Creating Out Of Scraps, Spit, & Vigor
Sara Fellini pours her whole life into her “scrappy” independent theater company, spit&vigor
By Victoria Borlando
“Sit anywhere that’s not currently covered in bloody rags,” said Sara Fellini as she welcomed her actors to the penultimate rehearsal before the premiere of GRIND, spit&vigor’s newest (and bloodiest) play in repertoire. One by one, the actors filed into the tiny blackbox theater space. They stepped over bright red rags and meandered through a maze of old furniture, handmade props, mismatched chairs, and buckets filled with water. Fellini navigated the chaotic set effortlessly while setting the stage for the full run-through. At one moment, she hunched over her old laptop in the center of the room, fiddling with the volume of a squelching, screeching sound cue titled “MEAT GRINDER 2.” She then darted toward each light, re-taping their colorful gels. In short pauses between tasks, Fellini rushed to the actors’ costumes hanging on a coat rack, adding final touches of splattered blood. The tips of her fingers were wrapped in neon spike tape — a roll of which bulged in the front pocket of the loose-fitting, jersey-knit jumpsuit she regularly wears. The actors watched in silence as she hastily tried to fix the broken “mechanical slide door,” which she built using a suspended door panel and simple pulley system. “I just love the DIY look of it,” Fellini insisted while forcing it back into place.
Fellini co-founded spit&vigor, a non-profit independent theater company based in Gowanus, Brooklyn, in 2015 with her longtime collaborator Adam Belvo to stage “embedded theater.” The style encourages audience members to witness one-act plays inches away from the performers. Belvo and Fellini came up with the idea as an expansion of immersive theater, performance that exploded in New York in the early 2010s. Productions like Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More, which has been playing at the McKittrick Hotel since 2011 (and will close in January) and the Third Rail Project’s 2013 Then She Fell invited a limited number of audience members to move through spaces and engage with actors in the various rooms they entered.
Belvo and Fellini liked this idea, especially for productions that fall within the horror genre, but disliked what Fellini calls the “gimmicky” act of forcing spectators to participate in the show. “As an audience member, when I’m called to perform something, I’m no longer [engaged] in the show,” said Fellini. “I’m only thinking about myself — and I hate that.” Embedded theater, on the other hand, lets audiences sit still and watch and listen — and keeps them mentally and emotionally in the show by putting them as close as physically possible to the action.
At spit&vigor, that means cramming stage and audience into a 15.5-square-foot box — which can legally hold no more than 20 people. Sitting literally within spitting distance of actors, a spectator immediately feels physically present in the play, and the emotional bond between actor and audience heightens. That is all Fellini wants when people come to a spit&vigor show: an extremely intimate affair.
In shows like GRIND, the (fake) blood from a human-meat grinder splashes on everyone, fights break out at the audience’s feet, and the toxic green glow of a computer terminal glints in every person’s eyes. At the same time, the audience also watches characters break down as they all realize that their society — a cannibalistic dystopia that encourages children to work forever yet slaughters them for food — deems them useless. Everyone experiences the horrors together.
The company began in Belvo’s old studio apartment. “The loft where the stage manager sits” — Fellini pointed at uneven wood planks painted black and shoddily nailed together in the back of the blackbox — “that used to be Adam’s bed frame. We needed extra space, so we just built that and rehearsed under his bed.” The two co-founders love spit&vigor’s scrappiness. Unlike the independent theaters around them, spit&vigor “owns the fact that we’re poor.” The three head producers — Fellini, Belvo, and Nick Thomas — fund the company through carefully budgeted portions of their day-job earnings, ticket sales, and whatever extra money they choose to contribute. Fellini, for instance, works full-time The Players Theatre as an organizer, and she divvies up her salary to support herself and the company. The troupe does not seek grants or regularly host fundraisers. “If we are putting our own time, our own money, our own blood and sweat into [our productions], we not only have control over it, but it’s fully our work,” argued Belvo. Asking for donations, government assistance, or financial grants — the way most independent theater companies sustain themselves — means potentially changing everything that makes spit&vigor distinct.
What does make the company distinct is an acquired taste. The size constraints of “embedded theater” and the grisly subject matter often make people uncomfortable; one GRIND attendee lodged a formal complaint after accidentally getting splashed by fake blood, even though the stage manager warned before the show that the audience might get spritzed. In Anonymous, Thomas’s one-act drama that is staged as an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, several audience members cried and avoided even looking at the actors as they described their struggles with alcoholism and personal relationships. “We — in all our blood, gore, and black humor — are not marketable at all to potential donors,” Fellini acknowledged, “but we shouldn’t have to be if we like what we do. Not having access to anything allows for unlimited creativity.”
Being “poor on purpose,” though, is not easy. In New York City, theater is a cost-ineffective industry at every level. According to Erica Barnes, a grant maker for the Alliance of Resident Theaters (A.R.T NY), a small theater company spends on average $30,000 to $250,000 per show. Most of that money goes to securing physical spaces for rehearsals and performances, costs that have risen steeply in recent years. “We’re still seeing companies just starting to come back [from the COVID-19 pandemic],” said Barnes. Due to social distancing laws prohibiting live ticketed events, commercial rent rates soaring, and the slow roll-out of the 2022 Commercial Rent Stabilization Act, companies spared from shutting down struggled to return to their venues. If the financial losses during the pandemic proved anything to Fellini, it was that no one needs much money to make art. “At one point, we just had a Zoom account, old costumes, and our blackbox,” she said. “But we realized we don’t need elaborate sets to make fun, cool art. Getting by on what we have is enough.” Furthermore, she argued, the cultural assumption that money means quality has implicitly forced “theater magic” to compete with “movie magic,” leaving less space for low-budget companies to thrive. “We try to remind people that theater isn’t about tech,” said Fellini, who strongly opposes the direction theaters around her are taking in seeking flashy sets and costumes. “Theater should be about plot, character, and human connection. Art has always been the realm for the human spirit.”
Fellini was born and raised in Floral Park, a quiet town on the border between Queens and Nassau County, Long Island. While it had quaint charm and streets named after flowers, living in Floral Park in the 90s and early 2000s was anything but idyllic for her. “I had a Victorian childhood,” she said, laughing at her own assessment of her early life. “I grew up around death; it was a normal thing to see for me.” Fellini’s mother died when she was 13 years old, many children she knew growing up died in tragic accidents, and her Catholic school service trips included volunteering at AIDS hospices and soup kitchens. “Back then, you just grew up knowing how to go to a wake,” said Cait Murphy, Fellini’s life-long friend and spit&vigor cast member. Fellini found a strange comfort in death, and the images of wakes, memorials, and funerals became her favorite events to write about. Growing up Catholic, she appreciated the humor of some of the rituals — she laughed as she described the tradition of picking out outfits and putting makeup on “doll-like” corpses before their burials — yet she also found the spirituality around death beautiful. “To me, it’s the only Christian religion that directly deals with death,” she said. “They don’t hide this reality at all. The bloody, dead body of our God is at the front and center of everything — knowing, seeing, and touching the dead body lets us appreciate humanity.”
School was a struggle for Fellini — she found it “unrealistic” compared to the tougher, more practical energy of the working world. Outside school and work, Fellini spent her time immersed in theater. “My older sister did theater, and I idolized her,” she said. Fellini remembers attending every performance of her Church’s production of Evita, where her 16-year-old sister played the titular role, and obsessively rewatching the VHS tape recording. From that point, Fellini sought any way to get involved in her Church’s theater company. She acted in the musicals, built sets for the Cardboard Box Player theater camp, worked as a stagehand and sound designer, and took up costume design. Stage production became a testing lab for all her creative ideas. “The way we grew up doing theater, we were never told we couldn’t do anything,” said Murphy, who met Fellini during a middle school production of Les Misérables (Fellini played Éponine). “All our creative decisions were seen as important and clever, and Sara really took that into adulthood.” Fellini never took writing or acting classes nor learned in any formal way how to direct, sew, and design sets. In fact, she dropped out of Stony Brook University after a semester to return to waitressing. Fellini wanted the freedom to audition for small acting roles in local theater productions and write small dialogues between characters inspired by people she met.
In 2015, Fellini channeled these life experiences into her original play, In Vestments. This one-act piece became the aesthetic cornerstone of the spit&vigor project. Performed in the West Park Presbyterian Church, In Vestments told the story of priests who spiral into madness after a piece of broken ceiling falls into a chalice of consecrated wine — a drop of worldly corruption in Jesus Christ’s holy Blood. The play features ghosts, moral dilemmas, an evil Jacques Brel, and two contrasting Jesus figures: a playful, mute, invisible Jesus unable to touch His disciples, as well as the statue of an emaciated, naked, crucified corpse drenched in His Blood. Fellini worked as a sacristan while writing the script, and had no idea the dialogues she wrote in her free time would evolve into a play that would win NYIT awards for Best Directing and Outstanding Premiere Production, and that the New York Times would call it “earnest and campy, wrenching and visually eloquent.” “I just wrote something straight from my heart,” Fellini admitted. “I was just acting as a sieve for everything I saw: the problems in the Church, in Catholicism, and growing up Catholic.” Yet, in all her criticism, she still found a vulnerability and beautiful devotion in her deeply flawed subjects. Like in most of her original work, Fellini braided horror, comedy, and love into a realistic (albeit chaotic) portrait of everyday life.
After In Vestments, Fellini continued to write, perform in, and direct original works. Her next play, The Execution of Mrs. Cotton (2016), became the first of many of her fictionalized historical plays about complicated female characters. Based on David Wilson’s book Mary Ann Cotton: Britain’s First Female Serial Killer, Mrs. Cotton focused on Elva Zona Heaster, a fictional Civil War-era nurse on trial for murdering a string of ex-lovers and children. In 2021, for spit&vigor’s first off-Broadway residency at the historic Players Theater, Fellini wrote and directed The Wake of Dorcas Kelly, a fictionalized black comedy about a well-respected 18th-Century Dublin brothel madam whose gruesome execution and funeral reveal her secret obsession: killing young boys and hiding them in her furniture. In both plays, Fellini emphasized the absurdity of horror tales; her characters, victims of brutal punishment and judgement for their social class and gender, are unapologetically wicked. While not excusing any of her characters’ heinous crimes, Fellini adores their ability to exist as imperfect people. More importantly, Fellini loves to complicate; the more difficult it is to mourn someone you loved after knowing their sins, the better.
Because of the success of Dorcas Kelly, one of The Observer’s best plays to watch in 2021, spit&vigor acquired a yearly residency at The Players Theatre, and Fellini began working there full-time. Recurring residencies are rare in The Players Theatre, an off-Broadway theater in Greenwich Village since the 1950s. The brown, tiny, Gilded Age-era building with grease-stained, worn-down seats hosted hundreds of famous playwrights and actors. Because they adhere to their 1918 commitment to supporting low-budget, experimental plays, the institution limits returning companies. Spit&vigor is the exception. Fellini believes that the two companies share many of the same ideals: both operate on shoestring budgets, perform plays in tiny spaces, and focus more on making art than selling it. “A Vulture review for one of our residencies called the old theater ‘scrappy’,” she said before quoting verbatim, “’There’s tenacity ground into every red velvet seat.’ Yes! That’s exactly what we want people to think about us!”
As artistic director, Fellini runs spit&vigor like a pirate ship: she relies on public interest, redistributes the earnings into paying her crew and the blackbox’s rent of approximately $1500 a month, and she lets everyone involved take on multiple roles. “That’s the spirit of this theater,” said George Walsh, one of the long-time members of the company. “You’re not necessarily pigeonholed if you want to learn how to do something new.” Walsh, for example, goes “where she needs me.” In one play, he controlled the sound effects; in another, he acted as stage manager; in Anonymous, he played Richard, the leading role. Murphy, who mainly works as an actor in Fellini’s plays, added that Fellini ensures that everyone’s contributions are visible in the final production. “From the first show, she paid her actors,” she stressed. “She lets us play around with our characters, and if you look closely, all our old clothes and handmade props decorate every show.” From a crew member’s perspective, spit&vigor encourages everyone to “find some ownership” in the company.
Fellini takes spit&vigor with her everywhere. Whether she’s at The Players Theater on MacDougal Street, editing the expense spreadsheet under the watch of taxidermied animals in spit&vigor’s Park Slope administrative office, making blood packets in the Gowanus blackbox, writing her next one-act black comedy, or hosting board meetings at a West Village café 30 minutes before her day job begins, she devotes herself completely to her company. “Sara lives in total art,” said Belvo. “Who she is in life and on stage are not two distinct things. In a way, she is spit&vigor, and spit&vigor is her.”
