very much truth and fact, more so to my life. This one line that I was “raised by showgirls” is very much true. Why the last name is Forbes is because that was one of the first streets I lived on for a longer duration of my life in L.A. And my first pet at that time was named Daisy. The force of it all! I’m trying to honor the kind of porn star name creation, but anyways, when I was living there, our next door neighbor was a Playboy Bunny, living in and out of the mansion. And I distinctly remember her looking like a million bucks. I was in this trance of someone who was living the full fullness of that reality, 9am on a Sunday, looking incredible, in her front yard doing nothing at all. And around this same time, I was dropped off at a theatre family’s home. The wife was a principal Fosse dancer, did every national tour of A Chorus Line…she taught me to perform in a lot of ways. She was a very important person to me, along with other dance teachers that I had growing up. They had resilience and this ability to survive. We don’t even have this form [chorus-heavy performances] anymore to a great degree. All of those Vegas shows have been gone for over ten, almost twenty years. The archetype was present in sporadic moments in the media, but in the last few years [the exposure] is just enormous. For me, I was obsessed with it from a young age. The girls were keeping me going. I was always looking to the Bette Davis’s and the Joan Crawfords’ and all those girls that deal with a lot of bullshit. How one deals with it is just a marker of how they hold themselves and respect oneself. It just feels like a standard to hold oneself to. It felt like a Russian doll of sorts, finding the layers of what’s real and what’s not, how much one has to give to an audience, the expectancy of that, my own pursuit of a life in what we do, which feels absurd to even formulate. But the showgirls that raised me, they were like yeah, it’s not gonna be a thing or it’s gonna be really, really impossible. The chances of even being able to share any kind of work anywhere is slim to none. So just being presented with that reality, those kinds of jokes, always felt like an important pillar in my survival, naming what I want to be in this world.

TW: On the topic of beckoning to our own lineages, you make this amazing offering to Zaza [Diana Oh] at the end of your piece, which I found so beautiful. I knew them while I was in college, and they were, as you know, this absolute angel on this earth. And I know that we just lost Dito [Van Reigersberg]. In upholding the lineage that artists like Oh and Reigersberg take residence in, one that your work as both a solo performer and collaborative artists is borne out of, I’m wondering what your hopes are going forward, in passing this tradition down?

SD: I’m trying to process that question quite a bit. Usually I name the kind of why-we’re-all-here-tonight of it all at the beginning of the piece. But there was something about it being at the end, you haven’t heard my voice, and sitting with the fullness of my own reality, that is still rocking me, and how people have started to process it with me after the show. And now with the passing of Dito, it’s just made it even more real. And also Nilan Johnson in between, Morgan [Jenness] beforehand…folks that I’ve lost. I’m trying to hold their spirit in this kind of baton pass that you’re naming. While I’m still here and vital and able to walk, roam, and be mobile for the most part, I want to offer the sense that liberation is possible in your body and experience. And there are communities of folks, whether you’re doing a freaking solo show, 90 minutes onstage, that will tend to and care for you and honor a reciprocity in both collaboration and humanity. There are those folks out there, and they may not be in the institutions that will put your name somewhere, and that is probably for the best. Bringing it back to Zaza, to inflame that idea for everyone, to embolden and empower folks to take their artistry into their own hands and find that sense of community in like-minded folks, that active pursuit of a collective consciousness towards liberation. Then the field can be enlivened. That ideology has to be maintained with such a delicate care so that the next generation doesn’t feel like they only can and/or have to be successful through TikTok or TV, something that isn’t going to fill their well as artists or make them feel like a citizen of the world. If I’m able to offer those pathways towards that way of life and the resources to do that, and also explore that in and of itself in my own performances, whether that’s me onstage or me directing other people or a whole multitude of things in between that I would love to do in the future, I think I would be a happy camper.

Cecilia Corrigan holds a fun house mirror up to influencer culture and brainrot capitalism in her flamboyant fever dream of a semi-solo show The Gay Divorce (1). Shapeshifting between various women, witches, and worms, she wanders through the attention economy looking for love and an escape from precarity. Basically every character is pitching an MLM. Jesus Christ even makes an appearance as a lapsed clean girl in crucifix pasties shilling “Pick Me Peptides” (mayonnaise applied like moisturizer). But theater itself might be the biggest pyramid scheme in the room – shout out my MFA grads! (jk I never got accepted to an acting MFA ;))

At rise, we meet a saucy, vaguely pan-European witch named Bufana who seems to exist in a sort of eternal fake podcast / QVC soundstage (the gleefully deranged sets are by artist Abby Lloyd). She sells advice on how to marry rich using the tradwife-y “BUF Method” (pronounced, yes, “boof”) and is attended by Jessica, an Igor-y homunculus played by the show’s director Allison Brooks who is also a fabulous clown (watch her self-soothe by eating crackers with beaver-like intensity). 

One dance break later and Corrigan transforms into Girly, a protagonist of sorts and BUF devotee. She’s a bubbly, sapphic femme wearing a whimsically punk, airbrushed and bedazzled mini dress (the trippy costumes are by designer Lauren Krischer) and she’s looking for princess charming. Our ingenue soon gets engaged to a VHNW woman who, Girly’s followers point out during a #grwm, is toxic. This feels like a conventionally hetero (or gay guy) dynamic that’s interesting to see in wlw. The fairy tale implodes as the event horizon of extreme wealth gap gay marriage disappoints and the dubious promise of social mobility through social media glitches. So new personas start to spawn.

Enter a worm. Swaddled in sparkly pink fabric, Corrigan morphs into a glam, nihilistic invertebrate that still longs for (and is baffled by) attention. “I’m a worm now. And I don’t care about anything,” she taunts whilst getting ready to sleep. “What if the rest of the show is just this? You think this is a show? A worm sleeping?” The crowd loves her (and vice versa). From flirty anti-sociality to performative martyrdom, her characters almost feel like embodied stages of grief or experimental identities on a non-linear path towards a healing.

Midway through the play’s journey, a maudlin Girly gets lost in a dark forest. “How did I end up here? Oh right, I started live-streaming,” she says and we laugh. Juxtaposing theater crowd and online following — black box as black mirror — the show casts us as various publics, including rocks for Girly to faint on. Will a brilliantly dumb “clap if you believe in fairies”esque bit of audience participation revive her? It’s fun watching her wrestle with some ferns and act squalid. I’m so bored of good-coded acting and this is all delightfully anti-good-coded. Like fun bad (but good [but not “good”]). John Waters meets Pee-wee (meets Artaud?). Having taste is the obsession du jour and we’ve got it, reader!!

Finally, the apocalypse happens. Humanity’s screen time gets so dysregulated that there’s, like, an extinction. Phones are dead but Corrigan survives as an eschatological it-girl armed with pink dildo nunchucks and lifestyle tips. In this cozy wasteland, where a Real Housewives transcript is a kind of Rosetta Stone, can happiness finally be found? The show sees hope in emergent collectivities and esoteric stimulations (2).

In conclusion, everything is extremely camp which this critic loves. Corrigan and Brooks are fun and feral stage presences who play with gay abandon. Fans of drag and performance art will welcome the work’s poor theater phantasmagoria of parasocial slop made flesh and satiric study of labor, love, and being on our phones.

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(1) Adding new meaning to the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical comedy The Gay Divorcée (1934) produced at the dawn of the Hays Code (the film was originally titled The Gay Divorce). In it, Rogers seeks a separation from geologist husband Cyril Glossop.

(2) During the run, Corrigan invited a different performing artist to present a brief opening act 2 each night.