Review: The Tasty Traumedy of "Chip on Her Shoulder"

Chip on Her Shoulder

Written and directed by Jen McAuliffe

Presented by Off with their Heads Productions at Chain Theatre

312 West 36 Street, Floor 4, Manhattan, NYC

April 5-17, 2026

Victoria Nieves. Courtesy of Off with their Heads Productions 
Food, as most of us have experienced, can be a source of comfort and even of control. For Angela (Victoria Nieves) of the one-woman show Chip on Her Shoulder, the go-to catalyst for such feelings is chips, specifically salt and vinegar. When Angela calls salt and vinegar chips "the perfect balance of pain and pleasure," her description also echoes the unerring blend of comedy and trauma that characterizes the play, in which the constant stresses from career, dating, and lingering familial hurts sometimes seem like they can only be countered, always temporarily, by a good, crisp snack. Chip on Her Shoulder, the debut play from Australian screenwriter and playwright Jen McAuliffe, was first seen at the Melbourne Fringe in 2025 and now makes its New York debut as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, an open lottery-based theater festival in which one hundred percent of box office proceeds go directly to the artists, and which this year runs from April 1-19 at UNDER St. Marks, the wild project, Chain Theatre, and The Rat NYC.

When Angela enters at the beginning of the show, passing a table laden with boxes of chips and other crunchy treats, she opens, in short order, first her laptop and then a bag of chips. As she eats the latter, she uses the former to make some extra, foot-centric income on OnlyFans. The very funny crossover of sex with salt and vinegar in this opening segues into a comment on women's creativity, underappreciated outside as well as within arenas such as sex work. As a stage actor who works long hours as a nurse to make the rent, Angela is very familiar with the struggles at the intersections of work and creativity, made worse by the vanishingly small number of Broadway parts available to Latinas. Nor is Angela's romantic life currently at Broadway levels, her "longest and most stable relationship," as she puts it, having been with those reliable chips. And then there is the long shadow of her mother's criticism, including of her weight, and her father's emotional unavailability. It comes as little surprise that she says "hope is exhausting."

Over the course of the one-hour play, we follow Angela through a series of short, chronologically arranged scenes–auditions, experiences with freeloading or judgmental men, therapy appointments, even the reading aloud of a soul-baring letter to her deceased parents–with brief, apropos musical cues during the transitions. Through it all, Nieves gives a hilarious and vulnerable performance, vividly representing Angela's woundedness and justified anger but also her spark and resilience. In the end, our time with Angela suggests, hope is exhausting, but also maybe worth it.

-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards

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