Archive of My Own
Written by Annabel McConnachie
Directed by Zoé Zifer
441 W 26th St., Manhattan, NYC
July 24-27, 2025
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L to R: Isabel Vann, Isabel Criado, Nicole Lado, and Annabel McConnachie. Photo courtesy of Eloise Martin-Jones |
Philosopher and cultural critic Michel Foucault posited that the "archive" is a distinctly modern concept, a claim that aligns well, if perhaps unexpectedly, with Annabel McConnachie's fan-fiction-focused play
Archive of My Own.
Archive of My Own's title alludes to the online fan-fiction repository
Archive of Our Own (
AO3 for short), and while fan-fiction (fan-written narratives that center on characters and worlds from commercial works in any variety of media) certainly existed before the internet did, digital connectivity has supercharged what might otherwise have remained a niche practice. This amplification correspondingly magnifies fan-fiction's effects, which occupy a spectrum from positive through questionable to clearly damaging and which the play explores with perspicacity and nimble humor. Following a staged reading at The Tank in the spring (you can read our review
here),
Archive of My Own returned to the stages this summer with a full production at the New York Theater Festival (NYTF) at the Hudson Guild Theatre, where it won the festival's awards for Best Production and Best Director (Zoé Zifer). Next up for
Archive of My Own will be the premiere screening on September 9th of its recorded NYTF performance (reserve your spot
here).
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Annabel McConnachie and Kevin Smith. Photo courtesy of Eloise Martin-Jones
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While
Archive of My Own's fan-fic-writing protagonist, played with infectious brio by McConnachie, is credited only as Girl, encouraging a broad identification, her authorial specialty is quite specific: smutty stories set in the world of
Glee. As we write this on September 5, 2025,
Archive of Our Own boasts 39,228 stories filed under
Glee, with the six most recent posted today - not bad for a TV series that ended a decade ago and evidence of, if nothing else, the cultural recycling associated with the archive. The Girl, though, comes to
Glee fan-fiction in 2009, the year of
Glee's debut, when she is 10 years old. At first a reader, she shortly turns to writing fic as well, and although, as she tells us, there are numerous categories of fan-fiction, denoted by a forest of acronyms, she sticks to the pornographic variety. The Girl acts as our retrospective narrator, addressing the audience directly while looking back over her history with fan-fiction, and the play intersperses into these reflections short scenes from the Girl's fan-fic that are juxtaposed with analogous flashbacks to her actual life and experiences. The former presents a much rosier version of love and sex, including kink and taboo, than the latter, a contrast which the production productively and hilariously highlights in how it presents these two worlds.
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| L to R: Isabel Vann, Isabel Criado, and Nicole Lado. Photo courtesy of Eloise Martin-Jones |
We first see the Girl typing on her laptop at a desk, clad in a plaid skirt, which is echoed in the costuming of one of the other actors, and a long, comfy cardigan worn open, which is not. One might see this choice as emphasizing that while there is perhaps a greater degree in fan-fiction of the writerly self-insertion present in any fiction, it always coexists with disjunction between writer and character that is here linked to idealization. While the Girl delivers her opening dialogue, three young women (Isabel Vann, Isabel Criado, and Nicole Lado) giggle and laugh together over their smartphones. The production returns to a much more subdued version of this tableau in its conclusion, but before that, we are treated to a selection of excerpts from the Girl's fan-fiction that involve different scenarios–such as a first kiss (unbearably romantic and the first step on a clear path to true love), female masturbation (an entirely successful exploration), and an unexpected but triumphant lesbian encounter–paired with similar moments from the Girl's offline life, such as a quick peck of a first kiss that leads exactly nowhere, a rather less successful exploration of her own body, and an unexpected lesbian kiss that, again, does not lead to true love. The fan-fic scenes are delivered in a slightly heightened style, with stylized physicality, including increasingly funny and inspired ways to represent sex acts in an SFW manner: a popcorn bucket, a lightsaber, and a GameCube controller all come into play in different scenes. Criado reads the narrative parts of the fiction off of a smartphone in these scenes (giving a riotously dramatic reading in the lesbian fic scene before effortlessly and immediately changing registers to play the girl who kisses the Girl in her real life), while Vann and Lado act as the story's characters (and Lado often provides very funny interpretations of narrative calls for various noises from her characters). In one instance, some comical stage business is made of Lado and Vann needing Criado to play a waitress, and Vann often plays male characters in these scenes, which, along with Criado's reading these stories from a phone, underscores the aspects of play involved in fan fiction, of imaginatively trying on roles and trying out experiences.
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| Annabel McConnachie and Kevin Smith. Photo courtesy of Eloise Martin-Jones |
The flipside of such play can be seen in the real-life scenes, in which, for example, the Girl's dating and sexual experiences fail to live up to their fictional counterparts. One man, played by Kevin Smith, who impressively distinguishes the various characters whom he takes on, down to their different ways of moving and carrying themselves, admits to watching a great deal of porn, which also provides a site for imaginative play and projection but, as with fan-fiction, does not always provide the healthiest of models. As we see, more than once, a phrase like "You're so wet" may sound better on the page than when an actual man says it out loud to an actual woman. Smith and McConnachie play off one another splendidly in these scenes, often spinning comedy from their awkwardness, as in one sequence in which Smith plays an alarmingly clingy date (like a lot of dirty talk, having a man obsessed with you also, it turns out, seems better on the page). The production's minimalist set helps facilitate the show's brisk pace and quick transitions, and the use of pop music cues in some of the fan-fic scenes both enriches their atmosphere and highlights their status as fantasy. As the Girl and the play conclude, this sort of fantasy can have positive, even empowering elements, but learning about sexuality and romantic relationships from the unreality of fan-fic can also be misleading and unhealthy, and a breakup serves as a neat summative metaphor that bridges the various strands that the play has set out.
Archive of My Own sets out these ideas in a way that is hilarious without sacrificing nuance, and, in a time when you can make an AI chatbot version of
Glee's Rachel Berry to live out fan-fic scenarios in real-time, they will only become more important.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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