“This is the first time I’ve ever done any type of interview that is theater-related,” says iconic New York City club promoter Ladyfag. Born Rayne Baron, Ladyfag has spent the past nearly two decades producing queer nightlife in New York, shepherding dance parties like Holy Mountain, Battle Hymn, and LadyLand, a Pride music festival whose headliners this summer were Cardi B and FKA Twigs. Now Ladyfag is stepping off the dance floor and onto the stage to produce a play called Smuta, which premieres in Brooklyn on October 9.
“I guess I’m a theater queen,” she says.
Smuta isn’t much of a departure from strobe lights and the DJ booth. Written by up-and-comer Jacob Wasson and directed by Niamh Osh Jones, Smuta (pronounced smoo-tah) takes place in 2019, inside a club patronized by Moscow’s queer underground. The two-hander stars Oh, Mary! scene-stealer James Scully and The Morning Show’s Augustus Prew as Yakov and Goodboy, strangers who find each other as a spate of gay hate crimes ravage their community outside the club.
“It’s a play about two people caught in these circumstances that they have no way out of, and that’s something that’s familiar to me right now,” says Wasson. The 29-year-old playwright first wrote and produced Smuta in June 2023, putting the show up at Gymnopedie, a gymnasium in Bushwick that he rented by the hour. “I set up the whole show 30 minutes before we let people in, and then I had to take it down because the guy would have bookings afterwards,” says Wasson. He thought that short successful run would be the end of the road for Smuta. Then he found himself talking to Ladyfag at a Passover seder. “We got to talking, and she’s really interested in helping young artists in New York. And it got born out of there,” says Wasson. “It was like, ‘Oh, maybe this is an opportunity to do Smuta again.’” Ladyfag has one word to describe their unexpected collaboration: “Serendipity.”
“The only reason it’s actually happening is because of Lady,” says Wasson affectionately. “We’re just two Jewish girls.” Ladyfag chimes in: “Nice Jewish girls from the suburbs putting on a play.” Wasson finishes her sentence: “In the big, bad city.”
Rather than taking the traditional downtown or off-Broadway route, Wasson and Lady decided to take a big swing by mounting Smuta in an actual nightclub: Refuge, which recently opened in East Williamsburg and where Ladyfag serves as a resident promoter/party thrower. “What I loved was Jacob’s use of an unconventional space,” says Ladyfag. “My career, which obviously is not in theater, I have also searched that out. I used to do a lot of [parties] in different places that people wouldn’t normally do.” Part of that was born out of necessity, as she explains: “There’s no funds and I want to do something crazy that’s going to make no money: ‘Hey, I know this weird spot.’”
The two-week-old Refuge is something of a culmination for Ladyfag. After moving from Toronto in the early aughts, she got her start in New York City nightlife as a cage dancer. “I moved here in the classic ‘I got a hundred bucks in my pocket and a dream,’ and I didn’t even know what my dream was,” she says. “I just wanted to come here for a few months as my last hurrah before I was about to open a vintage and antique store.”
Life, of course, had other plans. She credits the late queer artist and club promoter Will Munro for introducing her to the world of nightlife, which quickly became her home. “I started doing raves, and that’s when I realized that you could create an entire world from beginning to end—create somebody’s entire experience from the minute they get the invite to when they get to the venue, to when they go inside the doors, to the sound, to the lighting,” she says. “That just excites me—it’s always different and it’s always changing.” Wasson, ever the playwright, can’t help but chime in: “Sounds pretty familiar.”
Although a nightclub might not sound like the best venue for an intimate two-person play, it has some advantages. “These places are so amazing. They’ve got amazing sound, amazing lights,” says Ladyfag. “At the end of the night it’s tragic. You do the last dance, and sometimes throughout the entire week places aren’t even used.” But with Smuta, she’s found a way to keep the party going. “I went to [Refuge’s investors] and said, ‘Hey, guys, do you want to do this thing? It’s going to make no money, but it’s going to enrich the culture.’ It took them a second and they’re like, ‘Yeah, let’s do it.’ I was like, ‘Okay, I’m going to bed with the right people here.’”
Composer and musician Arya Gaston is live-mixing an original electronic score for Smuta, while Mark Séjourné, a collaborator of comedian Julio Torres’s, has created the scenic design with lighting by Shane Hennessy. Putting up a full-scale production outside the confines of a traditional theatrical space has its challenges: “We’ve thrown curveballs at Jacob, like, ‘Oh yeah, the bleachers, they came and they were six inches too short. They’re not going to be here for another month,’” says Ladyfag.
“They’re going to make statues one day about what it took to get this up,” says Wasson. “But it’s going to be great.”
“We always say that in nightlife, you have a bunch of problems—and if you solve them, you have a party,” says Ladyfag. “It’s the same thing in theater.”
Despite the problems, Ladyfag and Wasson hope Smuta can bring together two disparate parts of the queer community—the theater lovers and the rave-goers—at a time when all of them are under attack. “I wrote it when Trump wasn’t president a second time,” says Wasson; he then reworked the play this summer while acting at the Williamstown Theatre Festival. “Writing it now, there’s a real feeling among everyone that things are not just going to magically get better—that we’re going to go through some muck. It felt different to be inside of it, and I hope it feels different as a play now too.”
“It’s harder and harder to do shit, and with everything going on in the world, there’s more and more reason to use arts as an outlet for whatever you might need it to be at the moment,” Ladyfag says. The process of producing Smuta has inspired Ladyfag to engage with more theater. “Maybe we should all try to get along a little more, don’t you think? Maybe we should all get [out of] our own bubbles. Maybe this is a learning lesson for everybody, including us,” she says.
To be clear, Ladyfag will always be a club kid at heart. “I do love Marie’s, and with the nightclub—I’m not giving you Marie’s Crisis, babe. Sorry,” she says of the famed West Village piano bar. Wasson chuckles: “And neither is Smuta.”
But maybe underneath it all, the theater kids and the club kids aren’t that different after all. “Nightlife is this intersection of lots of different creative subcultures,” Ladyfag says. “Everyone’s in their own little groups. But the dance floor is this unifier, the nexus of visual arts, fashion, music, dance, and theater—all intertwined on the dance floor.”
And you never know who you might meet on the dance floor. I actually met my boyfriend almost a decade ago, in line for one of Ladyfag’s parties. “God, that makes me so happy,” she says. “See? And I’m a matchmaker.”
“Another reason to buy tickets to Smuta,” says Wasson. “You’re going to meet the love of your life.”
Smuta opens October 9.
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