Shell

There is something disarming about a show that asks you, before it even begins, to write down something you've always wanted. You sit there with your lined paper and your pen and you either take it seriously or you don't, and either way, the show has already gotten inside you a little.

Shell, Ana Evans's solo show running at SoHo Playhouse's intimate Huron Room through June 7, arrived fresh off a five-star Edinburgh Fringe run, and it earns that attention. Written, co-created, and performed by Evans and co-created and directed by Linnea Scott, it operates in the genre of interactive solo performance that lives or dies on the warmth and skill of the person holding the room. Evans holds it with ease.

The show introduces us to Andy, an earnest, cringe-worthy, deeply lovable hockey bro who has started a college club called the B.R.O., dedicated, with considerable passion and not a little confusion, to dismantling the ways society constrains our understanding of bodies, desire, and identity. He is relentlessly encouraging, the kind of character who puts you on the spot without making you feel stupid. He is also, apparently, the kind of character who will hand you a full can of PBR and ask you to chug it with him, which is exactly what I did. I did not go to SoHo Playhouse on a Friday night expecting that, and I regret nothing. The audience interaction throughout is managed with real warmth and a light touch. You are invited, never coerced, and the show works whether you lean in or hold back, though leaning in is more fun.

Andy shares the stage, with Peanut, a hungry, otherworldly creature who emerges from the same hockey bag and wants to know what you really want. They are not two sides of the same coin so much as two distinct characters who both belong to the same person, facets of a self, in the language of the parts-work therapy that inspired the show. (Parts-work is a therapeutic framework that treats the psyche as a collection of distinct inner characters, each carrying its own needs, fears, and desires.) Through Andy's well-intentioned sex-ed lessons and Peanut's strange, electrical hunger, Evans explores gender, identity, anatomy, and desire with a lightness that doesn't obscure how seriously it all means something.

When the show pivots in its final third to something more openly personal, stripping away the characters to reveal the performer beneath, it earns that pivot. Andy and Peanut have been doing the work all along, asking the questions, loosening the bolts, making it safe to feel something. By the time Evans steps out from behind them, the room is ready. What follows is tender and a little overwhelming, a direct address to the performer's body, to desires we all have, to the kid you used to be, and maybe still are. It calls out to the childhood dreams each of us carries, no matter how old we get, the ones we set aside or buried or simply stopped believing in. I still have some of those. Most of us do. And there is something about the way this show holds that, with such openness and without judgment, that makes you wonder if some of those dreams might still find their way into the light. There is a particular kind of relief that comes from feeling seen in a dark room by a stranger on a stage. This show delivers it, and then sends you out into the night with something that feels almost like hope.

I'll admit I came to this as a fifty-year-old man still figuring out parts of himself he kept quiet for a very long time, shaped by a religious upbringing that didn't leave much room for the questions this show asks. The question Evans keeps returning to, what do you want, what do you really want, is simple and almost unbearably hard to answer honestly. They don't let you off the hook. But they do it gently.

Shell played well in Edinburgh and I hope it finds its audience here. It deserves one.

WRITTEN & PERFORMED BY Ana Evans
CO-CREATED & DIRECTED BY Linnea Scott
SOUND DESIGN BY Lola Basiliere
LIGHTING DESIGN BY Lee Lillis

Trailer: https://vimeo.com/1169413037

For more info visit https://www.anachristineevans.com
https://www.instagram.com/shell.theplay
Photography by Morgan McDowell.

Shell is playing at SoHo Playhouse through June 7, 2026.

I attended this performance via a press pass provided by DARR Publicity.