Review: She Wore Red Velvet: “Crushed Velvet” and the Hagiography of Sandra Lee

Crushed Velvet

Written by Andrew Trimmer

Directed by Sam Perwin

Presented at wild project

April 5-18, 2026

Kate Delacruz. Photo courtesy of Austin Ruffer.
Tonight at wild project, everything is semi-homemade. The food gleams under studio lights, pristine and untouchable; the kitchen is immaculate but weightless; the life on display is both carefully constructed and rather unraveling. In Andrew Trimmer’s Crushed Velvet, presented as part of the 2026 New York City Fringe Festival, the question is not simply how to stage Sandra Lee, but how to stage the system that made, sustained, and ultimately consumed her. What emerges is less a biography than a kind of hagiography, Aunt Sandy rendered with ambition and real relish.

The production’s central instinct is a deeply compelling one. Rather than settling into a single mode, Crushed Velvet effortlessly moves across genres, backstage naturalism, media parody, documentary reconstruction, and sketch-inflected interludes, as if no one form can fully contain the contradictions of its iconic subject. That formal restlessness signals a genuine inquiry: how does one represent a life already mediated, branded, performed and metabolized?
Christopher F. Costa and Kate Delacruz. Photo courtesy of Austin Ruffer.
At its most incisive, the production locates that question within the machinery of television itself. Set within the fabricated world of a Food Network studio, complete with explicitly artificial food and overdetermined Americana, the play situates its action inside the labor of production. Red velvet, both dessert and symbol, becomes an organizing image: chemically constructed, visually seductive, undermined by entropy. Ultimately what is made, and what is sold, collapse into one another.

That collapse extends, inevitably, to Sandra Lee herself. As performed here, “Aunt Sandy” exists as both persona and person, an image calibrated for consumption and a figure increasingly aware of the pressures that sustain it. The familiar refrain, “It’s cocktail time,” lands early with a shared recognition between actor and audience, a small moment of hailing and mutual understanding: this is the language of the brand: nominally authentic, commercially effective, faintly degrading, and entirely inescapable.
Christopher F. Costa, Amy Greenblott, Maceo Oliver. Photo courtesy of Austin Ruffer.
The production finds some of its clearest footing in moments where performance and persona align. The use of music, including well-placed and tonally unexpected selections, sharpens the comedic register with precision. Flashes of blue and queer humor settle comfortably into the piece’s world, often landing with a sharp, immediate clarity and real laughs, indicative of a deeper tonal cohesion. The recurring review sequences, in which online commentary is rendered aloud, in-real-life, offer a particularly striking gesture, collapsing the distance between anonymous spectatorship and lived experience, making bad faith critique feel suddenly proximate, even uncannily embodied.

Standout performances provide welcome anchors within this shifting, heady landscape. Andrew Trimmer’s Boomer brings an empathetic and charming mix of energy and vulnerability, locating the character somewhere between youthful confidence and quiet precarity. Laura King Otazo’s Dee offers a measured, controlled presence, her direct address to the audience standing out as one of the evening’s most focused elements, a moment where the play’s inquiry sharpens into articulation. As Sandra Lee, Kate Delacruz leans into the recognizable contours of the persona, voice, affect, and presentation, the accent, the studied brightness, the careful calibration of warmth, while allowing flashes of deep self-awareness to register beneath the surface polish. Costume and styling, particularly in the construction of “Aunt Sandy,” are deft, reinforcing the production’s interest in image as both craft and constraint.
Laura King Otazo. Photo courtesy of Austin Ruffer.
What remains most compelling is the play’s commitment to its central conceit. Crushed Velvet understands that Sandra Lee’s story cannot be told straight; it requires multiple frames and competing modes of address to approach something like truth. It gestures toward the systems that elevate, commodify, and, at times, turn on their subjects, particularly those whose identities and labor are most readily absorbed, stylized, and recirculated within the logics of performance and consumption.

What begins as something pristine, carefully arranged for consumption, is gradually handled, disrupted, and, finally, undone. Like the confection at its center (and perhaps Sandra Lee herself), the production offers something visually striking and conceptually suggestive, a work that gestures towards a complex synthesis even as it continues to test the forms that might contain it.

-Noah Simon Jampol

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Review: "How To Eat an Orange" Cuts into the Life of an Argentine Artist and Activist

Image
How To Eat an Orange Written by Catherine Filloux Based on the writing of Claudia Bernardi Directed by Elena Araoz Presented by La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club at The Downstairs at La MaMa 66 E 4th St., Manhattan, NYC May 30-June 16, 2024 Paula Pizzi. Photo by Steven Pisano How To Eat an Orange , making its world premiere at La MaMa, does in fact include a real orange as a prop, and its multifarious symbolizations–evoking at different points cultural specificity, family history, matriarchal inheritance, and even a skull–are representative of the play's boundary-blurring, non-linear presentation of memory. The memories in question belong to visual artist, educator, and activist Claudia Bernardi , who lived through several years of her native Argentina's military junta, which held power from 1976 to 1983, before departing her country and eventually settling in the United States. How To Eat an Orange , from Catherine Filloux, a French Algerian American award-winning playwright,...
Read more

Review: The Immersive "American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams" Takes Audiences on a Marvelously Crafted Journey

Image
American Blues: 5 Short Plays by Tennessee Williams Written by Tennessee Williams Directed by Jim Niesen Presented by the Irondale Ensemble Project at The Space at Irondale 85 South Oxford St., Brooklyn, NYC October 27-November 26, 2023 Shadenia Savid in Moony's Kids Don't Cry . Photo by Natasha Rotondaro In 1948, Tennessee Williams published American Blues , a collection of five one-act plays, and a remarkable new production of this collection by Brooklyn's Irondale shows that these works have lost none of their power to both entertain and challenge audiences in the intervening three-quarters of a century. Comprising plays written in the decade between 1936 and 1946 - Moony's Kids Don't Cry (1936); The Dark Room (1939); The Case of the Crushed Petunias (1941); The Long Stay Cut Short, or, the Unsatisfactory Supper (1946); and Ten Blocks on the Camino Real (1946) - American Blues represents the second part of Irondale's American Century, the first install...
Read more

Review: From Child Pose to Stand(ing) Up: "Yoga with Jillian" and "Penguin in Your Ear" at the Women in Theatre Festival

Image
Yoga with Jillian Written by Lia Romeo Directed by Andrew W. Smith Presented by Project Y Theatre and Richard Jordan Productions in association with The Pleasance June 2-17, 2023 Penguin in Your Ear Written and performed by Eliza Bent Directed by Jess Barbagallo June 10, 2023 Part of the Women in Theatre Festival , presented by Project Y Theatre at A.R.T./New York Theatres Michole Biancosino. Photo courtesy of Project Y Theatre This June, Project Y Theatre Company presents the eighth annual installment of its Women in Theatre Festival (WIT), which showcases new work by women and maintains "more than 50% female representation of all artists involved." This year, the festival includes a lobby installation project, titled In the Betweens , from scenic designer Chen-Wei Liao, through which audience members pass on their way into the theater proper. One first chooses first between "light" and "dark" rooms and then moves into "the gardens" before re...
Read more