Leah Hennessey & Emily Allan

EMILY ALLAN and LEAH HENNESSEY are playwrights, filmmakers and performers from New York City. They first worked together as co-creators of the cult web series Zhe Zhe. They first began performing live together in 2014 with a series of musical comedy sketches which would eventually become Slash. Their last play, Star Odyssey, a commissioned piece by MoMA PS1, continued their exploration of homoerotic fan fiction and sci-fi eschatology. Their first film Byron & Shelley: Illuminati Detectives was commissioned by the The Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève for the 2021 Biennale de l’Image en Mouvement. Most recently they co-directed the HBO comedy special John Early: Now More Than Ever.

Your show SLASH is described as "homoerotic fan fiction about iconic celebrity and fictional pairings" and SYFY even called it "the ultimate fan fiction play". What is your relationship with fan fiction, and how do you translate it for the stage?

Emily and I are fan fiction voyeurs and enthusiasts. Although we both wrote fan fic adjacent writing as kids and teenagers, we only properly entered fandom as it exists on the internet during the epoch of BBC Sherlock. While the potterlock (Sherlock at hogwarts) scene in slash is original, some of the scenes are adapted directly from forums online, as are some of the essays about fan fiction. The show centers around an essay by feminist science fiction writer Joanna Russ which explores the mysteries of slash fiction, a sub genre of fanfiction which imagines ostensibly straight men male fictional characters falling in love with each other.

You've collaborated a lot in the past, including on the webseries Zhe Zhe, a camp satire of New York City's performance scene. What is your style of working together? How do you collaborate as a team? What makes you such a good creative pair? Where do you tend to clash or discover challenges, and how do you overcome them?

Emily and I have collaborated in many different modes but it all starts with writing. Writing side by side, in notebooks, in illegible handwriting. We both always longed for a relationship like this. We idolized comedy duos and songwriters and the specific obsessive erotic competitive intimacy of people (mostly men) who wrote and performed tougher. Slash is largely about that kind of relationship, about longing for that dynamic, and through creating it we created the relationship we wanted.

Tell us about some of the characters you embody on stage. Who do you pair up? What is the naughtiest part?

We do a variety of male duos, many of them English ie John Lennon/Paul McCartney, Sherlock/Watson and we also play various (mostly second wave) feminists ie Camille Paglia, Susan Sontag and Andrea Dworkin. The naughtiest part is probably Stalin and Trotsky, just because it’s so offensively historically inaccurate and silly.

Does the show invoke or comment on the ideas of gender, masculinity or femininity? Is there anything you're hoping to tell us about what it means to be a man, a woman or a human being?

The show is certainly about gender roles and dysphoria, and quotes various feminist texts but the play is structured as more of a dialectic than a polemic, and I hope we raise more questions than we answer. One of the central questions is why women fantasize about men being secretly in love with each other (the central motif of slash fiction) but that question alone brings up lots of other questions.

Can you tell us about some other female-driven shows you've seen at Fringe this year that really blew you away?

“52 Monologues for Young Transexuals” (@nothingmoretosaytheatre) was the show that I thought had the most wide ranging, most thoughtful and surprising writing about femininity. It’s a dangerously smart show and I can’t wait for the rest of the world to see it. I also wept at Growler (@growlerspeaks) and went through some kind of Orphic descent into the shadow realm and came back ready to perform for a month. I also thought Looking for Giants (@thatswhatswild) was the best thing by I’ve ever seen about romantic obsession. None of those three shows were playing it safe, or saying “the right thing”- they were all shocking and uncomfortable and unlike anything I’d ever seen.