Dark Moon Rising: Lilith in Pisces and the Triumph of Drops in the Vase's Inaugural Season
by Montserrat Mendez
03/09/2025
Lilith in Pisces
Drops In The Vase
By Kayla Eisenberg
Directed by Stephanie Cox-Connolly
The Flea Theater
The Siggy
20 Thomas Street
between Church Street and Broadway
Tickets Here
03/09/2025
Lilith in Pisces
Drops In The Vase
By Kayla Eisenberg
Directed by Stephanie Cox-Connolly
The Flea Theater
The Siggy
20 Thomas Street
between Church Street and Broadway
Tickets Here
Drops in the Vase begins the last play of its first season with an offering that is less a mere production and more a declaration: A fervent insistence that theatre, even in its most modest, makeshift form, must endure. That a group with scant resources can conjure such arresting stagecraft is cause for admiration; that they do so with an unguarded, almost reckless passion is cause for celebration. The world may be unraveling, democracy teetering at the brink, but still, the play must go on.
Kayla Eisenberg’s play Lilith in Pisces, is a meditation on conformity, on the slow suffocation of self when one yields too much, too often. If FeeJee Mermaid was a symphony of obsession, this is its counterpoint: the dull, ceaseless ache of repression. It may not burn as hot as its predecessor but make no mistake it cuts just as deep.
At the center of it all is Diane, played in tonight’s performance by Morgan Zipf-Meister. Diane is a new mother. Her child wails at inopportune hours; her husband, increasingly absent, is glimpsed only in the margins of her life. She has slipped, silently, into postpartum depression, a condition that manifests in the smallest of ways, the forgetting, the losing track, the misplaced bottle of milk and the wine bottle held a little too long.
The opening moments tread a delicate line between humor and despair. Diane has been drinking. The baby cries. The baby’s milk is missing. She considers, fleetingly, the alcohol content in the wine. There is a date tonight, an anniversary dinner that should signify something, but already, the night is unraveling. A glass is shattered. Not just a glass. A life.
Then, a reprieve: Erin, the babysitter, enters. She moves through the space with an ease that is, if one looks closely, just slightly off. Erin is everything Diane is not: Cool, liberated, certain. And so, we, the audience, exhale. At least someone is here to save the child from whatever comes next.
Oh, but there are surprises. Just when the play appears poised to settle into the predictable rhythms of a cradle-snatching melodrama, it veers, gently at first, then with startling precision, into something far more interior.
Erin, of course, arrives with a secret. Diane, whether by instinct or design, resists leaving the baby with her. The tension tightens, then dissolves, oddly, unexpectedly, over a painting of the goddess Lilith, a wedding gift. Erin recognizes her at once, and so a bond is formed. Not over small talk, not over the baby, but over the first woman God created, the one who chose exile over submission. She appears in myths, in star charts, in whispered warnings passed between women. And here, in this quiet living room, Lilith in Pisces becomes the key to everything.
It is not necessarily a gift. There are darker connotations: self-destruction, surrender, a tendency to lose oneself entirely. Black Moon Lilith marks the unguarded places in a person, the point where shame takes root, where rebellion simmers beneath the surface. It is where one dissolves into another, whether in devotion or in ruin. It is where the self, unmoored, drifts away.
And that is precisely where the play finds its true shape. Erin is not just haunted; she is possessed by a grief that does not belong to her. Patti, Diane’s best friend, disappeared on Diane at a moment of need. She is just suddenly gone. But not gone enough. Diane, too, has disappeared in her own way, folded into a life that has no space left for her.
This is where the play settles, where it becomes not just a story, but a reckoning. It is, at its core, about choice: the choices women make, the ones made for them, and the ones they refuse to claim.
Soon, it is revealed: Erin is Patti’s sister. And to say more would be to spoil what should be discovered in the dark of the theater, moment by moment. But know this: things have been unearthed before. As young girls, Patti and Diane dabbled in what might be called witchcraft, there was a summoning then. And there is a summoning now. But what is being called forth is not a spirit, not a curse. It is the longing for a life that belongs to oneself.
A play like this could easily fall into didacticism. So much of what clutters today’s stages and screens suffers from what Namwali Serpell calls the New Literalism, a kind of storytelling that insists on announcing its themes, circling them like a plane that never lands. It is the byproduct of a generation raised not on literature, not on the exploration of the world outside their doors, but on the architecture of video game landscapes, where every path is predetermined, and every meaning is bluntly stated.
Kayla Eisenberg is not that kind of writer. She understands restraint. She moves through Diane’s mind, her soul, her heart, without ever dictating what we are meant to find there. Nothing is underlined; nothing is spelled out. Even the play itself resists conclusion, offering moments that shift with each revisitation, scenes that take on new meaning in different light. The ending is as open as the next ten minutes of your life, as uncertain as all the rest to come. And yet, these two women are drawn with such precision, such fullness, that they never feel lost even as they come undone.
FeeJee Mermaid was a play about a woman brutalized by the world around her, shaped by its masochism, steered toward destruction by forces outside her control. Lilith in Pisces turns that lens inward. This is a woman who does the damage herself, who dulls the edges of her own existence with alcohol and pills, who succumbs to a kind of erosion that is quieter, but no less violent. If anything, this is A Woman Under the Influence with magic. A territory that Drops in the Vase should continue to claim with pride.
Those who read my thoughts on FeeJee Mermaid will remember that I called it the best play of 2024, and part of that was due to Morgan Zipf-Meister astonishing performance. Seeing her now is a gift. If Lizette, in FeeJee Mermaid, turned the life of her child into something beautiful and terrible, something that both destroyed and inspired, then here, in Lilith in Pisces, we watch that transformation in reverse. A woman standing at the threshold, uncertain if she can bear the weight of what she carries. It is not simply moving. It is devastating.
Ms. Zipf-Meister carries a kind of vulnerability that lingers in the air, something beyond text, beyond performance. You don’t watch her so much as you absorb her, drawn in by a presence that is at once delicate and immediate. She has reached that rare moment in an actor’s life when craft and instinct meet at their sharpest point. Tonight, there was almost nothing of Lizette left on that stage. Diane is something entirely new, less certain, more fractured, if such a thing is even possible. And yet, in her face, in her voice, in the quiet ache she carries, there is a terrible and breathtaking beauty. You fear for her. You fear for her child. You hope for them both. And still, you are left to wonder.
Nicki Kissil steps onto the stage, and suddenly, she is in control. At first, you resist it. This is Diane’s play, isn’t it? But then something shifts. You begin to wonder if this is even Erin at all. Perhaps this is Lilith herself! The first woman! Summoned at last by the voices of those teenage girls all those years ago.
Ms. Kissil is self-assured, formidable. The kind of woman who, in certain circles, might be considered dangerous. Even from across the room, she seems to look straight through you, her eyes holding something that feels less like knowledge and more like memory. A knowing. The kind only a goddess could possess. Her voice is the current that carries us forward, weaving through questions she poses to the audience, questions we are never meant to answer. Is she real? Is she Erin? Is she Lilith? Is she good, is she evil? Or is she something else entirely, something that shifts and flickers between all these things at once?
The deeper she steps into this space, the stronger her hold on the play becomes, until it feels as if she might take the whole thing and run. And then, just as suddenly as she seized it, she releases it, hands it back to Diane, leaving her to wade through all that has been unearthed. It is a graceful trick, an invisible sleight of hand. Because in the end, the questions belong to Diane. She is the only one who might answer them.
Richard Lovejoy plays Diane’s husband, Mark, a role that exists, largely, to anchor the play in reality. He is there to offer clarity, to remind us of what happened versus what we only imagined. And yet, even he does not seem entirely sure. Is he another lost traveler in Diane’s same strange wilderness? Or is he simply playing the role expected of him, keeping step with the quiet, predictable rhythms of suburban life?
Stephanie Cox-Connolly’s direction is measured, assured. There are moments, few, but striking, of precision, intricate pieces of choreography that unfold seamlessly. But her finest work is in the physical distance she builds and collapses between Diane and Erin, the way their bodies circle each other, pull close, recoil, shift in tandem with the unspoken currents beneath them. And it must be said: there is a particular kind of pleasure in watching a director bold enough to let actors disappear offstage for a kitchen scene.
Drops in the Vase does something remarkable with space. Set Designer, Sandy Yaklin takes the Flea’s basement theater, small and almost confessional, and folds it into a New Jersey living room with the ease of someone setting a table. There is an intimacy to it, a quiet kind of magic. The kind that does not announce itself, only settles in around you.
Ariel Chana Pellman’s costumes carry their own weight. Diane’s gray dress is a fortress, stiff in places and seamless in others. From certain angles, it looks impenetrable. Armor, but not the kind that signals war. Rather, the kind meant to keep something caged. Inside, whatever is fragile. Outside, the flat, predictable hum of New Jersey. Erin’s costume is something else entirely. It does not protect so much as reveal. She dresses like a girl who once practiced magic, though she insists she never did. But then, perhaps she never had to. Perhaps she is the magic itself. There is something in the color of her dress that matches the very piece of furniture where Diane does her conjuring. It suggests an answer, though it is not mine to give.
Artemis Zara Gültekin’s sound design is the kind of work that rarely gets its due but is felt in every moment. It is subtle when it should be and blatant when it must be. "Wheel of Fortune" lands like a hammer. Then it slips into something almost spectral, a whisper of sound that lingers at the edges of the room. It is, quite simply, extraordinary. And yes, theatre people, we notice these things.
This is Drops in the Vase’s first season. Ambitious. Exhausting, surely. Lilith follows Feejee Mermaid in a one-two punch of intent, not just productions but proclamations. They are making it clear who they are. A company that does not conform, staging a play about the cost of conformity. A deep dive into the shadows we carry, even as we stretch toward the light.
And this moment, the one we are all standing in, uncertain and uneasy, we are entering a time when we will be asked to blend in, to sand down our edges, to shrink. Hell, I have had a drink or two over the fear of what I may have to erase in myself just to survive the coming regime.
And yet, Kayla Eisenberg does not demand defiance. She only asks the question.
Who do we become if we make ourselves disappear in order to survive?
Who are we without our light? Without our darkness? Without our mundanity or without our magic?
The answers we truthfully give will define who we are.
She couldn't have asked us these question at a better time.
and I hope Drops In The Vase keeps asking these bold questions for years to come.
Kayla Eisenberg’s play Lilith in Pisces, is a meditation on conformity, on the slow suffocation of self when one yields too much, too often. If FeeJee Mermaid was a symphony of obsession, this is its counterpoint: the dull, ceaseless ache of repression. It may not burn as hot as its predecessor but make no mistake it cuts just as deep.
At the center of it all is Diane, played in tonight’s performance by Morgan Zipf-Meister. Diane is a new mother. Her child wails at inopportune hours; her husband, increasingly absent, is glimpsed only in the margins of her life. She has slipped, silently, into postpartum depression, a condition that manifests in the smallest of ways, the forgetting, the losing track, the misplaced bottle of milk and the wine bottle held a little too long.
The opening moments tread a delicate line between humor and despair. Diane has been drinking. The baby cries. The baby’s milk is missing. She considers, fleetingly, the alcohol content in the wine. There is a date tonight, an anniversary dinner that should signify something, but already, the night is unraveling. A glass is shattered. Not just a glass. A life.
Then, a reprieve: Erin, the babysitter, enters. She moves through the space with an ease that is, if one looks closely, just slightly off. Erin is everything Diane is not: Cool, liberated, certain. And so, we, the audience, exhale. At least someone is here to save the child from whatever comes next.
Oh, but there are surprises. Just when the play appears poised to settle into the predictable rhythms of a cradle-snatching melodrama, it veers, gently at first, then with startling precision, into something far more interior.
Erin, of course, arrives with a secret. Diane, whether by instinct or design, resists leaving the baby with her. The tension tightens, then dissolves, oddly, unexpectedly, over a painting of the goddess Lilith, a wedding gift. Erin recognizes her at once, and so a bond is formed. Not over small talk, not over the baby, but over the first woman God created, the one who chose exile over submission. She appears in myths, in star charts, in whispered warnings passed between women. And here, in this quiet living room, Lilith in Pisces becomes the key to everything.
It is not necessarily a gift. There are darker connotations: self-destruction, surrender, a tendency to lose oneself entirely. Black Moon Lilith marks the unguarded places in a person, the point where shame takes root, where rebellion simmers beneath the surface. It is where one dissolves into another, whether in devotion or in ruin. It is where the self, unmoored, drifts away.
And that is precisely where the play finds its true shape. Erin is not just haunted; she is possessed by a grief that does not belong to her. Patti, Diane’s best friend, disappeared on Diane at a moment of need. She is just suddenly gone. But not gone enough. Diane, too, has disappeared in her own way, folded into a life that has no space left for her.
This is where the play settles, where it becomes not just a story, but a reckoning. It is, at its core, about choice: the choices women make, the ones made for them, and the ones they refuse to claim.
Soon, it is revealed: Erin is Patti’s sister. And to say more would be to spoil what should be discovered in the dark of the theater, moment by moment. But know this: things have been unearthed before. As young girls, Patti and Diane dabbled in what might be called witchcraft, there was a summoning then. And there is a summoning now. But what is being called forth is not a spirit, not a curse. It is the longing for a life that belongs to oneself.
A play like this could easily fall into didacticism. So much of what clutters today’s stages and screens suffers from what Namwali Serpell calls the New Literalism, a kind of storytelling that insists on announcing its themes, circling them like a plane that never lands. It is the byproduct of a generation raised not on literature, not on the exploration of the world outside their doors, but on the architecture of video game landscapes, where every path is predetermined, and every meaning is bluntly stated.
Kayla Eisenberg is not that kind of writer. She understands restraint. She moves through Diane’s mind, her soul, her heart, without ever dictating what we are meant to find there. Nothing is underlined; nothing is spelled out. Even the play itself resists conclusion, offering moments that shift with each revisitation, scenes that take on new meaning in different light. The ending is as open as the next ten minutes of your life, as uncertain as all the rest to come. And yet, these two women are drawn with such precision, such fullness, that they never feel lost even as they come undone.
FeeJee Mermaid was a play about a woman brutalized by the world around her, shaped by its masochism, steered toward destruction by forces outside her control. Lilith in Pisces turns that lens inward. This is a woman who does the damage herself, who dulls the edges of her own existence with alcohol and pills, who succumbs to a kind of erosion that is quieter, but no less violent. If anything, this is A Woman Under the Influence with magic. A territory that Drops in the Vase should continue to claim with pride.
Those who read my thoughts on FeeJee Mermaid will remember that I called it the best play of 2024, and part of that was due to Morgan Zipf-Meister astonishing performance. Seeing her now is a gift. If Lizette, in FeeJee Mermaid, turned the life of her child into something beautiful and terrible, something that both destroyed and inspired, then here, in Lilith in Pisces, we watch that transformation in reverse. A woman standing at the threshold, uncertain if she can bear the weight of what she carries. It is not simply moving. It is devastating.
Ms. Zipf-Meister carries a kind of vulnerability that lingers in the air, something beyond text, beyond performance. You don’t watch her so much as you absorb her, drawn in by a presence that is at once delicate and immediate. She has reached that rare moment in an actor’s life when craft and instinct meet at their sharpest point. Tonight, there was almost nothing of Lizette left on that stage. Diane is something entirely new, less certain, more fractured, if such a thing is even possible. And yet, in her face, in her voice, in the quiet ache she carries, there is a terrible and breathtaking beauty. You fear for her. You fear for her child. You hope for them both. And still, you are left to wonder.
Nicki Kissil steps onto the stage, and suddenly, she is in control. At first, you resist it. This is Diane’s play, isn’t it? But then something shifts. You begin to wonder if this is even Erin at all. Perhaps this is Lilith herself! The first woman! Summoned at last by the voices of those teenage girls all those years ago.
Ms. Kissil is self-assured, formidable. The kind of woman who, in certain circles, might be considered dangerous. Even from across the room, she seems to look straight through you, her eyes holding something that feels less like knowledge and more like memory. A knowing. The kind only a goddess could possess. Her voice is the current that carries us forward, weaving through questions she poses to the audience, questions we are never meant to answer. Is she real? Is she Erin? Is she Lilith? Is she good, is she evil? Or is she something else entirely, something that shifts and flickers between all these things at once?
The deeper she steps into this space, the stronger her hold on the play becomes, until it feels as if she might take the whole thing and run. And then, just as suddenly as she seized it, she releases it, hands it back to Diane, leaving her to wade through all that has been unearthed. It is a graceful trick, an invisible sleight of hand. Because in the end, the questions belong to Diane. She is the only one who might answer them.
Richard Lovejoy plays Diane’s husband, Mark, a role that exists, largely, to anchor the play in reality. He is there to offer clarity, to remind us of what happened versus what we only imagined. And yet, even he does not seem entirely sure. Is he another lost traveler in Diane’s same strange wilderness? Or is he simply playing the role expected of him, keeping step with the quiet, predictable rhythms of suburban life?
Stephanie Cox-Connolly’s direction is measured, assured. There are moments, few, but striking, of precision, intricate pieces of choreography that unfold seamlessly. But her finest work is in the physical distance she builds and collapses between Diane and Erin, the way their bodies circle each other, pull close, recoil, shift in tandem with the unspoken currents beneath them. And it must be said: there is a particular kind of pleasure in watching a director bold enough to let actors disappear offstage for a kitchen scene.
Drops in the Vase does something remarkable with space. Set Designer, Sandy Yaklin takes the Flea’s basement theater, small and almost confessional, and folds it into a New Jersey living room with the ease of someone setting a table. There is an intimacy to it, a quiet kind of magic. The kind that does not announce itself, only settles in around you.
Ariel Chana Pellman’s costumes carry their own weight. Diane’s gray dress is a fortress, stiff in places and seamless in others. From certain angles, it looks impenetrable. Armor, but not the kind that signals war. Rather, the kind meant to keep something caged. Inside, whatever is fragile. Outside, the flat, predictable hum of New Jersey. Erin’s costume is something else entirely. It does not protect so much as reveal. She dresses like a girl who once practiced magic, though she insists she never did. But then, perhaps she never had to. Perhaps she is the magic itself. There is something in the color of her dress that matches the very piece of furniture where Diane does her conjuring. It suggests an answer, though it is not mine to give.
Artemis Zara Gültekin’s sound design is the kind of work that rarely gets its due but is felt in every moment. It is subtle when it should be and blatant when it must be. "Wheel of Fortune" lands like a hammer. Then it slips into something almost spectral, a whisper of sound that lingers at the edges of the room. It is, quite simply, extraordinary. And yes, theatre people, we notice these things.
This is Drops in the Vase’s first season. Ambitious. Exhausting, surely. Lilith follows Feejee Mermaid in a one-two punch of intent, not just productions but proclamations. They are making it clear who they are. A company that does not conform, staging a play about the cost of conformity. A deep dive into the shadows we carry, even as we stretch toward the light.
And this moment, the one we are all standing in, uncertain and uneasy, we are entering a time when we will be asked to blend in, to sand down our edges, to shrink. Hell, I have had a drink or two over the fear of what I may have to erase in myself just to survive the coming regime.
And yet, Kayla Eisenberg does not demand defiance. She only asks the question.
Who do we become if we make ourselves disappear in order to survive?
Who are we without our light? Without our darkness? Without our mundanity or without our magic?
The answers we truthfully give will define who we are.
She couldn't have asked us these question at a better time.
and I hope Drops In The Vase keeps asking these bold questions for years to come.
