Villain Era
Written and Performed by Star Stone
Directed by Ryan Cunningham
59E59 Theaters at 59 East 59th Street, NYC
In the theatre, we learn that your name is worth both nothing: a rose by any other name would still smell as sweet; and everything: How may I live without my name? I have given you my soul. Leave me my name! We learn not to say the name of an old Scottish Lord while dreaming of our name in lights. We crave notability, but don’t want to be notorious. We want to be famous but not infamous. We dream of being an artist, not just a personality.
Star Stone has entered her Villain Era. I had never heard the phrase before and find it’s an odd label for creating boundaries and prioritizing yourself, and particularly that it’s aligned with feminism. In my mind, I associated the phase with the reinvention of Cruella de Vil, Maleficent and Elphaba – they weren’t evil, they were misunderstood. As Jessica Rabbit once said, “I’m not bad. I’m just drawn that way.”
Back in the day, the road to success was paved with many a bad play. Sometimes you did them because you needed the practice, and sometimes you started out thinking they had potential for greatness. You’d tell your friends they didn’t need to come. Maybe, if you were really unfortunate, someone wrote a bad review that mentioned you, and your Aunt Alice in Peoria happened to notice it when looking for her crossword puzzle. And in a week, it would have faded into mist or turned into an amusing anecdote about how you were ‘adequate, but uninspired’. Ouch.
But that is no longer the world we live in.
Star Stone’s story is a heart breaking warning bell on the dangers of 15-min of fame. A fifteen minute YouTube reality contest most people have never, and will never hear of, stole her name and recreated her identity. But this wasn’t a case of identity theft. This was one of those innocuous little projects actors get paid nothing to do in the hopes of adding a credit to our names or building a reel. In Reality TV, not to be confused with REALITY, someone is edited to be the protagonist, and someone is edited to be the antagonist - even Gabriel Byrne thought he was Keyser Soze the first time he saw The Usual Suspects.
When we dream of something blowing-up, we’re thinking fireworks on the 4th of July, not Chernobyl, and certainly not a controlled demolition. People were profiting off of Star’s video, and it certainly wasn’t Star. Besides negative comments in the video’s chat, haters followed her back to her own social media, blowing up her Insta, calling her parents’ home and ultimately making her an unflattering meme. Trolls contacted her employer, her former employer and wrote nasty reviews on Amazon of a book they’re never read. And even when she shut down her socials, they continued to do far worse to her than she ever did in that silly little video.
This play is her phoenix from the ashes. Smart, funny, honest and sincere, Star tells us how she lost her name, and most of her self-worth. We see the effects the vultures and trolls had on her psyche as she spins from one part of herself to the other. As I’ve mentioned in other reviews, I’m not a fan of live actors turning upstage to talk to recorded content. It tends to be a clunky convention and in this case gives too much voice to an unsavory producer. Conversely, the insertion of the offending video that launched a thousand memes, and other digital fallout helps to underline the all encompassing crisis this situation became.
New Yorkers have one more chance to see this before Star heads to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival.
Review by Nicole Jesson.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on July 12th, 2024. All rights reserved.