Following the relaunch of her beloved podcast, Call Chelsea Peretti, earlier this month, the titular Chelsea Peretti took to Vulture Festival 2023 for a live episode recording. But this wasn’t just the Peretti you know and love from Brooklyn Nine-Nine or her recent directorial debut, First Time Female Director. This was Playwright Peretti, holding a reading of her new play, Thacher Island — about a family living on an island off the coast of Massachusetts — with the help of her theater group Pacific Playwrights Horizons (John Early, Kaitlin Olson, and Xosha Roquemore). Peretti, naturally, played the role of “Mother,” whose son (Early) is lost at sea but returns home to discover that his mom has been lying about their being stranded on the island. The play, still a work in progress, has everything a theatergoer could want: seagulls trained to defecate on target, ghosts, a lighthouse, a pirate named Vagina, a second lighthouse.
Following the reading, Peretti welcomed questions from the audience (“We have time for 65 questions”) as a way to workshop the material. As for why the cast opted for some variation of British accents despite Thatcher Island being set in New England, she explained, “I personally think of theater as British.” How long did it take her to write? “A number of days.” Will her son ever make it off the island? “Theater is not answers, it’s questions,” she said. The feedback also provided food for thought for the next rewrite, with one audience member suggesting the son’s name be changed to “Richard” — as in the long form of “Dick” — to parallel the character named “Vagina.” Others (several, actually) encouraged Peretti to dig deeper into the story’s subtextual Oedipus complex. But the biggest note came from an audience member who wondered if Peretti realized that her premise, of a pregnant woman escaping to an island, is also the plot of Practical Magic. “Do you see that as a plus or is that an area of concern?” Peretti asked, before brainstorming ways around that for the rewrite. Perhaps she’ll just leave it in and cast Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as the island’s ghostly lighthouse keepers.
