The October 1981 issue of Vogue magazine features Nastassia Kinski on the cover and includes the infamous Richard Avedon two-page photo spread of the actress wearing nothing but a huge, writhing boa constrictor. But in the alternate reality of Caitlin Saylor Stephens’s vitriolic new comedy, Five Models in Ruins, 1981, that October issue very nearly comes to feature a much lesser-known cover girl, and the accompanying story would showcase not a serpent, but five decidedly catty women in flowing white gowns.
Marys Seacole
Jackie Sibblies Drury is not content to let audiences just watch her plays; she wants to make them conscious of how and why they are watching. In Fairview, her 2018 breakout, this meant disrupting a black family sitcom with tone-deaf white voices. For Drury, the mundane is anything but; it’s in banal, everyday interactions that society’s fault lines become most clearly visible, if we know how to see them.