Eve Jones

There are three things I will say to convince you that 

is worth seeing while it’s at the Huntington. One: everybody in the audience under 30 seemed to love it. Two: every guy in the audience whose wife clearly dragged him there (especially the old guys) seemed 

grumpy as they were leaving. Three: it made me forget I had a headache.

I saw the show on the matinee after its opening night performance. Coincidentally, this was the night after the Advocate’s very own Berlin/Berlin party, as well as my own 21st birthday celebration. Could I have planned this better? Yes. But I follow through on my promises, especially ones that result in a very kind comped ticket, so I shelled out for a Lyft (thanks, MBTA), threw back a Caffè Nero double espresso, and waded through hordes of elderlies to get to my exceedingly well-placed seat in the Calderwood Pavilion.

follows a high school honors lit class as it reads 

by Arthur Miller. Meanwhile, in the high school’s small Appalachian Georgia “one-stoplight town,” 

-esque “witch-hunt” things are happening. This is all explicitly related to the #MeToo movement, which was gathering steam in 2018, when the show takes place and when it was written. This synopsis may seem liable to cringe—I thought Kimberly Belflower’s script managed to pull it off much better than expected.

The near-perfectly paced and thriftily peopled one-act held my attention from pretty much start to finish. (Side note: I think nearly all plays should be one-acts, unless you’re Shakespeare. Don’t give me an excuse to catch my breath.) Belflower’s script was the balance of funny and tragic that literally everybody seems to be trying to get right these days. But she actually mostly managed to pull it off. Some of that is probably her continued experience as a high school teacher, because high schools themselves are the mix of funny and tragic in question. I don’t want to spoil too many of the one-liners, but I’ll give you the Harvard-est one: “When colleges look at my application, they’ll either feel sorry for me or think I’m, like, a horse.”

The seven “teenagers” in the cast of nine almost flawlessly represent what it was like to be in high school in 2018. I did the math, actually, and assuming these actors just graduated from their various BFAs, they actually were juniors in high school in the spring of 2018, just like their characters. (I was a freshman.) They looked as much like high schoolers as 23-year-olds can look like high schoolers. I found Victoria Omoregie’s performance as Nell the most continually believable, but the clear stars were Isabel Van Natta as Shelby and Haley Wong as Raelynn. I can’t tell whether I cringed a bit at Jules Talbot’s performance as Beth because I was a Beth in high school, but since I can’t tell, I won’t hold it against her. The guys—Benjamin Izaak as Lee and Maanav Aryan Goyal as Mason—over-acted a bit, especially in the beginning, but what high school guy isn’t constantly chewing the scenery, when you think about it? And Japhet Balaban as Mr. Smith was exactly right.

Margot Bordelon’s direction was wonderfully unobtrusive and uncontrived, with the exception of which classroom chairs people chose to sit in—in all of high school, I only sat in the one same seat in each classroom, and I don’t know anyone who didn’t do the same. I understand the staging vision, but it irked me a bit. The worst part of the whole production to me was the Appalachian accents and their extreme variability within a class that supposedly has been together since kindergarten. Some actors were drawling it up and some were talking like every New England would-be frat-bro at my high school.

The most likely political criticism for this play would be that it’s a teenager’s idea of what feminism is. But its greatest strength, in my opinion, is that it’s a teenager’s idea of what feminism is. The teenage girl characters are all on the internet, but they’re still trying to be a “Christian feminist club,” only sort of flirting with sex positivity. When push comes to shove, they can’t necessarily reconcile their hypothetical feminism with actual men they know. They want to be respected, and they want to be feminists, and they want to get into college. They criticize some men for doing the bare minimum, but praise others for less. They let men tear them apart, then reconcile with each other, but they never interrogate why men could have had that effect on them in the first place.

But increasingly, I’m starting to think that art doesn’t necessarily need to save the world to represent it for what it is. And though I grew up in a more “liberal” area than the one in which the play takes place (we had several feminist clubs that the guidance counselor never tried to discourage, instead just pushing us towards a blue-no-matter-who philosophy), we had exactly the same problems. The feminists dated the most problematic guys. The smartest people had the biggest blind spots. Charisma reigned. I think this play puts Kimberly Belflower up there with Sarah DeLappe in understanding how hypocritical one can be when one is 17. That doesn’t mean that person will be a bad person forever, although that fate is a possibility that should be taken seriously.

I experienced real actual catharsis while watching this play, especially in the last scene that I don’t dare spoil. Like, maybe I finally let go of hating my 17-year-old self for no good reason. I felt like I saw life represented without feeling extremely depressed, which is rare. 

Please go see this play. It’s $25 for students.

Left to right: Isabel Van Natta, Jules Talbot, Victoria Omoregie, Haley Wong in John Proctor is the Villain; directed by Margot Bordelon; photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Notes

John Proctor is the Villain is a Must-Watch for People Who Were in High School in 2018

The purposes of this review are twofold: first, to convey the eminently pleasant though not necessarily intellectually stimulating experience of seeing 

at the Huntington Theater; and second, to convince you, yes YOU, the member of the Advocate reading this (or honestly whoever else) to take up my mantle of reviewing shows at the Huntington now that I have graduated.

, with music and lyrics by Adam Guettel and book by Craig Lucas, is a musical about Americans on a Florentine vacation in 1953. Margaret (Emily Skinner) and her daughter Clara (Sarah-Anne Martinez) follow the path of Margaret’s honeymoon while the man of the family remains stateside. Clara meets an Italian boy, Fabrizio (Joshua Grosso), and it’s love at first sight. But Clara has a developmental disability caused by… getting kicked in the head by a Shetland pony at a birthday party at age six… so Margaret refuses to let them see each other. There is, of course, a colorful Italian family to round out the cast of characters, with the requisite Italian guy who is so straight he seems gay (played by Alexander Ross), Italian woman who wears pedal pushers (played by Rebekah Rae Robles), and Italian house staff who are not allowed to talk. Of course, all turns out well in the end!

For the ideal viewing experience, treat this show like an opera. You are not there to follow the plot, which is belabored at best. The third scene in the show, which is completely in Italian, should be the clue that you’re not there to know what’s going on. (Spanish and Italian are somewhat mutually intelligible, and I felt very smart when I knew what “la luce nella piazza” meant.) Unfortunately, the two mothers in the show are burdened with fourth-wall breaks—the Italian one even does hers in English!—which malevolently tricks the audience into thinking we need to know anything about the plot besides the amount each character loves each other character.


The reason you can’t think about the plot too much: though Loretta Greco’s direction handles Clara’s mental state very well, and implies a greater maturing than the script necessitates, one can’t help but worry that Clara doesn’t really know Fabrizio. In 1950’s Italy (or America), a disabled wife could not really count on any man to treat her respectfully and safely. We as the audience also don’t know anything about Fabrizio because he only monologues in Italian. And Fabrizio is just 20 when they marry. Whatever. He seems nice. He sings “Clara!!!!!” a lot.


is for experiencing a spectacle. The musical boasts perhaps the grandest score in theatre. “Say It Somehow,” the Act One closer, is one of the best duets I’ve seen performed on stage. And the singers carry it beautifully throughout, with Joshua Grosso really shining on the soaring “ahs” and “ohs.” Rebecca Pitcher as Fabrizio’s mother fits the bill if you want a classical operatic diva, and who doesn’t? The period-accurate costumes are amazing to look at, and I especially liked one woman’s dress-and-glasses look in the first scene (you can see her in the background of the accompanying photo). The sets are mostly gorgeous as well; all luxurious dark wood and flower stands. Someone rides a bicycle across the stage and it’s, to be honest, great. I had a great time.


I do wish I understood the Italian. If you speak Italian, can you go and then tell me what you think?


A few aspects of the direction distract rather than dazzle. There are four—count ‘em, four—children in the show who are “extras,” meaning there is no script-mandated reason for them to be there. In a few scenes they mirror the youth and naivete of the main couple by wearing basically the couple’s same exact outfits and running around playing rock-paper-scissors during their first love song, which of course is a symbol for chance, and negotiation, and trust, and… you get it. But children, especially children who are allowed to have childhoods, are only so good at naturalistic acting and not pulling focus. I believe Greco probably knows this—but once you’ve cast a kid, you can’t cut the kid. Also, there is one scene, towards the end of the show, in which the cast does real actual choreography for the first time, and it’s weird as hell. I just don’t think you can introduce dancing in the eleven o’clock number. Weather is used too heavy-handedly, but I almost always think that. And, finally, I think someone should take a jackhammer to every projector in every theater across the world. There was a beautiful cathedral set, with candles and arches and pews and everything, and the projected backdrop was a loop of soft-focus flames that looked like a screensaver from 2009. The projected paintings were cool, but they would have been cooler if they were real and flown in from the rafters.

But this show was basically as good as Broadway—which has most of the same problems in a lot of shows—and you can see it for $25 if you’re a student. So, you should. It’s very summery, they serve a delicious $3 strawberry iced tea, it’s right off the 1 bus, and the people-watching of audience members is far better than short-form video content. It’s playing until June 15!


You know what’s even better than paying $25 for a Broadway-quality show? Paying nothing. I got to spend this excellent evening for free (well, $3 for the iced tea and $3 for bus fare) in exchange for writing down the thoughts about the show that I would have had anyway. Advokats, you gotta get in on this!

Summer 2025

This Musical Was Good So Please Take My Job: The Light in the Piazza Review

Moby Dyke: An Obsessive Quest to Track Down the Last Remaining Lesbian Bars in America 

by Krista Burton (spoiler alert: there aren’t that many, and most are in the Midwest) before I reached the legal drinking age. So, I was very excited when the extremely long and nebulous creation of Dani’s Queer Bar in Back Bay first came across my Instagram targeted ads. This eagerly awaited new Boston establishment, funded in part by a grant from Mayor Michelle Wu’s administration, suddenly opened after many false starts earlier in September. After hearing cautionary tales about long lines and cliques, as well as celebrations of finally having a sapphic space in Boston, I decided to check it out.

I, two other lesbians of varying gender presentations, and three other queer quasi-femmes went to visit Dani’s on the evening of Saturday, September 28. Our pregame ran long, so we ended up arriving at around 11:15 (a very convenient ride on the 1 bus!). The line was down the block. We were worried that we had missed the memo on “brat night,” but the reality was worse. The “Sweat” show featuring Charli xcx and Troye Sivan had just let out at T.D. Garden, and hordes of brat queers were ready for the post-game. Luckily, this meant the crowd at the bar would be very young. Unluckily, this meant we were in for a long line.

Funnily enough, there is an Irish pub right next door to Dani’s, and the Alabama-Georgia game had just finished. The tide was rolled enthusiastically as Alabama broke Georgia’s streak, and several white bros of varying levels of Bostonian and British poured out of the pub. We were offered cigarettes from a guy with a cockney accent. Not a very queer experience, but a profoundly Bostonian one.

After an hour’s wait, we were allowed without a cover charge by the intimidating but clearly good-natured stud bouncers into the very purple interior of Dani’s. The ground floor was remarkably chill considering the line, and we were served drinks almost immediately. As is our tendency, we started out with a shot of “something cheap,” which turned out to be $13 tequila. It was good tequila. I cannot super afford good tequila. One friend ordered a gin and tonic of indeterminate price (very tasty, very limey) and another ordered a whiskey ginger (very whiskey, very ginger), also of indeterminate price (later we found out they were both also $13). I decided I wanted my hands free for dancing, and also that I did not want to spend thirteen more dollars immediately, so I stopped with the shot for the time being.

We entered the line for the basement dance floor, which moved quickly despite being full of post-Sweat college students. The basement was a semi-industrial rectangle with a giant four-sided bar in the middle. There were thus two dance floors: one on the side closest to the DJ, and one on the far side with little light and even less wiggle room, though this one did have a few dozen disco balls of varying sizes on the ceiling. The DJ was doing extremely well with a targeted brat-esque set, and I danced a very vertical “HOT TO GO” with a shockingly low but still generally high number of people who were familiar with the choreography. People were actually dancing, not just standing, and one group had an inflatable hobby horse hoisted up like a flag that was later left on the dance floor for the crowd to enjoy. I got a whiskey ginger that was a baffling $12 from an attractive butch bartender who was absolutely doing well with tips.

Now, for the question on everyone’s mind: can one find a girlfriend at this bar? I would say probably not. A genuinely shocking number of people there had brought a girlfriend from home, which I say should be looked on with the same disdain and begrudging respect that sneaking a flask onto the dance floor warrants. There was one probably 25-year-old woman who was going around dancing with/grinding on everyone, including a few members of my group (though not myself), and she seemed to be having the best time. But if you, like me, have slightly less confidence than this woman, it may be a bit harder for you. Unfortunately, social anxiety does not disappear in a queer bar, despite the bar’s other magical properties like not having men grope you or make fun of your masc haircut. And cliques from various other colleges seemed impenetrable, as I’m sure my group seemed. I’d say take a date there, rather than finding one there.

Yet despite my continued tragic singleness (please hit me up, you know where to find me), the vibes were good. There was a tasteful amount of Chappell Roan and Charli xcx, but also some songs I had never heard. The drinks may be expensive, but honestly not that much more expensive than other places in Back Bay. The sapphic members of Stryk9 made a surprise appearance, which is always welcome. People were all wearing deodorant. I saw, but did not say hi to, someone I went to summer camp with ten years ago. Despite my only being able to spend 90 minutes there before the bar closed, I didn’t regret my choice to go. And if you know me, you know that’s rare. I will be going back when I scrounge up another $30 to spend on drinks!

Post-Sweat Night at Dani’s Queer Bar

So many excellent albums have come out this autumn, and yet 

by Chappell Roan is the only one that has wormed its way into my playlists. Chappell, an indie pop phenomenon, has reminded me of the glorious days of youth when I would listen to Kesha and anticipate similar climactic experiences in dark crowded rooms. But she has also shown us the way forward into the noise of the 2020s. “I’m so sick of online love,” she croons, before launching into an album opener for the ages, “Femininomenon.”

I can’t and won’t explain why her music itself is so addictive. (Something about rule of threes, pedal points, vocal agility, wide vowels, frequently landing on leading tones, reluctance to resolve chords, etc, etc.) But here I will attempt to unpack one aspect of her lyrics with which I am truly obsessed: she frequently will slightly alter lines from one chorus to the next.

This sounds kind of not important. Let me explain.

She most frequently employs these slightly altered lyrics to comedic effect. In “HOT TO GO,” her self-professed ‘cheerleader song,’ she sings:

And later, after talking about how long it’s been since she’s gotten any, she sings:

You’re expecting “dance with” (normal for a dance song), but you get “sleep with” (raunchy and unexpected). Haha! What a jest! A jape!

Equally funny and more bisexual is the chorus of “After Midnight,” where “I’m feeling kinda freaky, maybe it’s the 

 if you don't mind” becomes “I’m feeling kinda freaky, maybe it’s the 

if you don’t mind” in merely three intervening lines. This substitution subverts the expected to unexpected progression, because “girlfriend” is less expected from a female voice than “boyfriend,” and “club lights” and “moonlight” are equally likely. In fact, these substitutions remind you how similar these two couplets are. Not only do both end in the same syllables, but neither are materially different. A nonchalant statement about bisexuality! This is why the bi girls love Chappell.

The subtlest, but in my opinion the most impactful example of this device in 

is in “Casual,” her ballad about her semi-girlfriend telling her friends their relationship is just ‘casual.’ The chorus uses the following lines (italics are slant-rhymed stress that all fall on beat 2 or 4):

A triple rhyme followed by a departure from the rhyme mirrors exactly what Chappell laments, which is the disappointment of not following up on the expectations of the relationship. And this repeats a few times, given that it’s the chorus. But in the final bridge, we get this extended rhyme:

“Knee deep in the passenger seat and you're eating me 

Two weeks and your mom invites me to her 

Oh my god how do I begin to unpack the genius? Connecting the rhyme with the previously disjointed “knee deep” line starts to connect the dots of the passionate and committed moments in the relationship. The lengthened rhyme indicates a longer time to wait, as if the relationship and its disappointments have progressed within the song. The line “is it casual now” is just implied in the rhyme rather than being said, leaving both the listener and the subject to draw their own (obvious) conclusions. And the lengthened and repeated diphthong of [ou] in out/house creates a sort of howl, both far more plaintive and far less urgent than the repeated vowel [i] in weeks/me/beach.

Chappell is an artist of connected polarizations. She’s bicoastal and rural. She dances at the “Pink Pony Club” in Santa Monica, but she “miss[es] the seasons in Missouri.” She wants a “Super Graphic Ultra Modern Girl,” but is “so sick of online love.” She’s gay, obviously, and hyperfemme, obviously. So her artistry hinges on the collection of opposites into a cohesive performance.

And this lyrical motif, something that seems so small, is the perfect encapsulation of her as a performer. The differences don’t bother her, because she makes them as similar as possible. She navigates lyric changes so smoothly that you barely notice them, or you notice them and immediately laugh them off. Chappell is just gliding through, and if you’re caught off guard, that’s your problem.

Also, Chappell is the queen of puns. “I heard you like magic / I got a wand and a rabbit.” Come on, now. Go listen to the album. And let this be my bid to get it on all of our party playlists here at 21 South St. I want to dance to “After Midnight,” after midnight.

Summer 2023

Chappell Roan Has Taken Over My Life: A Musical Analysis

As we all know, the best part of Harvard is how we can skate by on a seemingly endless frozen Charles of prestige, luring important people into talking to us by tricking them into thinking we too are important. And this week, we got yet another celebrity to let us gawk at her: the WICKEDly talented Cynthia Erivo. Since 

 has its finger on the pulse, I, alongside our storied Notes editor, Aiyanna Ojukwu, made sure to attend both the parade and the roast to let you, the dozen or so readers of 

The parade was far more of a spectacle than we expected: the free mini-cannolis were flowing, IGP improv had a float for some reason, and the Blue Man Group  provided the necessary person-painted-an-unnatural-color representation. There were high school marching bands (?) and a mechanical bull (??). There was a dog wearing dog headphones (!)

And, most importantly, there was Cynthia Erivo.

Everybody and their mother had their phones out. I had my phone out, even as I hated myself for doing it. But importantly, your phone can go higher up than your regular eyes. I didn’t really 

 Cynthia’s face, but my phone did, as did Aiyanna’s camera. It raises the classic northern-lights-in-Massachusetts question: if you can only see something through your phone, is it really different from just googling a Getty image?

Finally, we observed Erivo doing the classic HPT kickline outside of Farkas from the advantageous position of the Smith Center Commons. Her coat was preventing any discernible kicks. But you can’t have everything. She did also do 

 riff, which we couldn’t hear since we were inside. Also, the Lampoon threw a stuffed pig at her from the roof. It seemed like a thematic nonsequitur.


Erivo was very much having her people’s princess moment. If you saw 

(2022), you’d recognize her magnanimous smile from her characterization of the Blue Fairy. I suppose if one throws a full parade for a private citizen, one can expect the private citizen to be pretty happy about it. To have a couple dozen Harvard students dancing in your honor? That’s better than any EGOT. Well, no it’s not. But you get the point.

Speaking of—at the post-roast press conference, Erivo claimed she didn’t even know what an EGOT was when she started her career. I call bullshit. But I digress.

That evening, The Hasty Pudding Theatricals’ roast went exceptionally easy on Erivo. The biggest “roast” was pointing out that she has played two of the same roles as Whoopi Goldberg, which is just objectively true and surely something of which Erivo is aware. Cast members also impersonated famous comedians John Mulaney, Jerry Seinfeld, and Bill Burr (?) offering jokes about the movie 

being long (?). Erivo did not seem to understand the joking implication that she won her daytime Emmy for 

You can’t blame the Pudding for being scared of her notorious sincerity, but also it’s not like they can invite her back as WOY next year, so what was really at stake?

Erivo, needless to say, did the famous riff again during the roast. She really is that good.


The best/worst/most cringe-inducing moment of the roast was at the very end, when the two clearly anxious emcees who I will not name here for their own protection were addressed by Erivo.

“I have it on authority that the two of you were nervous for today,” Erivo said to them, in front of an audience of 200 people. “You shouldn’t be. You did fantastic.” And to think they could have emerged unscathed otherwise! I hope for their sakes they got lots of Pudding-funded champagne later that night.


The press conference was also full of softballs. The Lasell University reporter sitting next to me implied to Erivo that she was, pre-

, more famous for stage than screen, with which Erivo took a bit of umbrage. I unfortunately did not get the chance to ask her about her favorite novel, but she probably would have just plugged Gregory Maguire’s book, since she’s rumored to have recorded an audiobook of 

for Audible. To close the night, NBC asked Erivo to do the riff one more time, which she did. Mid-sentence. Again, she really is that good.


I am currently writing my thesis on celebrity, though I’m writing about early 20th century opera singers more so than early 21st century musical theater movie stars. So, I’ll offer my reading of the day:


Boorstin’s tautology of celebrity states, put simply, that ‘celebrity’ occurs when one is famous for being famous. On HPT day, Erivo was clearly marketed as such, down to the 

. But with each effortless riff, she broke out of the Boorstin tautology, proving that her skill actually merits fame. And to extend the connection to my thesis: Willa Cather, according to my analysis, thinks that being famous is only acceptable if you’re both a good singer and gay. Cynthia Erivo, you’ve passed the test.

AughAAAAuaaaaAAAUAAaaaAAGHGH: Cynthia Erivo Comes to Cambridge

 is not really a play, so let’s get that straight from the beginning. There were many times as I was sitting in the sparsely populated Calderwood Pavilion theater when I thought, “I am not getting any insight from this, these are just magic tricks.” They were absolutely impressive magic tricks! But magic tricks nonetheless.

Vinny DePonto, the “mentalist” behind 

, aims with the 90 minute interactive show to make the audience think about how the brain works both by picking their brains and disclosing about his own. Before entering, each audience member is given a prompt about memory on a small piece of paper — mine asked for an “embarrassing memory,” and others seemed to ask for memories about love or fear. They must write down a few words around that memory before sealing the slip of paper in an envelope, writing their name and seat number on the envelope, and putting it in a box next to the stage. Latecomers had to go on stage and put their envelopes directly into the fishbowl from which DePonto would pull throughout the night. In between correctly guessing things people had written on their slips of paper, he would describe his own experience with his grandparents losing their memories and how it inspired him to get better at controlling his own mind, panic attacks and all.

The “mind reading” portion of the show was extraordinarily strong. I respected that DePonto never claimed any connection with the supernatural, taking the humanist approach by saying everything he did was him planting ideas or reading a person’s natural reflexes. (If you count writing words down on a card as a natural reflex, then he’s right!) He said that you could discover nearly everything about a person by knowing “what they fear, what they love, and what they hide away,” which explains the prompts on the cards.

Only once did he get caught when an audience participant said he accidentally thought of a memory other than the one on his card, making the evidence of mind-reading a little weaker. I’d be interested to see the show again purely to ascertain whether he was simply reaping ideas or also sowing them, especially in the case of a certain comestible motif. So if you’re into “mentalists,” definitely check this out.

I was hoping for more of a holistic theatrical experience, which I didn't quite get. DePonto would say something about his own mind, give a neuroscientific reason for it, and then say he would demonstrate through an audience member. Rarely did the thing he demonstrated with the audience member actually apply to the thing he said before. Then he’d get “interrupted” by some element of his set, do the thing where an actor pretends to be trapped in the play he himself wrote, and go back to talking about himself. It turns out it’s pretty hard to suspend disbelief about that in a one-man show.

Despite DePonto’s tragically relatable story about his grandparents—nearly everyone has a similar experience—I did not feel any actual movement from the themes in the show. This can often be a problem with self-disclosing writing, but especially so when one must, rather than projecting a train of thought onto a page, portray it with their own body for 200-odd shows. We as the audience discover more about DePonto’s story as he tells it to us, but he does not discover more about himself, despite taking on the cadence of doing so. Deponto’s attempt to bring himself to the same introspective level as the audience instead just brings attention to the fact that he is on a stage and we, for the most part, are not. And the driving force behind this entire self-discovering genre, that the personal is political, simply cannot function in this almost totally apolitical show where the only mention of the outside world is the concept of “propaganda.”

DePonto makes others’ minds support the story of his own. But I think the show would have been much stronger if he structured it in the opposite sense. By far the most compelling part of the evening was others’ revealed thoughts and the resulting ethnography of a Tuesday night Boston theater crowd. It was a rather elderly, very New England group: one woman’s “mind palace” was her Cape House, another “mind palace” was a “family camp,” and one man’s happiest memory was sailing in Boston Harbor. A college student had his greatest fear revealed as “aging” while sharing the stage with two elderly people. And one elderly gay man was jokingly berated by DePonto for having “Hit Me Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears stuck in his head before he devastatingly revealed that the man hoped his friend with Alzheimer’s would remember to make it to his Friendsgiving dinner.

The strength of this show is not DePonto’s self-disclosure, which serves little purpose but to weakly attempt to remove him from the god-king status of a close-up magician. It is that the fear of DePonto’s ability to expose our innermost thoughts frees us to be candid with strangers in a way we rarely are.

You’re wondering what the “embarrassing memory” I had to write down was? If you must know, it was about an embarrassing school project where we made a parody of 

’s“Welcome to the Sixties” about urbanization: “Welcome to the City.” We sang it in front of the class. We only discovered in the doing of it how poor the reception would be. It haunts me to this day.

Fall 2025 - Diagnosis

Mindplay Review: The Final Boss of Autotheory is a Magic Show

Talia Blatt

Tadhg Larabee

Annika Inampudi

Kyle Mandell

Serena Jampel

Sidonie Brown

Ottessa Moshfegh is an American author and novelist. Her debut novel 

 won the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Her subsequent novel 

 bestseller, and will be adapted for film by director Yorgos Lanthimos.

Moshfegh judged the Advocate’s 2022 Louis Begley competition for short fiction, and selected Yash Kumbhat's "Shaking, Trembling, Quaking, Rending." On May 13th, the fiction board interviewed her about her decision, as well as her upcoming novel, secret talents, approach to historical fiction, insomnia, and storytelling. Fiction editor Talia Blatt was joined by former editor Tadhg Larabee, and members Sidonie Brown, Serena Jampel, Eve Jones, Annika Inampudi, and Kyle Mandell.

This interview has been condensed and edited for brevity and clarity.

Talia Blatt: Let’s start with your decision in the Begley contest this year. Can we hear more of your thought process? And in general, when you read fiction critically, what do you look for?

Ottessa Moshfegh: I'm always looking for something that grabs my attention and sustains it. Second, I'm looking for a story that I want to understand. And the winning story was one that I felt immediately confused by, and not because it was written in a confusing way, but because it was about something that I didn't understand. I thought it was profoundly deep, and I was very impressed by how the story is woven in an almost abstract way through firsthand experiences as told by various characters that are all part of this strange world, going through this disaster. And I also just thought that it was beautifully written.

TB: You don't have any presence on social media. We're wondering to what extent you think authors should participate in the online conversation about their work.

OM: I think authors should participate to the extent that they care to. I don't think that there's any real requirement or restriction there. I think for me personally, I'm doing this interview from my car because I'm so busy. If I tried to have a life online, I don't think I could live my life IRL in the same way. And this is the life I care to live. For me, the way that I work with language, and the way I express myself, is my art form, and giving it all to Twitter or Facebook feels a bit like energy wasted. I can have conversations with people, and I'm satisfied with those conversations, when it's not being published online by an app or mediated in any way through a third party. I don't know. I like direct conversations.

Tadhg Larabee: I was incredibly excited to hear, maybe a year ago, the rumors about Yorgos Lanthimos adapting

, since it's one of my favorite books and he's one of my favorite directors. And I was wondering, especially given what you just said about the importance of unmediated language to your art form, how you're thinking about that book being adapted visually. How is that process going?

OM: I've written a bunch of screenplays, and most of them are adaptations of my own work. 

 is definitely the hardest adaptation because the novel is so much an interior monologue, and moves around the inside of the unnamed protagonist's mind back and forth through time. It required a whole new lens for me to see it as a movie. And I can't really talk about what's happening with that. But it's been an interesting process.

TB: I think we were hoping to do something of a fun speed round. Short questions, whatever comes to mind first. So: What's on your night table?

 by a friend of mine named Daniel Saldana Paris, a Mexican writer. I've been meaning to read his book for a long time. And I just saw him in Mexico City last week.

TB: You can have three writers, alive or dead, over for dinner. Who are they?

OM: James Baldwin. Honestly, I would just want James Baldwin to myself. Yeah, him and two empty chairs. I think that would be one good evening.

OM: Well, my high school graduating class was like 25 people. So it's hard to say. It was a very small school, very intimate. I think we all loved each other in a way that isn't possible in a bigger school. Two of my best friends now at almost 41 are friends I made in high school. So maybe I wasn’t the most popular girl in school, but I definitely had some really great friends.

TB: What was the last gift you gave someone?

OM: My friend stayed at my house dog sitting while we were in Mexico, and I brought her back a peyote-stitch, beaded bracelet.

OM: Maybe voices? I have a secret ambition to be a voice actor and do cartoon voices.

TB: What is one small thing that brings you joy?

OM: Probably when my husband comes home with flowers.

TB: If you didn't write fiction, what do you think you'd do?

OM: I think I might have ended up being some kind of executive. I don't know.

TB: Alright, that's the end of our speed round.

, but I was unsettled by it, particularly the femininity that's portrayed. I was interested in how you think about writing about women, because that book is a totally different femininity than I've ever read.

OM: Well, I think of writing about women the same way I would write about men: that they are human beings with very complicated egos and belief systems. Everybody has a past and everybody has a strategy of coping with what hurts them. I identify as a woman so often I feel that I am adjacent to my female characters because if they don't feel exactly like me — and they never do — I'm sort of observing them from the outside more. And weirdly, when I'm writing a male character, maybe because I'm not male, I find that I can feel possessed by the character best if I fully embody him. So I might imagine myself on the inside, rather than adjacent to him. But that's a very abstract way of answering your question.

TB: Your answer reminds me of conversations the board has had recently about autofiction. I'm curious what pieces of yourself you find appearing in your work — if it's like looking at a funhouse mirror.

OM: When I look back at my work, it is an archive of my curiosities, and the things that fascinate me, things that repulse me, things I find really funny. Still I don't actually identify with autofiction, and I'm not quite sure I understand what it is, not that I need to. I've always been interested in first person narratives because it's a way of writing from a different perspective, unique to your character. I've always thought about that kind of storytelling as voice-driven, almost like a song. It also has a lot to do with acting. And because it's such an interior form, or it can be, I think it's really easy to project the consciousness of the author onto the character. That's really common, and really funny to me, because if that's so, then I'm not a creative person. I'm just writing about myself. Trust me, if I wrote about myself, it would be really boring.

TL: On the subject of proximity to yourself, proximity to our world and our time, I'm really excited for your new book, which is historical fiction. I'm wondering how you wrote about a time so far from our own, and people so different from ourselves.

OM: Thanks for asking about the new book. It’s funny — I've written several novels that could be called historical fiction, but I've never really thought of them as being part of the genre, in that formal way. Like my first book was a novella and it takes place in New England on a ship in 1851, and I've been working on a long term novel project that takes place in Shanghai and San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Lapvona, the new book, felt more like it was playing with the genre of fable than the genre of historical fiction. But it is not in any strict sense of the word, a genre book, or at least I didn't intend it to be. I love research, and my methodology of research is really unscientific. I see research as part of the creative process, in that, in each detail that I find, I find a new trail of breadcrumbs to follow, into the next subject, the next article, whatever is going to bring me closer to understanding how to describe, in language, the world of my story. So I never mean for my work to be historically accurate. It's more like I'm stealing from history to inform my own work.

Eve Jones: On this note of the creative process, what does it look like for you to sit down and write? Do you have any rituals?

OM: Good question. I really wish there was a ritual, because then I could just, like, do it. Usually when I'm writing a first draft of something, like a novel, I just set aside a certain number of hours each day, and have a goal to write a certain number of words. It's different when I'm writing a short story. A short story, because it's shorter, because you can sit back and hold it out and look at the whole thing at once, the process of drafting is way more one of revision and rewriting and moving things — it's like a constant shifting collage, until the story snaps into place. But when I'm drafting a novel, I just try to keep moving forward every day, so there is a kind of rigid discipline. And when I’m revising, I have a really specific method. It’s very boring, but it looks like me with my manuscript and a pencil, for hours and hours each day over and over and over again, until I can read it though and not make any scribbles. Then I’m like, okay, here's a draft.

TB: Your work seems to really relish in disgust, especially as it relates to the body. I'm curious — why disgust? And has it changed the way you relate to or inhabit your own body?

OM: I think it's more that my feelings about my own body were showing up in my writing. Revulsion has always been a prevalent emotion in my experience, especially when I was younger, starting from puberty up until a couple of years ago. Disgust was a primary emotion for me; instead of getting angry or sad I felt disgusted. I think that's why I've had to write about it so much—it's part of my make-up. I don't find the human body disgusting. I actually find human intelligence kind of disgusting. But I like conflating the two. I do think there's a lot of value in writing about a character's physical being. Reading is such a thoughtful process, that I think we do it to escape the physical world. But if you can bring the physical world back into that experience, I find that very interesting. Having a visceral response to literature is something I think is important to keep up the power of the written word. It's also just sort of my jam.

Sidonie Brown: We discussed the ways in which the self creeps into writing. But on the other side of that coin, I'm curious if you find writing creeping into your life. For example, the narrator in

just has this intense apathy. While you were writing that character, did you notice apathy creeping into your life?

OM: No, but what I can say is that you're absolutely right that whatever you're working on starts to appear in your own life. I think that's true for everyone I’ve talked to who works creatively. I had struggled with insomnia before, in my early twenties, but it hadn't been a very big deal, not a big enough experience to write an entire novel about sleep. I mean I've always been fascinated by sleep, and I'm always really tired, so I think that's more what motivated me to write about rest and relaxation. But as soon as I finished writing that book, I developed horrible insomnia. I lost the ability to fall asleep. That really felt unlucky, and weird, uncanny.

TB: Last two minutes — we're all here because we're college kids who like to read and write. Any words of warning or inspiration?

OM: I don't really recommend seeking a career as a creative writer, but if you are supposed to be one, you will totally not care that I just said that. It's extremely hard, and it's extremely unlikely, even if you're a fucking genius, that you will get the attention that you so desire. It's a real gamble. And it's extremely hard work. If you want to be great at something, you have to work at least five times harder than you think you do. But you guys are all at Harvard. So you're probably all overachievers. I would say, Jesus, go swimming. That's my advice. Go swimming.

Spring Summer 2022

Fiction

An Interview with Ottessa Moshfegh

the new play written by Zadie Smith and directed by Indhu Rubasingham, hit the A.R.T. this past February. It’s an adaptation of “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” (and prologue) from 

, which you may remember as the most lewd thing you were allowed to read in high school. Being a typical Patroness of the Arts (and Zadie Smith follower), I snagged myself a rush ticket to the performance on Friday, March 3rd.

The accompanying photo of this article was taken from my seat, so you can see that the view left little to be desired. The volume of the play was high, the music contemporary, and the acting larger than life. It was as much of an assault on the senses as can be squeezed from what mostly amounts to a 95 minute monologue. And yet, about 45 minutes in, as Alvita (the titular wife, energetically portrayed by Claire Perkins) mimed an orgasm for the second time to near-complete silence from the audience, I noticed a bit of motion in my peripheral vision. It was the head of the woman next to me, bobbing up and down the way my sister’s head would on long car rides. She had fallen asleep.

I won’t bother much with a synopsis, because I don’t actually think the play’s narrative contributed at all to this effect. The play’s a pretty much one-to-one translation of “the Wife of Bath’s Tale,” down to the opening slog about Christianity and sex, the raucous exploration of the wife’s exploits, and the tale of the soldier marrying a witch (which Smith ingeniously transferred from Arthurian England to Jamaica). No, there’s not much suspense, especially if you’ve read 

, as, again, every person who will go to a play in Cambridge, Massachusetts has. But very few plays have suspense these days. We can’t exactly fault Smith for that.

The play, in fact, makes a valiant effort to connect with the audience, in writing and direction. Actors regularly walk through the aisles. Alvita regularly breaks the fourth wall, yells, and animalistically growls at surrounding men. Ensemble actors engage their whole bodies as only ensemble actors can, staying so tuned into the action that they react to Alvita’s every word with arms thrown into the air or a confident “no way!” And there are several dance sequences, including one in which the men of the company twerk to “Superfreak” by Nicki Minaj, asses to the audience.

(In fact, the play gets so self-aware at times that not one theatrical moment goes un-commented-on by the actors—or the director?—which leads to a disappointing but not surprising, “Haha! It’s a man in a dress!” moment.)

Despite this recipe for success, however, the Cantabrigian audience was largely silent throughout —  even on a Friday night. The play was new. Everybody had high expectations. There were even students in the audience primed by Smith in the English department earlier in the week to sit back and enjoy. But the biggest laugh of the night was a polite chuckle for a reference to Widener Library. Although there were elements of the play I didn’t love—the men in dresses joke, the lines written in couplets with a meter that distracted more than it satisfied, and the direction style, which though objectively well-executed did not quite fit my taste for more naturalistic acting—I didn’t think the play deserved nearly as silent of an audience as it got. For God’s sake, it was funny!

did not seem to have identified its audience. Its protagonist is a 57 year old third-wave feminist, but there is a scene set to “Superfreak.” Its source material courts academics, but the meter of the couplets isn’t even right! (Although, to be fair, neither is Chaucer’s.) And I challenge any male academic to sit through 95 whole minutes of a woman talking without, well, falling asleep.

Perhaps the theatre-going population of Cambridge couldn’t relate to, or didn’t care to relate to, the play’s setting at all. Zadie Smith’s oft-rearticulated favorite aspect of Willesden, a suburb of London, is its racial and class-based heterogeneity. And this heterogeneity (at least supposedly—I’ve never been) is most on display in places like the pub in which the play takes place. Folks from all walks of life, from a Patagonia-vest-clad white man in his sixties to a local South Asian student to Alvita herself all hang out together. Maybe Cambridge, MA simply cannot tolerate such a setting.

For example, Alvita regularly uses British slang and Jamaican Patois for which the average academic atheist Bostonian WASP would need both an online dictionary and a shit they don’t necessarily want to give. Or they could do what I (academic, atheist, Bostonian, and W but not ASP) did, which is rely on context clues. If one laughed at Shakespeare in the Common last summer and didn’t laugh at this, I have to wonder whether they found Shakespeare in the Common funny, either. It was excruciating to watch these actors work so hard on something that, while less political than promised, was definitely both funnier and more ~important~ than Shakespeare, all for the audience to not throw them the simple bone of laughing.

(Although, side note, at least Shakespeare on the Common had gay people in it. How hard would it have been to make one of the seemingly unending background characters gay? Or is homosexuality where Willesden’s diversity ends?)

Maybe Cambridge/Boston are simply using the theatre as an intellectual status symbol à la nineteenth century Europe, or for that matter, nineteenth century Boston. Especially post-pandemic, when one might need more motivation than mere entertainment to sit in a room with a couple hundred people, the most important part of theatre-going is making sure you’re seen ambling to your well-placed $200 seat. It doesn’t quite matter what happens when the lights go down. Might as well take a nap—nobody can see you! Well, nobody except the person to your immediate right.