Review: "The Song of Lip and Tarantula" Deserves a Spot on Your Playlist

The Song of Lip and Tarantula

Written by Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation

Directed by Sasha Gheesling

Presented by FRIGID New York NY, Big Beef Productions, and Kelley-Marie Van Dilla at UNDER St. Marks

94 St. Marks Place, Manhattan, NYC

February 4-8, 2026

Raising a child is a hefty responsibility, especially within the attenuated care networks of heteropatriarchal capitalism. So just imagine what it would be like to raise 26 of them. That is the number mothered by the title characters of The Song of Lip and Tarantula, a new play from writer, comedienne, and educator Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation. While this number may sound like something from Greek mythology (or Titus Andronicus), the more dreamlike elements of The Song of Lip and Tarantula are imbricated with verisimilar details rooting the play in the current political landscape, lived queer experience, and a granular, unsentimental evocation of New York City.

When the play opens, Tarantula (Airen Guevara) is sitting, eyes closed, in a chair in what we will learn is Lip's (Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation) apartment. On the wall behind Tarantula hang a number of headshot-style photos with blurred and distorted faces–a portion of those 26 children. Lip enters, humming and bearing ingredients for Shabbat dinner, and as she shuffles between table and sideboard in the mouse-and-bug-infested apartment, she proclaims how delighted she is to have Tarantula there, given Lip's loneliness and how long it's been since she's seen Tarantula. These two trans women are sisters to one another, but an incident between two of their “children” led to the end of their joint household and its stream of trans youth, after which Tarantula ascended into the bourgeois realms of what Lip resentfully calls "cisgender heterosexual paradise," with a well-paid art-world fiancé and a new home and social circle in New Haven. Lip–thirty, still living in a "hovel in Brooklyn" in Tarantula's words, and without a "real job" and "pregnant again" in her own–anticipates that all of their children, living and dead, will be joining them that evening for a reunion, and to be present for her giving birth. As the play progresses, it intermixes flashbacks to a pivotal rooftop evening for the pair, scenes which in turn effectively intermix short narrative asides by Lip into the women's conversation. The early stages of the play seem almost magical realist, but things aren't entirely what they seem, either for Lip or for the audience.

Despite the close bonds of their shared past, by the time that we meet Lip and Tarantula, each feels like the other can't be happy for her. Their disagreements are of course personal, but they often simultaneously point to larger questions. Tarantula, for instance, criticizes Lip's attempts to be "the perfect Jewish woman," like her mother, as a reduction of womanhood to cooking and reproduction, and, at another point, attacks the whole concept of chosen family, calling it unreal. Lip, meanwhile, argues that Tarantula has abandoned her values and community (changes that Tarantula views as a self-reinvention akin to another transition). Lip, on the one hand, doesn't want to talk about certain parts of the past and asserts that some things are better off forgotten; but Tarantula, on the other hand, in a different kind of forgetting, acts as if one of their past children never existed. These complexities render not only the characters but their disagreements much more compelling than if either was clearly and consistently in the right. Tarantula's desire for security and comfort, for example, is both totally rational and understandable as well making her a sellout, and Lip's intense need for love is both understandable and problematic. At play too is the intergenerational perpetuation of harms, an issue to which Lip's view of time as a spiral seems relevant–Tarantula may be right that she and Lip were too-young, inadequate parents to their children, but Lip may be right that Tarantula's mother will never speak to Tarantula again no matter how successful and "normal" a life she creates. Aviva Pearl Ocean Creation plays Lip with a demonstrativeness that comes to seem performative as well as self-protective (taking us back to that fantasy of surpassing her own mother), and Airen Guevara gives Tarantula a put-together resoluteness that is itself partially a mask, while together, the performers convincingly convey the depth of their characters' feelings not merely in their conflicts but also in more affectionate moments such as an endearing scene in which they laugh and joke together on the rooftop. Flight is a recurrent image in the play, as is creation: alongside the fashioning of selves and the fashioning of children, Lip invokes the idea of creating merely by speaking, a biblical but also theatrical power. At the same time, Lip causes the audience to ask if there is a point beyond which creating one's own reality becomes tragic if not dangerous. Tarantula says "we have to find a way to make ourselves live," and The Song of Lip and Tarantula offers an incisive and moving exploration of this idea through its memorable, albeit flawed, chosen family.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards