With ‘Someone Spectacular,’ Playwright Doménica Feraud Lends Clarity to the Fug of Grief

In Someone Spectacular, a new play by Domenica Feraud, something unnerving happens when six people convene for their weekly grief-counseling session: Beth, their therapist, just doesn’t show up. As 10 idle, nervy minutes turn into 20 and 30, the group—made up of Nelle (Alison Cimmet), who’s lost a sister; Jude (Delia Cunningham), who’s lost a baby; Thom (Damian Young), who’s lost his wife; Julian (Shakur Tolliver), who’s lost his aunt; Lily (Ana Cruz Kayne), who’s lost a mother she loved; and Evelyn, (Gamze Ceylan) who’s lost a mother she hated—begins to come undone. They panic, draw lines, judge each other, judge themselves. But as more time goes on, a change takes place. They start to open up and protect each other, to split off and rearrange themselves into a shape that feels more stable, almost safe. What every person is figuring out, sotto voce or at full volume, is how they are meant to carry on without their person.

Feraud has often wrought rewarding and incisive work from intimate experiences—her essays “The 26=Year-Old Virgin” (2020), “The Movie Star and Me” (2022), and her 2019 play Rinse, Repeat being, until now, the best examples. Yet while Rinse, Repeat centered a subject, disordered eating, with personal relevance to Feraud, it was ultimately an invention. Someone Spectacular, on the other hand, sits much closer to autobiography, emerging from the blinding shock of her own mother’s death in 2022.

With four weeks left in the show’s off-Broadway run, at The Pershing Square Signature Center on 42nd Street, Feraud talks to Vogue about her profoundly joyful opening night, being one of the understudies (She’s on this weekend!), and how mainlining The Real Housewives helped shape the work. The conversation has been edited and condensed for length.

Vogue: I’d love to hear about your opening night. Someone Spectacular is a very personal show, it’s an emotional show, though it’s also very funny. How did you celebrate it?

Doménica Feraud

Photo: Getty Images

Doménica Feraud: It was a bit overwhelming, in the best way. My brother came in from Austin to be there, and it was his first time seeing the play, so that was really special. A lot of my family and my mom’s closest people were there, and then I had friends who were able to be there. And then, also, just to celebrate with the cast and my director, Tatiana Pandiani, and to meet her partner and her friends…and to have Paige [Evans], who’s my co-producer on this, and also my dramaturg, who’s been a mentor to me for a very long time and now is a peer—even though we’ve been so close for seven years, we got to take a picture for the first time. Also, each of these characters is inspired by real people, to some degree; they’re sort of the Inside Out emotion versions of people that I know. So we got a really cool moment of getting a picture of each actor with their inspiration.

Tell me a bit about those characterizations. How close were they to the real people?

Evelyn is very much drawn from my mother, and the very real, complicated grief she was dealing with [when her mother passed away]. As soon as I knew I wanted to write a play that was six characters in a grief group, I just thought, I really want to show the different perspectives, and have that grief hierarchy that does unfortunately happen. We even have it as audience members: I mean, we’ve had people at talkbacks who’ve said, “Oh, well, that woman was just there for her miscarriage.” Even after watching the play, people still have their judgment of whether or not these characters deserve to be here.

Lily is a version of myself. Because they can’t all be super nice to each other—that’s boring—I was like, if I’m going to make someone the worst, I’m going to make it me. When my mom died, I didn’t want to be here, and I was so angry, and I may not have verbally said everything, but I was embodying it. I was really resistant to life. So it’s been interesting to sort of turn my shadow self into a character, and realize that even that version is still worthy of love in some way. That’s been very healing for me to see. And then with the other characters, I think that everybody is exaggerated to be dramatically interesting, and we all know that and we’re very comfortable with that. But the experience of loss and how these characters are feeling about losing someone spectacular, that is where the real kernel of truth lies.

I know that in many ways this was not a play that you planned to write. How did its particular conceit come to you?

I saw a play that was six people on a train and not much happened, and I thought, oh, I like this. Having six people in a space, not really going anywhere—just theatrically, I found that really interesting. And then I was also reading Dear Edward [by Ann Napolitano] at the time, where there’s a plane crash and they’re all sort of dealing with grief. It was turned into a series, and there was a grief counseling element in the show. I am a big proponent of therapy. My mother was a big proponent of therapy. And I just thought, What if you have therapy without a therapist? I mean, I’ve been in group therapy; if somebody’s not there keeping everyone in check, it could get really ugly.

And, weirdly, in a case of life imitating art, I actually went on a trip and there was a guide we were working with who one day didn’t show up. We just didn’t hear from this person, whose name also begins with a B. We didn’t know what was going on. And it was really interesting to watch how the members of our group who haven’t really experienced loss were very chill about it all, whereas me, my dad, and my aunt were all clearly very worried that something bad had happened. So, I felt a little guilty. I was like, oh, my God, I hope I didn’t write that into existence. But it happens. I’ve learned this with losing my mom: People can be here, and then they can suddenly be eliminated off the face of the earth. And then what do you do?

You, of course, have a history now of wrestling with big, painful, rather intimate subjects in your writing. What did it feel like, on the other side of this one?

I mean, rehearsals were really hard for me. When they were staging Lily’s panic attack, I had a panic attack. I was like, why am I having all of these terrifying, self-sabotage-y, scary thoughts? That clearly triggered something. It was hard to watch the worst time in my life, day in and day out, and also mine it for: Is this line repetitive? Are these very real feelings of grief and loss and this beautiful observation about what it is for Thom to live without his wife—are they serving the play? But once I got on the other side—really, once the play was locked—my anxiety went way down. We changed the ending at the last possible moment, and then I was like, okay. Now, I love watching the play. I had some friends of my mother’s in on Tuesday, and we were sitting on opposite sides of the stage, and they told me it was so beautiful to see me watch the play because they could see how much joy it was bringing me. I love watching these actors, and I love watching what our director has done with this play. I mean, my father said something really beautiful to a friend of ours last night about how when he comes to the play, he’s coming to visit my mom. So that’s really meaningful to me. And now I’m going on this weekend as Lily.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Yes, I have questions about that. You have, of course, performed your own work before, but this is a particular case. When—or maybe how—did you decide to be an understudy in this show?

Well, I wanted to play Lily. I really did. We did a reading and I watched it and I was just like, “All of the feistiness is there, but the softness of Lily isn’t. And I really feel like I’m the person who can do both.” I love writers like Issa Rae and Phoebe Waller-Bridge, and I think there’s something to be said for being able to be inside of something and really listen. It was helpful to my process. But my producer and dramaturg, Paige Evans, after a really great note session, she said: “Doménica, the play is very good. It’s in really good shape. But I have one thing and I think it’s going to be hard for you: I don’t think you should act in it.” And I was like, “Oh, I agree.” Cue to me having a panic attack and changing my mind a million times. It really had to be my decision, and I sat on it. And even though I really wanted to act in it, I did make the choice to cast Ana Cruz Kayne in a reading, knowing full well that she’s amazing. When I watched her, I was like, God dammit, you’re doing the thing that I think only I can do.

So then I had another conversation with Paige. I was like, “Is it going to affect you wanting to produce this play if I’m in it?” And she said, “No, no, not at all. I’m very happy to be involved. But this is your family and this is about losing your mother. And I think the actors need you to be able to support them.” And that really resonated with me. Everyone in the cast has experienced loss in some way. This is beautiful and hard for everyone. And since I’m also producing this, it was just too many hats for a piece that is so deeply personal. But Paige came up with a really fun idea. In the post-COVID world, there are more understudies off-Broadway, so Paige asked me, “Why don’t you understudy? That could be a fun compromise.” She told me a story about Dominique Morisseau, who went on for an actor with a known out and the audience loved it. It’s like the best of all worlds, really.

How did your earliest conversations with Tatiana go, in regards to this show? What were some of her most meaningful—or maybe unexpected—interventions?

The whole idea of them playing a game comes from her. She was like, “Let’s activate this a little bit, because this is going to be hard for an audience to sit in. It’s just a lot of emotions and feelings. How can we really make use of the group dynamics? What if they’re playing a game?” And then I came in with, “Okay, if it’s going to be a game, I think Fuck, Marry, Kill.” That immediately brings everyone in. So from the get-go, Tatiana was just offering really smart, dynamic ideas about where to place things. And she’s very direct. It would be my day off, or it’s July 4th, and I’d wake up to a long email from Tati with all of these suggestions of, “Look, the ending is overstaying its welcome.” She really cares about shaping the play to be its best possible version, even when those ideas are hard for me to hear, or involve losing language that I feel is really important for personal reasons. She’s an outside eye, going, “I understand why that is special to you, but for the piece and what the piece is doing, we don’t need it.” And that perspective is really very helpful for me.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

Can you tell me about the process of casting Evelyn?

Our casting directors were Conrad [Woolfe] and Leigh Ann [Smith], and Conrad’s partner Scott and my mom were really close for 10 years. So I think the cast works so beautifully, in large part, because these people are in the fabric of my family. The love that they have for these characters is very important.

But it was really wild. We started readings, and we immediately had somebody we loved [for Evelyn]: Marjan Neshat. She was actually at the opening, and that was so special. She was so lovely and had such love in her heart for the piece. But she was transparent with us when we were [planning to stage it] in the summer. She’d done a lot of theater back to back, and she was like, “I don’t know how to spend another summer without my son.” Especially since she’s about to go into a Broadway show. It was very bittersweet, but I really, really appreciated the way she went about it. She really set the bar for us in terms of what we were looking for.

But what kept happening with Evelyn was that people would get close and then back off and back down. What my dad thinks is that people got scared. Every other role people were really eager to step into, but with Evelyn, my dad was like, “Everyone knows what they’re signing up for, and not everyone can handle that.” So he really admires that Gamze [Ceylan] was willing to take that on. Actually, there’s a line in the play: Lily says, “I still can’t talk to my mom.” I do really struggle with that, even though I watch videos of her and read her diaries and listen to her voice. But I did stop in the street after seeing a show at the Public. I looked up and I said, “Mom, who do you want to play you?” And the answer came in very clearly, and it was Gamze.

We had our callbacks and Gamze was really amazing. There was a lot of wanting to find a softness for Evelyn, because my mom did have this maternal, soft, wonderful way about her. But what I really appreciate with Gamze is that you can tell this woman has been through a lot. There’s a toughness there. For people who didn’t know my mom well, they found her kind of intimidating. Here was this woman who was so beautiful and so put together, people found her hard to read. She was guarded because of her childhood. Gamze holds all of that.

And the other thing I really love about her is that she speaks English with an accent. [Ceyland is from Turkey.] My mother was Ecuadorian, and that was really important. So it’s been a real dream. Gamze wrote me a card yesterday, which I read while I was getting ready for bed. She said, “There’s more Evelyn in you than there is Lily.” It just melted me completely.

Photo: Julieta Cervantes

I’d love to hear about how people have responded to this show. I imagine that their stories can be quite heavy, so how do you protect yourself while also making space for their experiences?

I have had a lot of people become very emotional after the show, and talk to me about how it reminds them of their loss or their person. In those moments, I feel really lucky to get to know about these people. I became a Bravo junkie after my mom died. A lot of the Bravo reunions helped shape this play, I will say, just a little bit. Six people sitting in chairs actually can be very interesting.

But there’s an episode of The Real Housewives of New York where you have Carole Radziwill, the amazing author and journalist, and Dorinda Medley go on a trip to pick up Carole’s late husband’s ashes. Dorinda is also a widow, and even though they’re very different, the two women form this very close bond after that trip. There’s even a bit where everyone’s having ridiculous fights and Carole and Dorinda are in Dorinda’s room, and Carole just says, “Look, I know this is all going on, but I will always love you. You came with me to get my husband’s ashes. You and I have something that’s just different.” And then they do a memorial for Richard, Dorinda’s late husband, and Carole talks about how she feels that [she and Richard] would have been close, and the things he loved that she really loves. It’s so heartwarming to me, and I really relate to it. After losing my mom, I really want to know the names and the lives of the people who are not physically here, but also are physically here in the people that they love. Because my mom is all over me. When I met you at the theater, that was her jumpsuit I was wearing. And so these people, we can’t see them, but they are here.

We have a little corkboard outside the theater. We have these little pieces of paper, and you can write the name of your someone spectacular—someone that you have loved and lost—and then pin it to the board so that they’re there, forever, as a part of this. So I feel really privileged and lucky to get to hear about those things, about those experiences. It’s why the play is here: so that people can relate.

I also have a really good support system. I think therapy is very important. I have great people on my team, but my dad also calls me every single day to check in, and it’s just so lovely. One thing I’m showing with this play is, yes, these people are fighting and they’re competing, but they are also, at the end of it all, coming together and connecting and choosing to stay in that room together. I think human connection is how you get through loss. In grief, you can be talking to somebody, you can be looking at someone who has lost the same person that you have lost, but you’re speaking different languages and you just cannot connect. So part of the conceit and part of what’s going on [in the play] is in many ways, these people are a family, but they just don’t recognize each other. So to have them then come together and be able to help each other is really beautiful. And what I have learned in grief is that that’s how you stay here—and that’s also how you keep your someone spectacular alive.

someone spectacular is on at The Pershing Square Signature Center through August 31.