Archives 2023

In Someone Spectacular, a new play by Domenica Feraud, something unnerving happens when six people convene for their weekly grief-counseling session: Beth, their therapist, just doesn’t show up. As 10 idle, nervy minutes turn into 20 and 30, the group—made up of Nelle (Alison Cimmet), who’s lost a sister; Jude (Delia Cunningham), who’s lost a baby; Thom (Damian Young), who’s lost his wife; Julian (Shakur Tolliver), who’s lost his aunt; Lily (Ana Cruz Kayne), who’s lost a mother she loved; and Evelyn, (Gamze Ceylan) who’s lost a mother she hated—begins to come undone. They panic, draw lines, judge each other, judge themselves. But as more time goes on, a change takes place. They start to open up and protect each other, to split off and rearrange themselves into a shape that feels more stable, almost safe. What every person is figuring out, sotto voce or at full volume, is how they are meant to carry on without their person.

Feraud has often wrought rewarding and incisive work from intimate experiences—her essays “The 26=Year-Old Virgin” (2020), “The Movie Star and Me” (2022), and her 2019 play Rinse, Repeat being, until now, the best examples. Yet while Rinse, Repeat centered a subject, disordered eating, with personal relevance to Feraud, it was ultimately an invention. Someone Spectacular, on the other hand, sits much closer to autobiography, emerging from the blinding shock of her own mother’s death in 2022.

With four weeks left in the show’s off-Broadway run, at The Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd Street, Feraud talks to Vogue about her profoundly joyful opening night, being one of the understudies (She’s on this weekend!), and how mainlining The Real Housewives helped shape the work. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length.

Vogue: I’d love to hear about your opening night. Someone Spectacular is a very personal show, it’s an emotional show, though it’s also very funny. How did you celebrate it?

Doménica Feraud: It was a bit overwhelming, in the best way. My brother came in from Austin to be there, and it was his first time seeing the play, so that was really special. A lot of my family and my mom’s closest people were there, and then I had friends who were able to be there. And then, also, just to celebrate with the cast and my director, Tatiana Pandiani, and to meet her partner and her friends…and to have Paige [Evans], who’s my co-producer on this, and also my dramaturg, who’s been a mentor to me for a very long time and now is a peer—even though we’ve been so close for seven years, we got to take a picture for the first time. Also, each of these characters is inspired by real people, to some degree; they’re sort of the Inside Out emotion versions of people that I know. So we got a really cool moment of getting a picture of each actor with their inspiration.

“It’s almost like you could dive into them,” the artist Faye Wei Wei says of her paintings over the phone from London. “I like to swim a lot in the lido and I often think about how, when you’re swimming, the pool is like this mirrored surface. As your fingertips are reaching for another stroke, you see a reflection of yourself and there’s this doubling. It’s almost like there’s another world that you could exist in and you could just go into it.”

This romantic way of looking at such a simple action, is a throughline within her work. Once she even painted two intertwining flowers on a literal portal—a lover’s door—to protect him and remind him of their love. “It’s a bit silly, but there’s a record of the traces, all the marks and the feeling that you fit into the painting,” Wei Wei says of the outpouring of self. “You can feel my presence there. I see canvas and the surface of a painting as infinite.”

Nowhere is this illustrated more clearly than within her debut monograph Portals, out now from Éditions Lutanie, which encompasses nearly 14 years of the British artist’s work. The book opens with a simple dedication to Wei Wei’s mother, Autumn Cloud, in Chinese, and a figure drawing titled, I Tangled Your Legs in Mine. We Were a Knot in the Grain of the World. “The first piece is one of my favorite things I’ve ever made, but it’s just me and my ex-girlfriend intertwined,” she explains. “It’s a really tender drawing and I made it by rubbing it out with a pencil eraser. It created this kind of dreamlike quality, but also a cocooning of the two lovers.”

Born in South London, Wei Wei spent the majority of her childhood either seated at the table drawing while her siblings played video games or picking flowers—“lots of good weeds,” she says—at the park down the street. She remembers collecting fallen leaves with her art class when she was about six and developing an early interest in still lifes. “I was so fascinated by the crevices in leaves,” she says. “It just felt really natural. I don’t know why it just feels so good—like all the blood is rushing into my right hand—but I’m really moved by it.”