Moonshiner
Presented by Adult Film at a private location in the Ridgewood area, NYC (address released upon RSVP)
March 12-April 4, 2026
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| Annalisa Noel. Photo by Geve. |
Moonshine, as many theater fans know, is one of the characters in
A Midsummer Night's Dream's play-within-a-play, which is performed by a dreamer-led group hoping to impress its social betters. The young women in Lillian Mottern's play
Moonshiner, though hundreds of years and a continent distant from Shakespeare's playacting laborers, share something with them as they engage in aspirational role-playing in a dreamlike setting. For Mottern's characters, that means the unreality-tinged environment of the 2019 Los Angeles wildfires, where moonshine meets firelight meets the Santa Ana winds, which one of the play's women notes, are supposed to (like the moon) "make you go crazy." Adult Film's enthralling production of
Moonshiner's distinctive snapshot of contemporary young womanhood continues the company's predilection for performance spaces that put audience and actors into intimate, boundaryless juxtaposition. The characters themselves, meanwhile, probe and play with the boundaries created by their own self-presentations among collisions of surfaces and reflections, compliments and criticism, that afford glimpses of more deeply seated disappointments and desires.
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| L to R: Raina Soman, AJ Molder, and Annalisa Noel. Photo by Geve. |
Moonshiner takes us to the rooftop of a West L.A. apartment building where Riv (Annalisa Noel) and Joan (
Raina Soman), both 22, live and are meeting up to watch the fires on a sweltering August day. The set design, by the production's director, Danica Selem, keeps it simple, suggesting the roof and its small wading pool through red paint and some sheets of reflective silver material. The latter, in addition to sometimes giving an impression of the fires in how it interacts with the assertive color changes in
Shane Hennessy's lighting design, evokes mirrors and all that they thematically imply, from self-examination to imitation to false surfaces. Aside from entertaining themselves, Riv and Joan are waiting for Joan's 21-year-old cousin, Im (
AJ Molder), who is coming to stay for a few days and whom Joan–questionably, it turns out–describes to Riv as backwards and unreasonably frightened of everything. Periodically crossing paths with these young women is the unnamed landlord of the building (
Megan Metrikin), a middle-aged woman who might represent one version of what awaits on the other side of the undefined space of young adulthood, even as she echoes the young women in some respects: her most pressing ambition seems to be having her picture taken with Harrison Ford's–not the one you're thinking of–star on the Walk of Fame while posed in some way that isn't "average."
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| L to R: Annalisa Noel, Raina Soman, and Megan Metrikin. Photo by Geve. |
Joan, who peppers her speech with "like"s and a realistic level of uptalk, sometimes gives the impression of vacuousness as she boasts that "the man on the corner" said she looked good, brags that a woman at a local bar said that she looks like a writer, or recounts her latest exploits with a model friend whom Riv has never met. Riv retorts at one point that someone told her that she looks like a famous racecar driver, and it seems noteworthy not only that these moments of validation are concerned with image but that more than one of them is about what these women look "like" rather than about themselves as such; and Joan's declaration that she would like to be someone's muse, a person reflected in someone else's accomplishment, fits right into this pattern. And if Joan never met a silence she didn't feel the need to fill, Riv mirrors her in a somewhat childlike inability not to be moving, even breaking out some unimpressive cartwheels at one stage. If Joan's comments about how much people like her and about her plans to "befriend" various people are a method of deflection, so are Riv's comments about how estrangement from her father was her "choice" (her mother is deceased). Im, who opines that their "generation is cursed" and whose mother has been left to struggle more or less alone–including by her sister, Joan's mother–with her mental health, is more open about her own feelings of sadness and isolation. The landlord says that everyone is "so disconnected" these days–she herself will shortly discover her longtime friend's religion–and it certainly can often seem like the characters in
Moonshiner are disconnected even when together, each pursuing her own line of conversation or signaling a disinterest in other people's stories. Near the end of the play, one of the characters comments that "everyone is starting to harden," and within the play's microcosm, Riv and Joan first get more passive aggressive, and then just more aggressive, with each other as the play bends towards an all-too-brief moment of real vulnerability.
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| Annalisa Noel. Photo by Geve. |
The childlike traits of the younger characters, especially Riv and Joan–the cartwheels, the easy lies, the focus on how one another looks, the (seemingly) unfiltered pronouncements, the needling of one another–point to the undefined quality of the juncture of life at which they find themselves, its liminality, to borrow a word unexpected invoked by Joan. Riv and Joan are ending their college years, graduating to adulthood but not to a clear future or perhaps even a clear self. Moments when Riv and Joan refuse to commit to an answer–Where is Riv's dad? Is that Joan's car?--seems akin to the refusal to commit to a story of the self, to keeping open one's option to pretend, to imaginatively self-fashion. The impermanence of an environment that burns every year too might be seen to mirror the young women's liminal lives and identities. Even the consummate naturalism of the dialogue, full of false starts, unfinished thoughts, elliptical expression, and frequent interruptions, aligns with this sense of indeterminacy. And even as much of what the characters talk about is indisputably banal, there's also often a slight tinge of strangeness, almost dangerousness, to things, from Riv and Joan's invasions of others' personal space to the atmosphere of being amongst the flames at, as the unnamed woman calls it, the "edge of the country" and the "edge of the world."
Liam Bellman-Sharpe's subtle sound design acts a key part of this atmosphere, which in turn frames the vividly drawn and painstakingly nuanced performances that one anticipates from an Adult Film production. Molder gives us an Im who is stronger than Joan gives her credit for, even as the others clearly discomfit her at times, and brings a potent intensity to a scene in which Im momentarily erupts. Metrikin invests her character with an undercurrent of detachment that hints both at someone with more life experience than the other women and at someone who is still, to an extent, drifting, like the other women and like the ash in the Los Angeles air. Noel and Soman masterfully imbue the dynamics between Riv and Joan with unspoken layers at every turn, and the pair render the moment when Joan most exposes herself both sharply funny and legitimately heartbreaking. By the end of
Moonshiner, much of the talk is of plans to leave, but the concluding scene comes across as a paradoxical moment both of fantasy and of Beckettian inertia. But then, what can we expect in a world that is regularly on fire?
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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