sarah jae's end-of-2024 updates
plays, albums, reviews, and new mental health diagnoses galore
i can fix him reading recap
we finally, finally, finally read i can fix him with a live audience! it was so special. a few days beforehand, i rewatched greta gerwig’s Little Women — god’s perfect movie — and got weepy over this scene:
my goal in writing this play was to make these girls and their lonely little fanfiction mafia more important. it is one thing to be small and have big feelings, and another thing entirely to be small, have big feelings, and have nowhere to put them. i love them and i am them. like jo, i worried throughout the entire writing, editing, and presentation process that the story i’d written (which necessitated a glossary of early-2010s fandom terminology) would be too small and specific to resonate with ANY audience. i feel so lucky to have been proven wrong!
people came to see the play and they laughed a lot and they understood — even the audience members who didn’t have the lived experience of being on tumblr or writing fanfiction in 2013 understood. i haven’t yet come down from the joy in that understanding. i am so grateful to my collaborators — director Alex Church-Gonzales, cast members Laurel Anderson, Rachel Brudner, Emily Conlon, Sophie Falvey, Abby Gumpper, Maggie Metnick, Elly Silberstein, and Romeo Torres — and to the many others who have read and supported this play from the jump. someone please give us money for a real production in 2025!
you can find more photos from the show on my recently-rebuilt website.
Enter the seedy underbelly of an early-2010s Jewish day school and meet mafiosos Freddie, Donna, Sylvia, and Jane — members of an exclusive after school fan club that serves as a front for a successful fan fiction laundering ring. They'll write anything for you, for a price.
i can fix him is about being a fan, being an uncool girl, and navigating befriending your fellow uncool girls.
they’re publishing 3 of my plays!
i am so proud to share that i am among the inaugural cohort of playwrights publishing their work with 1319 Press! it’s a fantastic new venture founded by the brilliant Sarah Groustra with so many exciting new titles from emerging writers.
you’ll be able to buy and license three of my most pop culture-y plays (river phoenix fugue, speaking strictly for me, and the old jew who begat scrooge, on his deathbed) in the new year.
root vegetables album now available!
i have had the supreme good luck over the years to be asked to perform my friend Marc Jablonski’s beautiful music — first, publicly, for The Flashpaper. i’ve been involved with Root Vegetables since the first developmental reading last fall. in september of this year, we performed selections from the show/some other Marc shows at Green Room 42. those songs are now available to stream wherever you get your music!
i’m self-indulgently sharing my own song here because getting to sing a bundist song in yiddish meant a lot to me (i also sing “Six O’Clock” from a different Marc show on the album), but you should listen to everything, from Izzy Marinucci’s gorgeous seventies folk-rock vocal on “The Leaf” to Russell Norris’s madcap storytelling on “Cyborg” to Kenneth Laboy Vazquez’s sensitive and rich take on “Supervolcano” to Marc’s musical Catskills historiography on “The Mountains.” also, the band is stupidly good (Marc on piano joined by Jack McManus on guitar (and also piano on one song), Anna Young on bass, and Molly Riviere on drums).
i am so proud of Marc and so excited to share his music with you all!
i am a Theatr Insider now!
i’ll be seeing and reviewing a lot of shows in the new year — join me on the app and get access to the coolest theatre resale marketplace around.
big essay coming out in the new year!
i have a big essay coming out in the new year! it is related to my NPR appearance! i am very excited to share more information but i can’t yet!
guess what i have OCD!
i guess you could call this burying the lede, but it has been a long time since i wrote about my mental health online, so this feels like the right place to put this information. eight years ago, i was diagnosed with bipolar by a college counseling center psychologist who had known me for a matter of weeks. i took that as gospel because there is a lot of bipolar in my family and it just made sense that i would be the natural continuation of that line. it didn’t not make sense, but i always knew i was more prone to depression than i was to mania, and more prone to quick mood swings than i was to extended periods of either.
the first thing i ever wrote freelance was about my experience sending myself to the ER sophomore year of college because i thought i had leukemia. i left the ER with a prescription for anxiety. reading it back, though, the mental mechanics i describe align exactly with the way obsessive compulsives describe looping anxious thoughts. OCD can manifest as health anxiety, and that’s how it has most destructively manifested for me in my adult life. i also sent myself to the ER on my 21st birthday because i thought i had breast cancer, and i had to push back my move to new york in 2022 because i’d become convinced i had MS and i had an honest-to-god mental breakdown about it, and i have recently become convinced that i am going to die of a heart attack at any moment. but it doesn’t stop there. in the wake of my diagnosis from a therapist who has known me for 3 years, i have created a list of my deepest, most irrational fears that stretches back to my toddler brain being so afraid that an open window in a restaurant meant a bug might fly into it that i made my family leave the restaurant. later in childhood, it was fear of natural disasters. then a nebulous fear of death. then it was a fear of nuclear war. this list of fears doesn’t even account for the ways OCD has perpetuated my anxious spirals of self-hatred, for the rooms i’ve sat in totally convinced that everyone around me was thinking about how much they hate me and how ugly i am. i am learning that OCD wants to protect me by hurting my feelings.
i have always kind of thought that i have a secret, self-involved, unbeatable form of anxiety, one that doesn’t respond to grounding exercises or breathing exercises or anything else i’ve been taught to do over the years. learning that this anxiety is actually OCD, and that there is effective treatment for OCD that i’ve never tried because my problems have been so misidentified, is one of the most exciting things that has happened to me this year. i have felt a lot of grief about being misdiagnosed, but i am mostly energized to take positive steps towards recovery in 2025. my life can look different! and i’m excited to get there.
anyhoo, thank you for being here. i love to write this newsletter and i am so excited to see what changes the new year will bring to it and to me. as always, please subscribe for free or for money, or you can venmo me @Sarah-Leiber to support me directly!
also, i recently shared my best new-to-me of 2024 — check that out! follow me on instagram so i can spend less time on tw*tt*r!