“Becoming is exhausting.”

What Do you Do when the person you loved most won’t allow you to be who you really are?

When Nils's ex-girlfriend dies suddenly, he is dragged back into a toxic online roleplay scene he swore he'd never return to. He'd been doing okay sticking to his seven-year plan for getting over their breakup - but now, everyone either blames him or expects him to have answers, and he's getting nasty anonymous messages that might be coming from beyond the grave. A nuanced examination of identity, trauma, assault, grief, and mental health through an online world.

Content Note & Resources

"All New Cells" contains references to suicide, child sexual abuse and self harm, which are discussed, but not depicted; themes include transphobia and online bullying. This show is recommended for ages 16 & up.

The Shattered Glass Project has developed a list of publicly available resources for anyone needing support or help with mental health, sexual abuse or bullying. For this list and additional content information please visit our Spoilers and Support page.

Story Line, Content Information, Themes, Fandoms, Memes and References, and Other Important Dramaturgical Information for the Inquiring Journalist.

(and don’t give us tl;dr…!)

“Becoming is exhausting.”

Dramaturgical Themes

All New Cells is a powerful story of disconnection and a search for identity contrasting how we live IRL (in real life) and how we present to the online world. The importance of role-play gaming and the construction of new personalities in new bodies is woven through the fabric of Nils’ story and personal development, as is the theme of creating power for and over yourself in a world where people often feel powerless. All New Cells touches on the way in which the digital ghosts of our past come back to haunt us. Ultimately, as Nils’ story shows, we can find agency for ourselves in a digital world and carry that agency into the life we live in the real world. We have the power to redefine ourselves.

Playwright Aliza Goldstein says in their playwright’s notes in the program that “All New Cells (is) a play inspired by the roleplay forums of my youth, the people who I met there, and the people who I was there….(A) beautiful, desolate, anonymous hellscape-cum-wonderland where you and me were free to be a hundred thousand kaleidoscopic versions of ourselves…. I hope you’ll recognize the characters who inhabit it. They live, I think, in every community, and in fandoms especially. If you feel seen by this play, I’m glad: I want to see you.”

We hope you will see yourself and us as well in this beautiful journey of discovery.

Synopsis (may contain…Nay! definitely contains spoilers):

All New Cells tells the story of Nils, a transgender man in his early 20s who is recovering from the trauma of an abusive sexual relationship with Lux, a cool femme lesbian chick in her early 30s. In order to escape Lux and to move forward with his transition, Nils has abandoned the vampire fiction online roleplay and writing board he joined at 16.

“It's not like we broke up and I got sole custody of Sailor Moon and Sherlock.”

The story is told almost entirely through instant messaging conversations between the characters, including Lux’s best friend Aeon (a mom in her early 30s) and Moody, an intense and self-focused 20-something. Despite their largely digital interactions and geographic separation, they are deeply involved with one another on a personal and emotional level. All New Cells is steeped in memes and references: the theme of vampire fanfic is particularly crucial as the characters explore elements of consent and control, violation and power, angst, and the feeling of having been altered forever for the worse.  Regardless of which fandoms the observer may belong to, the characters are instantly recognizable in their passion for expressing their fandoms through activities ranging from fanfiction to  cosplay and fan conventions to online RPGs.

Content Information (aka, The Trigger Warning)

At the top of the show, we learn that Lux has committed suicide, after a rejected attempt to connect with and apologize to Nils. Aeon shares the news with Moody and with Nils via IM. At the same time Lux’s death is announced, Nils begins receiving nasty public but anonymous hate messages. Everything Nils, Aeon, and Moody believe about themselves changes as they discover who Lux really was and her choices as leader of their online community. In particular, Aeon and Moody learn in more detail about Lux grooming Nils for an inappropriate sexual relationship from the time he was 16, through gifts, through explicitly sexual vampire fiction writing exchanges, and on trips to fan conventions.

“The internet raised us”

Moving between the present and the past, through chat log conversations and the occasional IRL interaction, these individuals struggle with all the things that we recognize in our own lives. Grief. Guilt for sins of omission. Seeking forgiveness (and granting it or not.) Exploring their identities. Choosing to become who they are in a world where knowing who you are is not always easy or comforting. Director Alison Kozar notes that we are exploring queer characters in a queer affinity space and there are aspects of these characters that have emerged or are emerging and are still in flux, as queerness so often is.

All New Cells is not tragedy porn. During the rehearsal process, the cast has identified a distinct theme in playwright Goldstein’s work showing how trauma is incorporated into rather than excised from the development of the characters. Each of the characters are coping with trauma. A natural and human response is a kind of denial, attempting to return to “normal” and refusing to accept the trauma. Even with all of Nils’ clear internal work, he spends much of the narrative denying Lux’s impact and working toward a body she’d never touched. Nils’ victory (and the implied victory for Aeon and Moody) is incorporating the trauma to become a wholly actualized person. Ultimately, we learn that by incorporating our whole selves we can better access joy, and this is the true and ultimate end or perhaps beginning for each of these characters.

Why this show? Why now?

The board and staff of The Shattered Glass Project are dedicated to bringing stories to the stage that are unique and which have been selected for telling by theatre artists whose voices have been suppressed.  Trans and GNC folks and women are being suppressed like hell right now, all across the United States and the world. Every day, across the US, it is becoming less safe and less legal to simply BE. We are not going to let this story go untold.

We find universality in the specifics. All New Cells is a very specific story that encompasses enormously universal themes around finding out who we are. Nils represents every kid ever in terms of finding his identity, but his struggles are greater. Aeon stands in for all the parents watching a loved child grow and become; as well as for those of us who only see what we want to see until we can no longer ignore what is happening right in front of us.

We are all nerds of one sort or another. Artistic director Rebecca O’Neil, a straight cisgender GenX white woman, grew up on the original Star Trek re-runs, MASH, Anne McCaffrey’s Dragonriders of Pern, and a hefty side dose of watching her brother play Dungeons & Dragons in the early 1980s. Her fan fiction was a mashup of Vulcans and dragons going through pon farr. Plus George Harrison and Harrison Ford. Sorry.

Director Alison Kozar, mixed arab neurospicy queer, grew up on Douglas Adams novels, X-Files fanfic, and did MUD cartography. (Don’t know what a MUD is? Imagine if World of Warcraft was entirely text-based.) They did vampire roleplay with some of the original folx from White Wolf, and freeform roleplay on IRC (the forerunner to Discord.) They have put more time into Mass Effect than you knew was possible or healthy, and they probably have a headcanon for that show you like.

Playwright Aliza Goldstein, a queer Jewish millennial, came of age thoroughly immersed in the worlds of Star Wars fan fiction and play-by-post forum roleplay games on Neopets, Gaia Online, and standalone websites, and knows first-hand how theses spaces can foster both creativity and exploration as well as… incredibly poor interpersonal boundaries. She was not allowed to play video games as a child, which naturally means she now works in game development as an adult.

For Themes, Fandoms, Memes and References, Read More below the Publicity Photos and Cast List!

Publicity Photos

Publicity photos by Kirk Hostetter Photography

Cast Members

Nils - Kasper Cergol

Aeon - Jasmine Lomax

Creative Team

Playwright - Aliza Goldstein

Casting Director - Buddy Todd

Calling Stage Manager - Brandon Ellis

Properties & Set-Dressing Design - Jessamyn Bateman-Iino

Sound Design - Madelyn Zandt

Graphic Design - Lara Kratz

Producer/Scenic Design - Rebecca O’Neil

Themes, Fandoms, Memes and References

Provided by director Alison Kozar and arranged in order of appearance in the narrative:

Fanfic and fanfic boards: These may seem a bit old-fashioned as social media giants push harder and harder to annihilate the old internet, but message boards for people writing all kinds of fanfic still live: example, a message board for people writing Lois and Clark fic. (If you check it out, be a good guest.) Fanfic and fanfic communities also definitely live on facebook and twitter and DEFINITELY tumblr, but you’ll find concentrated pockets on livejournal, message boards, and even old angelfire sites. Fanfiction.net was an early clearing house, then adultfanfiction.net (which started as a Buff/Angel archive on geocities,) and now the de facto clearing house Archive of Our Own (AO3), which still hangs on by its fingernails through rounds of funding and waves of litigious copyright owners and moral panics.

Fanfic goes back pretty much as far as history does - much of the Arthurian legend is fanfic about King Arthur and little of it shares common authorship. You could say a hell of a lot of fiction in general is Bible fanfic, like basically anything C.S. Lewis ever wrote. More casual methods of publishing fanfic predate the internet too, fanzines and magazines or even just postal mailing lists. The special archive at University of California Riverside has a generous collection of Kirk/Spock (if there’s a slash, it means they fuck) fan fiction from 1974-2010. 25 whole boxes. Many earlier K/S stories were written in the McCarthy era, when the ramifications for writing or having gay fan fiction could result in losing your home, family, or freedom.

ANC’s vampires: The vampires written on the board in ANC’s world seem pretty classic, inspired mostly by Anne Rice’s style (like in the same way D&D is inspired by Tolkein tho,) but with nods to the different vampire courts from Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files series and some style/imagery from Twilight. There’s probably also some Vampire: The Masquerade in there, too. We’re heavy on angst, we’re mad with the power of undeath, we delight in gore, we’re petty as fuck, and we’re pretty gay. Stories on the board are written by individuals, pairs, or larger freeform groups tagging in and out.

Vampires are definitely a metaphor.

“Then perish”: A tumblr meme that broke containment in 2017. Often abbreviated down to the final line, or final image. Like a lot of tumblr humor, it is bizarre and defies explanation.

Anon hate: Alarmingly common in longer-form social media sites like tumblr and livejournal that allow anonymous comments to posts/accounts. The implication in ANC is like our world - the anon hater is usually not a random stranger but someone you know, harassing you from the safety of online anonymity. Most sites that allow anonymous comments also allow users to turn them off. Nils’ anons are referred to as grey faces because that’s what the tumblr anon picture looks like.

Chatlog: Ok, so discord and instagram and idk, google chat, they all store logs on their own servers, so you get the tradeoff where you can always check back and see who said what and when, but also they kindaaaaaaaa own your information? Back in the day, AOL Instant Messenger and IRC (internet relay chat) and like, MSN IM, they all stored their logs on your computer. It was faster and cheaper for them, and sometimes you even had to specifically tell the app to save it for you and where. It meant you could check back and see who said what and when. And it was your little burden to keep. Kind of like intrusive thoughts or flashbacks.

AO3: Archive of Our Own. AO3 is almost certainly the largest fanfiction archive and community online, with fiction for just about any piece of media you can imagine.

Snape/Lupin: Snape and Lupin are two characters from TERF JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series. As stated previously, the slash means they’re getting down (romantically and sexually) in the fic. Snape and Lupin are also written as grown-ass adults in the series, and one of them is a werewolf. Guess which.

Naruto: Naruto is a popular manga and anime series about young ninjas in training. It’s one of those things that got big not just in Japan or in US anime circles, but even kinda became mainstream in the US, kinda like Dragon Ball Z. It is very much a shonen story, meaning it’s designed for boys to be into. So, a lot of adventuring and fighting and boy characters, and a boy costume for young Nils to buy a cheap version of. If you ever saw kids running as fast as they can with their arms held straight behind them, possibly wearing a headband? They were fans.

Taobao: Taobao is a Chinese online shopping platform owned by Alibaba. It’s kinda like eBay. Stuff can be pretty cheap, both financially and in make.

Cheongsam: Also called a qipao, the cheongsam is a form-fitting dress with high side slits and a high collar. While it’s explicitly Manchurian in origin (or Chinese, more broadly) it’s that dress you always see in western media when they want to show how “Asian” a femme character is. It has a rich history with regional and historic variants.

Damara/Handmaid: The green cheongsam, black wig, and ram’s horns indicate Lux is dressing young Nils as Damara, a character from Homestuck. Basically she’s the apparatus of terror and suffering throughout all time in Alternia, but is ultimately the pawn of her less-known master, Lord English.

Attack on Titan: So, we’ve talked about a few anime and manga that became cultural phenomena on both sides of the Pacific. Attack on Titan is another, and it’s special, because it got people really RILED, and the nature of anime being localized is that you’ll have early adopters who watch it either raw, or with fan-provided subtitles, and then another wave of fans who get into the wider release when a company translates and distributes the series in English. Also it’s something like five seasons long, so it took people some time. This meant the fervor and outrage had staying power.

Attack on Titan begins in a walled city where the last of humanity is holed up, fending off attacks from giant human shaped creatures called Titans who like to eat humans for fun. It’s serious and epic and we see the main character be very strong and heroic and as time passes it seems very very fascist and imperialistic and then it turns out the creator of the series leans very fascist and imperialistic too and, well, that freaked a bunch of people out but also some people decided they were just fine with that actually. Here’s an article from Vice that gets into it.

But, let’s talk about a more important connection for ANC: There is a well-traveled pipeline from radical feminist theory to TERF theory to fascism. Much like the pipeline from incel gamer to mass shooter, it doesn’t take much more than fear and an internet connection.

Duel behind the Dennys: This is another tumblr meme that broke containment and spilled out across the internet. I’m actually having trouble finding an initial source? Some are saying it started around 2017 but I could swear I saw it bouncing around years before then. Then again, I actually use tumblr. Maybe it didn’t hit critical mass until 2017. So! The idea is simple but powerful - you will fight God or your best friend or a celebrity or your term paper in the parking lot behind Dennys at 3am. (The time and setting needs to be appropriately liminal and prosaic.) The point is you are ready to fight and you don’t care how ridiculous it is.

Playwright’s note: the Denny's Parking Lot thing may have its origins in the Denny's brand tumblr being one of the few brand tumblrs that was actually accepted and embraced by the site's userbase. A lot of Tumblr humor from the 2013-2015 period tended to invoke Denny's as a liminal space (and someone made a connection to "Denny" being a diminutive of "Dionysus".)

TERF: Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminist. Sometimes seen as Trans Eradicatory Radical Feminist. Sometimes TERFs claim it’s a slur. Sometimes they self-describe as “gender critical.” TERFs have a hardline, narrow, and incorrect view of gender; rejecting the assertion that trans women are women and treating trans men as lost or brainwashed girls. TERFs clamor for bathroom bills, harass and out online transgender people, and have a well-moneyed fascist apparatus behind them in both the UK and US. JK Rowling, author of the Harry Potter series, is a well-known TERF.

Red Court, White Court, etc.: The denizens of the ANC fanfic board are lifting some ideas from Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files novels here. The Red Court are what we’d consider contemporary classic vampires: Blood thirst, beauty, can’t handle sunlight, preternaturally fast and powerful. (In the Dresden Files, Red Court vampires are not and were never human, they only appear so via a “flesh mask” and objects of faith don’t hurt them.) White Court vampires feed on emotional energy and can appear in daylight, but otherwise are equally inhuman, pretty, and powerful. Not mentioned in ANC are the Black Court, which we’d recognize as traditional vampires like Nosferatu or Dracula, are undead humans who must drink blood, avoid sunlight and garlic and crosses, and are really really gross. Which is probably why everyone on the board prefers playing White or Red Court vampires.

“Search your feelings, you know it to be true”: Star Wars reference. This is (SPOILER) what Darth Vader says to Luke Skywalker after revealing he is Luke’s father.

“The North remembers”: References A Song of Ice and Fire (otherwise known as Game of Thrones.) The North refers to the Northern kingdoms who have experienced and remember the betrayals and injustices visited on them by other kingdoms and seek revenge. They remember “winter is coming” which refers to a time when fearsome enemies attack the North.

“Well he sure nailed that to the church door”: Referencing Martin Luther, a professor of moral theology who, in 1517, wrote NINETY-FIVE Theses on Indulgences, which were a really huge moneymaker for the Roman Catholic Church, and signaled the birth of Protestantism. He then nailed them to the door of All Saints Church in Wittenberg. Ninety-five Theses. (Take that, Hamilton.) He also started a huge fight with this shit, so it’s a fair if grandiose comparison to Nils’ post.

“So long and good night”: This line is repeated because it is in fact more passive-aggressive song lyrics, from My Chemical Romance’s Helena.

Click to read more.: This is another livejournalism or tumblrism. I feel like it’s much more a livejournal thing? In the early 2000s, community blogging site (and huge fic community) livejournal introduced readmore tags, called lj-cut for the html tag you’d use to get them. Livejournal was kind of… imagine if anything people posted on facebook was real and intimate. Imagine it was like that all the time, and had the friends lists and communities and trolls and infighting, but also you’re baring your innermost secrets because it’s an online diary platform. Shit could and did regularly get nasty between people.

And then Brad dumped the lj-cut feature onto the site, and people could vagueblog about their friends behind a read more link, which made it seem more private, except not. I think this actually only started more shit, which could explain Moody’s distaste. Although, read more links were and are still super handy for fanfic writers. List your tags and trigger warnings before the cut, and then you have some sense of security that people clicking through to your fic are buying in.

Missing stair: This term doesn’t appear in ANC but the concept is important to the story. Coined by Cliff Pervocracy in 2012, it describes a major problem in the community that everyone just works around and gets used to, like a missing stair in an old house. “We all just remember to jump over it.” Instead of solving or expelling the problem, the community just accommodates them instead. They see the red flags, but since they weren’t personally hurt, they just go on as if this is normal. While this was originally coined in a BDSM community context, the term spread because it’s unfortunately common.

“Real avant-garde Y2K anxiety anime”: Serial Experiments Lain. Aeon gives a pretty decent synopsis but you can and should learn more since the parallels and references run DEEP in ANC.

Cast Biographies