And I felt naked

Note: I’ve known Layla since we were hungry young actors closing down the bar at South’s after putting up chaotic—sometimes incredible, sometimes meh—new plays at Serials at The Flea. I was immediately in love with Layla as a performer and uber-cool person. Still am. Since then, I’ve gotten to stay at her childhood home in Dallas and her apartment in Bed-Stuy, workshop new plays with her, and share a writers’ group with her. I recently had the pleasure of watching her solo show, I’m Not Even Half at the Bushwick Starr. 

And I felt naked. 

I saw raw aspects of myself in the obsessive, self-centered, and manic spirals of Khoshnoudi’s main character “S”. S wants to be loved, to be reached for, so she claws like a rabid dog for Harry’s crumbs. Harry is an artist on the rise whose brush offs seem excusable enough.

Been there, as Layla and I have processed romantic obsessions on many a phone call over the years. 

Like Layla of 2022-23, the character S is hooked to her phone watching the Zan, Zendegi, Azadi / Woman, Life, Freedom movement in Iran, videos of girls claiming their autonomy and risking their lives. S is utterly enraptured by and addicted to witnessing their bravery when she’s quite literally hit by a car. She flirts with the paramedic and then uses her possible brain injury as yet another excuse to get close to Harry.

These small manipulations sit stark against a landscape of real life or death stakes. 

(Some delusion of control? Like a rat scratching itself raw in a cage?) The portal to S’s witnessing of uprising and her excruciating self-attack is her phone — she watches the videos happen in the same location she watches for three dots. Both put her nervous system in a constant state of agitation and arousal, and blur the line between there and here. 

Layla is a bold performer who deliciously embodies the oscillation: between victim and abuser, between Iran and America, between selfishness and generosity. Layla does not attempt to resolve contradiction, but presents its frictions and the costs we keep paying, until we don’t: through death, will, exhaustion or a miracle. 

I’m Not Even Half held a mirror to my contradictions. There is no aha! moment that magically resolves S’s frailties, rather, she embodies the dizzying positions of her psyche, and eventually stumbles her way into a new paradigm, one in which she shifts the punishment to an external abuser rather than the self. The brave acts of the girls of Woman, Life, Freedom inspire a retirement, (or at least pause), from self-abuse. When S shifts out of the adrenalized cycle of seeking elusive male attention, she encounters a big open void. 

The play made me wonder: Am I willing to sacrifice the comfort of my familiar neurotic pains in order to become useful to the world I claim to want to build? 

Layla’s writing and performance lives inside S’s slippery integrity – she wants to do good, yet her own fears and self-harming tendencies erode these aspirations. Layla embodies this flimsy ethical dance with unflinching detail and impeccable comic timing. In the most thrilling scene of the play, S catapults between the conflicting, ugly positions of her own psyche, voicing thoughts most people would rather disown. I was stunned by the rawness of it, and told her so, after the show, at another bar—(South’s is long gone now.) I was so proud of her, sharing her shadow and how it is lit and exposed by the world around her. I envied her willingness to share her void. 

The void, that scary place I’d rather stick things in than face. 

The void, where I must claim my violence as my own, and my pain as my own. 

The void, where the I/we/you/them starts to evaporate, where we are connected but separate but connected. 

The place where there’s nowhere left to go.

In the void, S has a pause. 

She conjures her Mother. Together, they imagine a world where the oppressive regime falls and horrible men die horrible deaths. For a moment, they breathe in that imagined world together. 

And I feel I am sitting across from S and her mother, (and Layla and her Mother) soaking up a love that has gotten their women through everything their line has lived, on the horizon of whatever is coming next.

I’m Not Even Half
Created and Performed by Layla Khoshnoudi
Directed by Machel Ross
Produced by The Bushwick Starr in Association with ¡OYE! Group
Playing at The Bushwick Starr through October 30. Tickets HERE.