The Cult of Nadja (FULL OF SPOILERS)
by Mona Pirnot

Nadja has all the makings of a charismatic leader. She’s full of perverse and convincing ideas about sex, gender, animal instincts, immaculate conceptions, and conspiracy theories. She has the power to change your mind or, at least, disturb it. Thankfully, she decided to write plays instead of starting a cult. But wait. Come to think of it…maybe playwriting has been part of her recruitment strategy all along. Watch Derangements at your own risk. It could convert you to The Cult of Nadja Leonhard-Hooper.

Derangements begins when two friends, Anne Marie and Roxanne, are catching up over dinner. Roxanne confesses to Anne Marie that she has a crush on a woman who might like her too. Anne Marie encourages her friend until it becomes clear that Roxanne has grossly misinterpreted a non-sexual situation as highly sexually charged. Then the waiter appears. He seems perfectly normal. He takes their order perfectly normally. As soon as he walks away, Roxanne remarks how scandalized she is by his blatantly predatory behavior. Anne Marie grasps the severity of her friend’s problem. Roxanne thinks everyone she ever meets is trying to sleep with her.

So Roxanne is the deluded one, right? Wrong. Seconds after Anne Marie dismisses Roxanne’s assertion that the world and everyone in it is sexually depraved, the women get flashed by a man off the street. And not just any man off the street. This man possesses, where a penis would be, a blinding light with mysterious powers. Deranged!

The flasher’s flashing portal-dick catapults the women on separate (but equally confounding) medical journeys. Anne Marie becomes so profoundly confused that she can’t remember the names of her friends, her family or just about anything. She seeks help but can hardly communicate as her condition gets “hearse – hoarse – worse.” Meanwhile, it seems Roxanne has become contact-pregnant by the flasher. Could this be possible? Anything is possible in Nadja’s world populated with a human-sized Duolingo owl who might be a Communist and a hippy doula guru who might be a Republican and a witchy woman who lives in the woods who might be…mom?

Anything goes but nothing is what you think it will be. Nadja‘s play will let you know that right when you think you’re right, you’re wrong and right when you think you’re wrong, you’re wrong again. She plays around with your assumptions like a cat plays with a mouse. Maybe it sounds like I’m mixing my metaphors, but I’m trying (much like Nadja‘s play) to paint a picture of something more bizarre.

Picture this: Nadja as a cult-leading-kitty-cat pawing at your brain until you believe that up is down and down is sideways and everyone you ever meet is trying to sleep with you, save you, or cast a spell on you. This play and its thrillingly batshit ideas are as unpredictable as your craziest friend. Which is not to say Nadja is my craziest friend. In fact, she’s among the most lucid. It takes a clear head to distill such crude thoughts, which is just one of her many brilliant contradictions. She is cogent and unhinged. Crowd-pleasing and nonconformist. She is my favorite dirty old man.