I first heard Isabel Monk Cade read her essay My Way–which has since become, through a collaboration with director Joy Donze, a fully-staged solo show– as part of The Dogtown Reading Series in January 2024. I was struck. Her writing was so unvarnished. In front of a packed house in a loft on Elizabeth Street dressed in all black– her eyeline immaculate and bangs the epitome of the nouvelle vague– Isabel stood behind a music stand leading us through a panoply of sexual experiences by way of the morning-after pill. The show’s title refers both to a type of contraceptive, a generic version of the well-known Plan B, and the title of the Frank Sinatra song, the one that evokes visions of red sauce Italian joints and dive bars in inner Brooklyn. The combination came to Isabel one day. She filmed herself taking the pill while listening to the song and sent it to her friends. She couldn’t stop laughing at the apparent irony, somehow taking this medication was an act of valorous autonomy, when it was the product of but another– including one with a boy referred to as “Bushwick Charlie”– hookup gone wrong.
What may have started as a filmed gag, a ploy with the Old Blue Eyes, became a means of reclaiming, but this was not the first time writing had proven to be a haven. During the summer of 2015, Isabel was working as a bartender, making cash tips, and had a large wad of bills on her. She found herself in the back of an Uber Pool sitting beside a woman who introduced herself as a psychic. Isabel asked for a reading, “In the back of this Uber, I got a reading from this medium.” After a series of questions, it became clear this medium had summoned Isabel’s grandmother. “There’s this woman,” the medium told Isabel, “this person… She’s pointing to the book on your nightstand, the notebook, your notebook. You have to keep doing that. You have to keep doing that”. Isabel followed up her initial reading with other medium appointments and they all concluded the same thing: her grandmother was telling her to write.
Flash forward a few years, 2022 to be exact, when Isabel found herself on a plane back from England where she’d been visiting her sister. Nursing a fresh heartbreak, and without internet access, she started to journal. What came to her was a series of questions on codependency, love, and relationships. It also coincided with Kevin Spacey, in “a psychotic way,” but she’s still at work on that piece, and isn’t ready to discuss it yet. The initial essay she started on the plane, which included a meditation on plane food, became her first completed personal essay. The day after landing, she woke up delirious and jetlagged. She went to a cafe in her neighborhood and typed it all out. It felt like a “coming home… something that came naturally to me.” And from there, she was off, exploring the form, which she did by making a list of concepts that she found curious and funny. Inspired by David Sedaris, “one of my favorites of all time,” she realized the essay was a space where she could contemplate, make sense, and reckon with her internal monologue. In her newly formed writing practice, Isabel sometimes found herself able to enter what writers refer to as “the flow state,” “I would look up and two hours had passed and I had no idea I’d been writing that long… that’s when my most beautiful work happens, honestly, however pretentious that sounds.” Finding great joy in the process, she came alive with recounting these memories, making sense of her past: “I was cracking myself up and digging into memories…there was so much joy writing them, joy that I still have.”
With a natural inclination towards the dark, Isabel wrote on her list of ideas “A retrospective of Plan B”. She’d taken the medication so many times, it had become an almost integral part of her sexual experience. The frequency of this medication in her life felt ripe for introspection: how did this coincidence with her experiences with sex, with her coming into her sexuality, and the pressures she felt to sleep with her high school boyfriend, perhaps before she was ready. And then there’s the economics behind the purchasing of the pill. When she first started taking it, after going on the pill– what everyone her age at Laguardia High School was doing to cement their place in the next phase of adolescence– she’d have to use a fake ID to purchase it. Fifty bucks a pop. With age, now legally able to procure the medicine, the purchasing power became a power play between the potentially pregnant individual and the person responsible for the pregnancy. Where is there room to make sense of responsibility in hookup culture? When someone is essentially a stranger, but your involvement with them may lead to an altered life path, how do you advocate for yourself?
It was these questions, as well as the deeply solitary experience of having to take the morning after pill– something her director Joy pointed out– that made Isabel want to read her essay out loud. Isabel and Joy met doing an indie play festival in late 2019. They were randomly paired together to create a work in one week, and throughout closely collaborating became good friends. When Isabel realized she wanted to translate this piece beyond a reading into a fully fledged solo show, she called on Joy who has helped Isabel turn the piece into an evening-long performance. This was partially achieved by Isabel memorizing the essay, unlike in earlier settings, she’s completely off book, and the piece has been entirely blocked. Throughout the evening, Isabel moves throughout the stage, sometimes engaging in a series of choreographed gestures. There are also moments where she interacts with the audience directly, calling upon them to fill in for characters, like Isabel’s high school boyfriend. In one moment, Isabel takes us through a slideshow of all the names of generic morning after pills. Her acting training, Isabel is a graduate of The Neighborhood Playhouse’s Conservatory, is on full display: she conjures up the perfect facial expression for every shifting beat and mood. The first round of May Way took place in early February, in the theatre of the El Barrio’s Artspace PS109, and a second round is due at the end of this month, March 29th to 31st.
It was a sense of bravery that led Isabel to translate this piece to the stage, “I just sort of was like, let me just try this in front of different people and read it out loud. Cause you know, I come from a theater background, like, let me just fucking read it. Let’s fucking do it. When I did it, it was really well received”. All these months and drafts later, Isabel’s words continue to come into themselves, shifting and adapting to their new form. The initial defiance visible in Isabel’s voice, on her face that January in 2024, is still there, in her gestures and command of the theatre’s space, and over the phone when we spoke last month in preparation for this piece. Isabel is directly confronting, and she will continue to, in this next round of performances, and in future essays, “I have several that I want to write and keep writing,” she tells me. Perhaps these too will be transformed into solo shows. Lucky us.
Tickets for Isabel Monk Cade’s Solo Show My Way are available here.
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