Since 2012, the New York-based theatre and production company Morgan Gould & Friends (helmed by Morgan Gould, of course, in collaboration with eight actors, three designers, and a filmmaker) has produced a slew of fantasies that wrestle with identity and belonging. “Our theatre is a place for gays, fatties, freaks, dorks, weirdos,” Gould says. A director turned playwright, Gould has trained and developed work with Young Jean Lee, Ensemble Studio Theatre, P73, New Georges, Lincoln Center, and Target Margin, among others.
While finishing up her MFA in playwriting at Brooklyn College, playwright and chair of the department Mac Wellman accused Gould of being too comfortable in the realm of satire. He and fellow professor, playwright Erin Courtney, challenged her to write something totally sincere. What would happen if instead of making fun of the things she couldn’t believe were true in her satire, she dared to write about what was? What if her writing came from a place of truth?
Self-righteous and wanting an A, Gould took the opportunity to delve into a more personal realm. She asked herself what she felt the most sincerely about, and realized the answer was her love for her two best friends, both gay men. Her friendships have always been the most important driving force in her life; her most traumatic breakups have been with friends, not romantic partners. “It’s not like boyfriends because you can only have one of those, but you can have as many friends as you want,” she says, “so if you’re going to break up, something has to be terribly wrong, and you have to literally be like, I DON’T WANT YOU IN MY LIFE ANYMORE, which I find totally harrowing.”
The unique stakes of friendship—particularly between those who aren’t “normal,” in this case a gay guy and a fat girl—form the core of the play. Gould started to think about the kind of wedge that might be strong enough to come between her and her best friend: “It’s not a relationship, because when my two best gay guy friends have boyfriends, it’s completely fine. But if they started befriending this amazing perfect person who was super mainstream, who was beautiful and perfect and blonde and thin, that would be the only thing that would create a rift. Because it would betray everything we hold sacred. There’s an unspoken pact—we’re freaks making our way through the world together. So to switch to the other side would be a complete stab in the back. The values of the friendship—the currency—would just evaporate.”
And so, I Wanna Fucking Tear You Apart was born. The play is about the friendship between fat girl Sam and gay guy Leo, who are both writers in their late 20s. These platonic college friends-turned-roommates-turned-soulmates watch Grey’s Anatomy together and have each other’s Chinese food order down. But when Leo gets a new friend at work—a girl who likely shops at Anthropologie unironically—Sam and Leo begin to deteriorate faster than the sixth season of Roseanne.
Assumptions around niceness, beauty, and mainstream acceptance inform Gould’s play, which upends traditional narratives about fat women—Gould herself identifies openly as such—primarily by putting a fat woman at its center. “It was important to me to write about a fat woman who is not dying in her apartment in a hospital bed while eating pizza and catfishing an attractive man. I’ve never seen anything like that. I wanted to give that to myself.”
“I’m not chubby or big-boned,” says Gould. “I’m fat. That’s who I am. There’s this idea that people who are fat are victims, but that’s not my experience. I do admit that I can be intensely prickly and even aggressive, and I think many fat people are, because the world has been really mean to us, so you develop these ways of protecting yourself. The bigotry I experience is not imagined. But it’s made me stronger, not weaker… so it’s weird that all we see of fat people in stories is these said bed-confined pizza eaters.”
Gould observes that friendships between marginalized people can be the only bonds they have, a stabilizing force in a world that hates them—which is why it’s so easy for the stakes to become unequal as one person’s need for that protection starts to shift. Writing from a place of sincerity, Gould has created a set of unforgettable characters and captured the joy and heartbreaking desire of deep friendships while asking probing questions about friendships, about fatness, about ambition, and about the cost of living in a world that finds you unacceptable in some way.
—Sivan Battat