Sugar Tub: The Play
Words by Maleah Pasasouk
Photography by Corbra Snake
Being led in the wrong direction can happen easily; in Los Angeles or even New York, pockets of the city can take you there quickly. Under the right circumstances, an entertainment-driven mindset, and a search for validation in the modeling world (for better or for worse), you may just get trapped in a Sugar Tub world. Siena Soltis's hour-long play explores how quickly any social circle that prioritizes fame can spiral from a mere-trialed want to a physically and psychologically dangerous situation, inviting its audience to reflect upon their own pathetic and desperate dreams of fame.
In an abandoned boiler room in a Downtown Los Angeles art gallery, Sugar Tub is placed a couple of floors below the sleek gallery you initially enter. It’s a bit cold, and the audience is surrounding the railings, perpetually looking down on the scene: a pool. For 60 minutes, Sugar Tub follows 5 aspiring models ages 19-25 in a night out at a Los Angeles party as they fight one another for a contract from Franklin, the no-show man upstairs with the power to grant their fame-sick wishes. The pool serves as their waiting room, and the ultimate stage for snarky remarks and tap-dancing numbers.
“I’m Dulce. I’m 19. I’m a Model,” declares Victoria Davidoff, opening the play as Dulce. She’s eye-catching in a red, sparkly bodysuit, in front of a passed-out Olivia Fogel (Grande). Venti (Kayla Dobbs), Trenta (Greer Cohen), and Karine (Sadie Rose Parker) are slowly introduced over the course of the performance to join in on the war-in-mind dialogues with one another. The five characters spend their evening together, making one-off, blasé comments as they look around the party for a more famous friend. They stay in each other's orbits, chasing the same thing while their conversations shift between shallow, meaningless banter and their deep, internal desires for the limelight. Throughout the play, the girls never rest from their seductive poses, with pointed toes and hands gripping their shiny waists. Akin to an audition, their choreography is simply a performance of the personas that they believe might get them noticed, despite each other not being the desired man they hope.
The actresses wear American Apparel-esque bodysuits; their stockinged feet in heeled Mary Janes recall what a hopeful model might wear while pursuing her dreams in the Industry. They’re polished as much as one can be on a night out, but visibly worn down, collectively wearing glittery eye makeup while flaunting visible eye bags and a sheen of sweat. Somehow their messiness feels curated. The forces motivating all five girls are tangible: the promise of a modeling future and an unfathomable social status that comes with being wanted. However, it’s the overbearing success of a faceless ‘Franklin’, the key to their desire, that exerts the greatest power over their value. It’s shallow, yet eating them up alive. It becomes abundantly clear that to merely be upstairs at the party (where they’re cooped up in a pool instead of) would be the sign-off of the recognition they’d spend the whole night chasing. Outside of their objective for potential contracts, their tie to Franklin (the upstairs man) is their singular concern. Their relationships with one another are similarly opportunistic. They’re in a constant state of sizing each other up through comments of appearance, sexiness, status, and social connections, treating each other as both potential connections and competition if it fits their bill.
Though Franklin becomes their epicenter, one-off “friendship” is a true core of the play. As they’re physically separated from the outside world and claustrophobic within the party’s pool, they enter a night spent on an existential run with eachother. Mid-play, it’s revealed that one of the girls has actually been at the party for a matter of days. What seemed like Dulce’s temporary night out begins to look more like a cycle of waiting, where the possibility of approval from Franklin becomes reason enough to remain. The party resembles the modeling industry’s rather insidious demand: the girl’s more than happy willingness to surrender their dignity, autonomy, and time shows how badly they want it. Their sacrifices begin to look much scarier; in a way, their pressure cooker is within the pool itself, and they’re kept suspended in this limiting space. The audience is looking upon the girls just a staircase above, and the concrete pit feels like a boxing ring.
The girls' night begins to feel like a machine that runs on its own. On occasion, they turn to their drugs stored in their little vintage city bags. What it contains is thrown out just a minute later, mid-play, when a no-caller ID buzzing comes through that’s a supposed Franklin. Whatever argument or tangent the girls are running off on is dropped immediately, and it feels like a wake-up call, even though he never ends up being on the other line. In between these pastimes, they spew about their lives outside of modeling, but their stories become a disguise. They downplay their own investment in their pursuits of modeling and redirect each other's conversations the moment they get too close to admitting how much they care.
Their casual spin on it is just another form of competition, and that same pursuit turns the party endless with dread. They praise modelling while simultaneously exposing how desperate its pursuit has made them; they participate in a machine they’re fully aware is consuming them by the minute. The girls know more than they let on, care more than they admit, and manipulate one another by pretending otherwise. They aren’t simply being manipulated by the industry; they’ve absorbed its logic and begun manipulating each other with it.
Soltis says the opportunistic networking we see in the play isn’t exclusive to Los Angeles, though; it’s a reality you can face in any living entertainment- driven economy, and it's in big cities like New York and Los Angeles. Siena’s spin on this sense of social survival within the girls suggests a hunger to get ahead for all the wrong reasons. These girls show a social economy where being seen, being connected, and being wanted can feel as valuable as actual talent. Their very own relationships become provisional. They can be vulnerable one moment, competitive the next, and completely detached at the moment it benefits them, though no one is asking them to be this form of “marketable” on their own. They step up to the plate as human products meant for constant evaluation and are fine to adapt to that logic and become completely fluid to living it out as evidence that they only seemingly matter in this state.
The Starbucks drink-sized named girls are rather deadpan, walking a thin line on a willingness to step up to their dreams, and sitting for however long it takes to “just be chosen.” As to be chosen in their seemingly 24-hour marketable state, is the only clear win as they did it by their pretty existing. There’s an obvious struggle and mishandling with their ideals and winning in the industry. As if they’re stringing each other along, the girls are strategic in their self-presentations with one another and curate an ideal persona throughout the play while still being semi-introspective about how silly they sound.
There are fun moments outside of the girls’ existential storyline, and there's a comedic scene where all of the girls demand proof of Dulce’s established modeling career, to which Davidoff (Dulce) bursts out into a tap-dancing march number routine. Laughs echo in the boiler room when their girlier and rarer un-deluded moments spew through lines like “I’m zen about it.” and pop-culture comparisons calling themselves to VH1’s Flavor of Love reality show, an early 2000s show where a house of women compete for the love of the original hip-hop hype man and rapper Flavor Flav. Weirdly enough, the characters remain simultaneously level-headed and vindictive. Sugar Tub ultimately questions whether “winning the industry” means achieving recognition or simply surviving it long enough to receive it.
The play deeply reminds me of Margaret Atwood’s The Robber Bride quote, reading “You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman.” Because Sugar Tub is so centered on identity, watching these women define each other’s worth off the back of Franklin’s professional co-sign is a hard watch but also a complete understanding of how a patriarchal system affects them. While its subjects are bound to the women’s experience, Sugar Tub feels very present-day. In 2026, you don’t need to be a model to feel like there’s always someone who wants something from you. Siena tells me post-show that “modeling isn’t modeling” and that the grander idea is that Sugar Tub is bigger than sex work, the validation, and the contracts that rip the girls in two.
Much like Waiting for Godot, a play by Irish playwright and author Samuel Beckett, Sugar Tub is essentially girls talking about nothing and everything as they wait for some grander approval. A third wall is broken halfway into the play by Karine confronting Dulce, who begs for closure after regretfully recruiting Karine into the modeling-ring their now caught in. She consciously minimizes their stuckness, saying Franklin is only one singular destroyer out of “all the other Franklins” of the world. She calls their collective want for the modeling contract a pathway to the “elusive golden ticket.” Their one-night familiarity’s with the other Starbuck drink-sized named women, Venti, Trenta, and Grande, is an LA-coded formula for a night you’d want to forget. Their betrayals of each other and their constant routes to find the flaw within each other lead to their collective collapse. By the end of the play, the girls are either at rock-bottom overdoses, Irish goodbyes, or complete friendship breakups.
Ultimately, what lingers after the play is a cautionary tale. Sugar Tub has no problem with its refusal to resolve matters among its characters, and it’s strong in showing a relationship with a role that makes these girls feel chosen. There’s no singular Franklin that can be blamed for everything that happens to the characters. The modern “Franklin” does not have to be a man waiting upstairs; it can be the spotlight of an algorithm, employer, or an imagined future of ourselves. Siena leaves us with a more uncomfortable ending, and there’s no easy way out. To no surprise, the relationships that play out are extensions of the same system it picks apart. Sugar Tub’s absurdity makes it funny, but its familiarity is perturbing. The never-ending tension of the play is an excellent take on criticism of the culture of hustle and ambition without painting their dreams as inherently wrong. The problem is that they’ve been fed an idea that proving their dreams deserve to exist is equal to the sacrifice of their identities as a whole.
By the time the girls leave the infamous tub, the realization is that there’s nothing special about the man upstairs who barely needs his face to make an impact. There’s nothing golden about the ticket they’ve spent the whole night waiting on, and being upstairs is an illusion that has lost its shine completely. There was nothing worth compromising themselves for in exchange for the feeling of being wanted, and there is no win at all because there was never a simple problem to solve. They’ve absorbed the system so much that they carry it with them and unforeseeably will, whether there's a Franklin around or not. The tub is left empty, but the system that brought them there is absolutely not.
Left to Right: Olivia Fogel, Greer Cohen, Victoria Davidoff, Siena Soltis, Kayla Dobbs, Sadie Rose Parker