Cerandipity
Directed by Helena Jost
312 West 36th Street, Floor 3
July 12-30, 2026
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| Annabel McConnachie and Isabel Vann. Photo by Callee Egan (@calwithcamera). |
For people of a sufficient age, it can sometimes be tempting to feel nostalgic for our pre-Web 2.0, even pre-home-internet, relationship to celebrity, for days when we didn't know every off-putting opinion of the artists we liked, or even, in the cases of some bands, for example, what said artists looked like. At the same time, however qualitatively different today, the celebrity crush has been a phenomenon for far, far longer than today's information-saturated mediascape has existed. Annabel McConnachie's short two-hander Cerandipity takes an empathetic look at the significance for two contemporary young women of the celebrity crush that they turn out to share, with the play's title as perhaps a playful riff on the 2001 rom-com Serendipity, which takes a romantic-pairing-as-destiny approach that is perhaps not so different from the Hollywood-fueled fancies of the play's pair of protagonists. Presented this July as part of Chain Theatre's 2026 Summer One-Act Festival, Cerandipity deftly develops a funny yet sensitive snapshot of two fifteen-year-old friends feeling out their relationships to themselves and to others, famous and otherwise. |
| Annabel McConnachie and Isabel Vann. Photo by Callee Egan (@calwithcamera). |
Cerandipity begins with friends Olivia and Kendall
–played by McConnachie and repeat collaborator
Isabel Vann, respectively
–in the middle of playing truth or dare during a sleepover, that frequent site of confessional intimacy. Partly ensconced in their sleeping bags, the pair lands on the question of crushes (not specifically celebrity crushes), and while Kendall is initially reluctant to answer, after some humorous equivocation, it comes out that both Olivia and Kendall are into (drumroll): Michael Cera. This overlap precipitates a bit of (competitive?) friction, as part of which Olivia asks, "Do you even know him?" The two also compare imagined encounters with Cera, drawing a distinction between dream and fantasy that points to questions of agency. (Funnily enough, when they compare "[w]hich Michael Cera does it for [them]," neither mentions his rebel-without-a-cause role in David Lynch's
Twin Peaks: The Return.) Lack of experience and its attendant anxieties come to the fore, and things get relatively heated at one point, but the young women's back-and-forth ultimately pivots to an affirmation of their friendship, a relationship that is neither imagined nor mediated by a screen. In rendering this relationship on stage, McConnachie and Vann's performances lucidly capture the tension and affection, the trepidation and the trust that flow through and between their characters.
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| Annabel McConnachie and Isabel Vann. Photo by Callee Egan (@calwithcamera). |
McConnachie has satirized the problematic aspects of our (technologically mediated) parasocial relationships to celebrity in past works such as
Waiting for Gadot and, more obliquely,
Archive of My Own (in
Cerandipity, Kendall's fear that no one will "like" her might evoke for some the ease and safety of 'relationships' with chatbots and the possibility that one could just license an A.I. Michael Cera to 'date' instead of exposing oneself to the risks of the real world). But all of these plays acknowledge the usefulness of parasociality as well. In
Cerandipity, Olivia talks about "caring, dreaming, wanting something," and media–like a sleepover–can act as a safe space to try out feelings and ways of seeing and understanding the self and the world. If Cera as the unlikely object/facilitator of fantasy is part of the joke, it is also part of that process of figuring out one's likes and desires (which of course can have a wide range not only between but also within individuals). Olivia says that Cera seems "kind" and "emotionally intuitive," which could be viewed as a(nother) mark of her and Kendall's youthfulness (like Lisa Simpson's enjoyment of
Non-Threatening Boys magazine), but it underscores that different (and less toxic) models of masculinity can be attractive. A brief discussion of a non-Cera character in one of his films even opens up the possibility of queer desire, and reinforces how fictional characters in movies and tv (and maybe at least some theater?) often blur with their actors (much as in the fan fiction considered in
Archive of My Own) as catalysts in fans' self-discovery and self-definition.
Cerandipity does bring its focus back to personal, not parasocial, relationships at the end, but it leaves us with the idea that a little fantasy is healthy too.
-John R. Ziegler and Leah Richards
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