Sugar Tub at Art/Space 114

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: John Paul “Juice” Caballero.

On a Sunday afternoon in mid-July, some 20 visitors gathered inside Art/Space 114, waiting for playwright Siena Soltis to summon us toward our seats for her latest production, Sugar Tub. The gallery, a nonprofit exhibition space on Fourth Street, blends into the Beaux-Arts glamour of Downtown L.A.’s Old Bank District. Beneath its main floor, several staircases descend into the building’s industrial underbelly, a subterranean level of concrete walls, pillars, and exposed supports. At the room’s center lay a stark concrete pit—an empty swimming pool or “tub” surrounded by an overhang from which the audience would soon peer down like gods or vultures. Soltis left her scene bare—the stage no more than a bed of concrete with several raised slabs, inlaid drains, and a hatched cellar door. A boiler-like vessel stood at the far right, while black curtains sealed the performance area with the dysphoric provisionality of a dressing room. Three overhead fixtures cast an almost clinical light across the floor, their glare returning upward to illuminate the faded blue-and-white brickwork of the walls. Operatic music filled the chamber as we took our seats, receding with the lights to signal the performance’s start.

Sugar Tub captures the anxiety of contemporary hustle culture, tracing its parasitic reach into the commercial beauty industry and the punishing standards for feminine desirability that have taken hold. Under Roxanne Rogers’ direction, the play treads between generational satire and claustrophobic tragedy, its late-capitalist vocabulary (of contracts, relevance, and self-optimization) given kinetic force through choreographer Mamie Green, artistic director of the L.A.-based Volta Collective. Across the play, Green creates restless movements for the five-actress ensemble—Victoria Davidoff, Kayla Dobbs, Greer Cohen, Olivia Fogel, and Sadie Parker—whose recurring tap-dance sequences and melodramatic poses chart an unsettling descent from performance into self-exploitation. Staged inside a claustrophobic architecture and animated by a choreography of strain and physical exhaustion, Sugar Tub channels the tragedy of late-capitalist ambition: a desperation for validation so complete that our attempts to perform freedom only reinforce our captivity.

The play unfolds beneath the unseen L.A. home of “Franklin,” an elusive, wig-wearing industry representative for the California-based nu-metal band Korn. Throughout the performance, his lively party (propelled by muffled Korn tracks that hum throughout the production) carries on in some fictitious space mapped directly onto the overhang where the audience sits. Looking down, we watched as the concrete pit—an implied pool and deck—transformed into a basin of entrapment for the characters Venti, Trenta, and Grande, aspiring models each named after market-ready beverage sizes. Barred from our level above, the women wait in a state of limbo, keeping conversation light and dancing Green’s choreography to avoid the scene’s truer tension: a desperate yearning for Franklin’s call, whose invitation upstairs promises the great deliverance of a professional contract.

As the dialogue progresses, we learn that some have been there for hours, others for days. Dulce, another young model, enters the scene three days into Trenta’s vigil. Hungry, shivering, and fueled by crushed Adderall taken from Grande’s purse (Grande meanwhile lying face-down and catatonic on the concrete), Dulce’s entrance prompts the women into a manic pageant, parading themselves around the space before an invisible power. Dulce immediately sets herself apart, insisting on the fruitfulness of her already established modeling career. Within her frantic defense, she claims to have entered the tub only to locate Karine, her estranged best friend, and find something resembling closure. The others seem to pine for Franklin’s validation, but Dulce sees her search as a more private and noble pursuit, removed from the forces that keep their heels tapping against the concrete and eyes watching for the slightest lapse in one another’s behavior.

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: John Paul “Juice” Caballero.

Yet the distance Dulce draws around herself does not hold for long. Whatever she believes has led her there, however personal or enlightened, cannot exempt her from the culture of the pit, which demands proof of viability no matter the visitor, even the most transient among them. “I’m Dulce, I’m 19, I’m a model,” she repeats until the refrain wears thin, its components passed between the women like trousers cut to a generic pattern, adjusted accordingly for each name, age, and aspiring profession, yet failing to imply any real individuality.

When Venti and Trenta demand to see Dulce’s modeling routine, she struts away with the poise of a runway walk, only for her gait to slip into a simple tap routine borrowed from a high school production of Oklahoma! The moment lands with a strange comedy, revealing something peculiar beneath the packaged glamour Dulce has promised and promoted. Her modelesque elegance, learned and practiced early, exposes itself as a rigid performance of bodily obedience. Hands rise overhead or settle at the hips; stomachs draw inward with a comic sameness; palms cinch the waist; faces sharpen into angles for the presumed audience above. Each parodic gesture displays the body with the ease of a well-rehearsed production.

The play’s argument is expressed most persuasively through dance, where the relationship between movement and strained execution does more conceptually than explicit dialogue could in the world Soltis creates. Speech risks dampening the conceit by stating what the body has already made obvious; Dulce’s transition from a sleek runway stride to an amateur tap routine testifies to this power. As Dulce, Davidoff smiles through the sudden change, beaming at the others without embarrassment. For her character, the routine carries no shame, belonging to a repertoire already naturalized in the body. Elsewhere, Soltis’ women struggle against their routines with an intensity that shatters any illusion of effortlessness. They repeat sequences toward exhaustion, bodies braced against the movement and effort visible in every gesture. It is when Sugar Tub trusts movement to carry its innate weight that the larger work resonates most profoundly. Conversely, when dialogue explicitly outlines the metaphor (for instance, when Trenta describes the industry’s trapping reality with the line, “I’ve been waiting my whole life, I can wait another 24 hours”), the play narrows, closing down what irresolution the body has kept open.

Venti and Trenta’s demand for Dulce’s performance springs from an anxious bid to restore control. The pair preside over the empty pool with a strict fidelity to industry etiquette, enforcing behavioral rules that have never been formally outlined yet govern the space with the authority of doctrine. Even still, the women strain to convey an air of “carelessness,” “beauty,” and “informal, sexy fun,” contorting themselves into desirable positions for whoever may be watching from the balcony overhead. Admission into Franklin’s realm, Venti and Trenta insist, will belong to the model who most convincingly disguises her desire.

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Cobrasnake/Mark Hunter.

Within Soltis’ panoptic arrangement, unseen eyes supply the terms through which the women police themselves, each carrying out Franklin’s judgment in his absence until his authority seems to float freely through the tub. The production’s physical confinement brings this psychic violence even closer to the body. Soltis’ claustrophobic use of the pool may be the play’s most resonant dramatic achievement, casting the audience as surveillants within the paranoid schematic. It is no surprise, then, that the actresses often tipped their faces toward us, searching the dark perimeter for a sign that their performance had registered.

At times, Soltis’ arrangement can feel overt, yet it is this very bluntness that ensures the point is never lost. Seated above the tub, watching the actresses glance upward, the audience remains acutely aware of its vantage. Soltis integrates our gaze into the very architecture of the space, casting the audience as the gatekeepers that confine these women below. The question becomes whether this elevated perspective successfully unsettles us into an awareness of our complicity, or whether the women, clad in leotards and made to “perform” themselves, merely reproduce a fraught dynamic. At times, the production’s parody supersedes the subtleties of these power dynamics, leaving the audience less invested in unpacking their complicity and more absorbed in the comedic movement of the actors. Yet, in quieter moments, I became keenly aware of the authority my positionality afforded me.

Such spatial hierarchy has a long theatrical tradition. For the ancient Greeks, there was the theatrical god, suspended above the scene and lowered by crane when the human plot failed to unwind its own narrative knots. For the 20th-century Irish playwright Samuel Beckett, there was the unseen yet imminently present Godot, whose promised arrival—or the chance for salvation—never materializes, leaving the characters in perpetual wait. For Soltis, it’s Franklin, the patriarchal host who rules over Sugar Tub by withholding himself entirely. His party upstairs draws its perverse power from its visual absence, every frantic response to the possibility of being noticed only renewing Franklin’s hierarchy. This disembodied control materializes late in the first act when Grande’s phone rings, its screen illuminated by an anonymous “No Caller ID.” The women freeze beneath its Pavlovian force—all the promise and cruelty of their waiting gathering around this small object, a material proxy for the true authority that remains out of sight.

Dulce intercepts the call and convinces the others that Grande has been chosen, hoping the lie might clear her own passage upstairs toward Karine. Yet the fiction barely resonates before Trenta admits that, at age 25, she has begun to regard herself as commercially obsolete. She recalls Jean, a “fish-faced” coworker who drove thumbtacks into her head during staff meetings. Without self-pity, Trenta frames the abuse as “the best audition I ever had,” validating her exceptional capacity to endure. Soltis’ script and Green’s choreography meet here with resonant force. As a distant Korn song plays—our only sonic trace of Franklin—Trenta launches into a presentational tap routine. Feet striking the ground, each step brings her monologue back into the body and physicalizes the endless audition these women have accepted as ordinary life. Nested quietly within the play, the routine speaks to the coercion beneath their polished performances.

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Cobrasnake/Mark Hunter.

In one scene, Karine suddenly appears, dancing into view, with Dulce as the encounter’s sole witness—whether she enters the tub as an apparition or a material presence remains uncertain. Their anxious movements give way to conversation, where we learn that Karine, now a model, looks unrecognizable, having shed the working-woman façade of her “serious” job for a low-backed white bathing suit, heels, and pristinely curled hair. She speaks of Franklin and the party upstairs with a blasé fluency, already attuned to the rhythms of a life from which Dulce is now estranged, despite her emphatic insistence that she, too, has become a successful model. Karine’s appearance leaves the measure of success even more ambiguous. What does “success” mean when one’s freedom is restricted by the industry’s demand for performance? Is there any element of agency within this fragile image of liberation, which itself implies another form of psychological captivity?

Were it not for a second phone call, Karine’s visitation might last forever. Instead, a shrill ringtone breaks the narrative, prompting her departure and plunging Venti and Trenta into a frantic struggle for the receiver until the melody fades unanswered. Left in silence, the women begin to disintegrate. Dulce confesses that the first call came not from Franklin, but from Ubatuba Acai, Grande’s workplace. Suddenly, a darker reality takes hold: they have built futures around a false signal, a route to ascension reinforced only in the vacuum of Franklin’s assumed attention. They maintain his machinery themselves, turning its predatory logic inward.

The revelation pierces the surface the women have so carefully constructed, releasing them into a second, more ferocious dance beneath shifting blue and purple light. Trenta and Venti fall into a synchronized duet, heels tapping and eyes pried wide toward the audience. A marionette-like force seems to overtake them, their vacant expressions sitting strangely against the routine’s precision. Nearby, Dulce passes through several balletic positions, her arms floating through port de bras, before the women fold together, bearing and redistributing each other’s weight in a tangle of limbs. Their bodies, once arranged by appraisal, now make a precarious connection, each balance held by the others. If Green has mapped the theatrics of self-presentation throughout Sugar Tub, here her choreography charts their disintegration with equal lucidity. We see a fragile collectivity beneath the labored performances.

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: John Paul “Juice” Caballero.

One by one, the characters abandon their posts. Venti “chooses for herself,” leaving her phone behind to climb the stairs without invitation—her movement free, perhaps, but toward Franklin all the same, tragically dependent on his admission. The stage registers this fracture in increments, as light and sound fall away with each departure, casting Dulce into a darker recess before the space plunges into total darkness. Then, out of the quiet, Grande begins to laugh. The lights return as she staggers toward the switch, bringing them back within fresh light to deliver the play’s great detonation—she has been slipping upstairs to replenish her Adderall supply all along. As Grande heads upstairs once more, she leaves Dulce alone with the burden of truth, knowing their captivity has been manufactured as much in the mind as it has been bound by concrete. The confession dangerously implies that psychological and professional escape had always been available, simply because the stairs were. But Karine’s plight proves that even freedom to roam upstairs remains bound by the performative demands of Franklin’s world. Here, Soltis’ production resists the neoliberal fiction that structural domination endures through some failure of individual will, underscoring her play’s anticapitalist logic: the possibility of leaving means little once freedom’s terms have been authored elsewhere.

As Karine returns for the last time, the play pushes on its emotional wound. She reveals that years prior, Dulce had introduced her, vulnerable, to Franklin as a bargaining chip, trading her friend’s capture within his world to secure her own freedom to continue “living and dancing and swimming” without consequence. This revelation strips Dulce of the benevolent façade she has maintained since the beginning—a vision of herself as an enlightened rescuer. The pure fact of the account refutes such moral vanity, as Dulce’s manic search for closure contracts into something more self-serving. What remains is a performance of guilt, sustained out of regret for having sacrificed a friend to preserve herself. 

And yet, a stubborn dependency survives the betrayal; turning toward the stairs, Karine throws out a sharp demand for Dulce to “stop being a fake cunt” and join her. Dulce follows but stalls midway, shifting her gaze between the party above and the concrete tub, filled with hollow promise below. There she remains, unwilling (or perhaps no longer able) to relinquish either refuge, alienated from the performances that have come to define her, yet unable to imagine a self beyond them. In Soltis’ final and most devastating cue, the lights cut out as Dulce turns her head between both worlds. She is caught in those decisions, cast beyond narrative time. We continue to look down upon the distance she cannot cross, faced with the play’s bleakest recognition: the most terrifying trap of corporate desire is our own desperation as subjects who seek admission.

Soltis’ satire speaks in a language that belongs to our time, yet its desperation taps someplace older and far more existential. Perhaps her wit cuts so sharply because she makes comedy of the fervor with which we produce our own disillusionment in the folds of late capitalism. Soltis writes as a people’s playwright in a moment of spiritual disrepair—when the marketable, “beautiful” self threatens to extinguish forms of selfhood that defy traditional profitability. Today, the cultural impulse to maintain a flawless, ever-improving façade captures the raw energy of political dissent and reorients it inward, trapped in the perpetual, costly labor of aesthetic upkeep. What might otherwise be a collective reckoning with cultural overwork and environmental devastation instead finds shelter in a multi-step skincare routine; the systemic power structures that cause such exhausting market demands and beauty standards are recast as personal cosmetic defects. Ultimately, Sugar Tub offers no clean victory on either side of resistance or capitulation. Its bleakness remains truer than consolation. We are often too busy auditioning ourselves to notice the collapse around us.

Siena Soltis, Sugar Tub (performance view) (2026). Performance at Art/Space 114, 2026. Image courtesy of the artist. Photo: Cobrasnake/Mark Hunter.

This project is made possible with the support from Getty through its Getty Marrow Undergraduate Arts Internship.

About the author

Paige Glover is an arts writer and recent graduate of Vassar College, where she received a B.A. in Art History. Her writing and research focus on modern and contemporary art, photographic reproduction, publication histories, and the politics of visual culture.

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