Review: "Archive of My Own" Takes a Glee-ful Dive into Fan Fiction

Archive of My Own

Written by Annabel McConnachie

Directed by Zoé Zifer

Presented at The Tank

312 W 36th St., Manhattan, NYC

March 17, 2025

 Annabel McConnachie and Kevin Smith. Photo by Charlotte Shenassa.
Many consumers of media, if they are aware of fan fiction–fan-written narratives that use characters and worlds from commercial works, including novels, tv shows, video games, and more–probably imagine a genre stuffed with x-rated stories of Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock having a torrid affair. In actuality, as Australian writer and actor Annabel McConnachie's play Archive of My Own points out early on, not all fanfic consists of pornographic fantasies involving copyrighted characters, as readers of the massive fan fiction repository Archive of Our Own (referenced in the play's title and known as AO3 to fanfic fans) can no doubt attest. However, the play's unnamed protagonist–credited as Girl and played by McConnachie in a delightful, often dryly humorous turn–instantly and amusingly clarifies that her own fic was always pornographic and always about Glee. The play cleverly juxtaposes excerpts from the protagonist's Glee fanfic with her experiences with sex and dating outside of the virtual page, mining both hilarity and insight from the disjunctions.
Nicole Lado, Isabel Criado and Isabel Vann. Photo by Charlotte Shenassa.
Fifty Shades of Grey famously started out as Twilight fan fiction, and while the various iterations of both properties achieved enormous popularity, neither offers anything approaching a good model for romantic or sexual relationships, never mind a realistic one. Through dramatic readings of excerpt from her Glee stories and recollections of comparable events from her own life–a first kiss, a first experience of heterosexual intercourse, one of a number of similar first dates, and so on–we witness Archive of Our Own's protagonist come to realizations about the flaws in fanfic models and attempt to parse the ramifications. In a staged reading of the show at The Tank in March, the fan fiction side of things was performed by the trio of Nicole Lado, Isabel Vann, and Isabel Criado, while McConnachie and Kevin Smith acted out (with one exception) the flashbacks to the Girl's real-life encounters. Lado and Vann handled the dialogue in the fanfic excerpts, with Criado reading the rest of the prose–including at one point, in a nice touch, an authorial footnote–creating an effect something like a series of mini plays with the stage directions read aloud. It is interesting to note that these actors having the scripts in front of them also created the sense of seeing the process of reading fanfic, prompting one to imagine what this will look like and how such effects will change in a full staging. Watching Vann and Lado act out the often-histrionic prose read by Criando is hilarious, especially in a story about Glee's Rachel Berry masturbating (soundtracked by "Touch Myself" in the background and contrasted, equally hilariously, with the Girl's own, very brief attempt) and another about a lesbian seduction. Smith also delivers a lot of funny moments as a sequence of men whose behavior ranges through cringe, awkwardness, self-absorption, and dishonesty. Having, in contrast to Smith as the "real" men, women act out both the male and female roles in the fanfic excerpts underscores both the fantasy nature of (the) fanfic–the majority of which, surveys have suggested, is written by women–and the fact that this fanfic is entirely a product of the Girl's self, conscious and unconscious.
Nicole Lado, Isabel Vann, Annabel McConnachie, and Kevin Smith. Photo by Charlotte Shenassa. 
Since the fan fiction here is the Girl's, even as is it exemplary–the excerpts, down to an authorial preface, will feel instantly familiar to anyone who has spent any time trawling AO3's waters–the audience can be comfortable laughing at its heightened aspects. On the one hand, fanfic is empowering and democratizing in how its writers (who, again, are very often women) appropriate control of canonical texts; but on the other hand, as the protagonist reminds us, fanfic sex represents an amalgamation of what the media tells us, what we want sex to be, and what we guess sex is. The play illuminates how the overheated melodrama that can characterize sexuality in fanfic ends up serving as a model for how one "should" act, much in the way that, for one of the play's male characters, video pornography does. A swath of video pornography engages in boundary transgression in a way that a swath of fanfic does as well, and the Girl observes of the latter that the tropes represented would fall on a scale from problematic to illegal in the real world and questions the place and implications of such (relatively common) representations. Power is doubtless an element in such transgressive fantasies–perhaps that is the case in all sexual fantasies to various degrees–though the performativity modeled by sexual fanfic (like video porn) would seem ironically disempowering.

In the end, while acknowledging both the good and the harm that smutty fanfic can do, the Girl considers what her relationship status with fanfic will be going forward. Whatever this conclusion, we have not seen the last chapter for Archive of My Own, which will premiere a fully staged production at the New York Theater Festival from July 24–27 at the Hudson Guild Theater. As with a piece of fanfic moving out of beta, it will be exciting to see this particular production in its revised form.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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