GOBSTOPPER
Presented by SoHo Playhouse
Direct from the Prague Fringe, produced by Phoebe Byrne, a SKELF Theatre Co. production
Written and Performed by Leyla Aycan, Directed by Sophie Michelle
SoHo Playhouse, 15 Vandam Street, New York, NY 10013
February 11, 2026 - March 1, 2026
In the tight-knit villages of rural Scotland, identity is rarely a private matter. One may attempt to determine who one is, but the surrounding social ecosystem—the claustrophobic churn of hearsay, scrutiny, and minor scandal—has its own decisive say. In Gobstopper, a bracing solo work from SKELF Theatre Co., reputation circulates like weather through a valley: gathering force, mutating in transit, and eventually settling over its subject with stubborn persistence.
The play opens with its prickly, unnamed heroine barking “shut the fuck up” at an elderly man whose noisy presence irritates her—only to discover, a moment too late, that he is choking on the candy of the title. No sooner has the commotion subsided than she becomes aware of another gaze fixed upon her across the bus aisle. A boy is staring. For an instant the encounter registers as merely awkward, perhaps faintly comic—hardly the beginning of a flirtation, given that the observer is clearly a child. She responds with a flippant gesture, a reflexive performance of irreverence. Yet the boy’s mother quickly intervenes, her alarm sharp and unmistakable. Only then does the young woman realize, with dawning horror, that the child is blind and that her careless gesturing has been grotesquely misread. The realization arrives too late. Before she can muster an apology—or even fully grasp the misunderstanding—she is struck. The end result is a bloody nose. From there, the audience is ushered into the volatile orbit of a young woman whose impetuousness, candor, and self-destructive bravado have placed her perpetually at odds with the world around her.
Portrayed with electrifying precision by Leyla Aycan, the character moves through her day like a live wire. One moment she is exiting a strained conversation with a neighbor; the next she is nearly flattened by a passing car, responding with a middle finger before ducking into a corner shop and stuffing her shoulder bag with shoplifted sweets. The performance conveys a person propelled by restless energy yet shadowed by profound solitude. Throughout the day she anticipates a meeting with her friend Fizz—a casual rendezvous promising gossip and companionship—that repeatedly fails to materialize, yet today that meeting doesn’t happen for a more specific reason.
As disappointment accumulates and her emotional defenses begin to erode, fragments of her past surface, complicating our understanding of the abrasive persona she presents. What emerges is a portrait that invites sympathy and skepticism in equal measure.What, then, accounts for her prickliness, her reflexive hostility toward the world? The play offers no tidy diagnosis, but it gestures toward the outlines of a formative loneliness. A mother whose manner seems chilly to the point of indifference, paired with the conspicuous absence of any paternal presence, provides an initial clue. One begins to imagine the emotional climate of her childhood—an upbringing perhaps marked less by overt cruelty than by a persistent lack of tenderness.
By the time we encounter her, the scaffolding of her adult life appears similarly precarious. Her social circle has contracted to nearly nothing; weeks have passed since she last saw her closest—and apparently only—friend. The isolation is palpable. Within such a vacuum, the impulsive decisions that punctuate her story begin to feel less like aberrations than like the predictable gestures of someone grasping for connection wherever it briefly presents itself. In that light, a fleeting encounter with a stranger in a bar ceases to seem merely reckless. It begins, instead, to register as a momentary attempt at intimacy in a life otherwise defined by its scarcity.
The play’s sense of place is rendered with striking vividness. Though the stage remains spare, the environment it conjures feels saturated with the weary textures of provincial life: a landscape at once familiar and faintly oppressive. Under the deft guidance of director Sophie Michelle, the playing space transforms with fluid ease into a bus stop, a cramped living room, a convenience shop, and the indistinct pavements of a town whose boundaries seem both modest and suffocating. The protagonist appears misaligned with this environment, an angular presence within a community whose patience for eccentricity has long since thinned. She is conspicuous in the most uncomfortable sense, and the townspeople have begun quietly withdrawing their tolerance. The production raises an uneasy question that lingers long after the performance ends: to what extent is her ostracism self-inflicted, and to what extent is it the inevitable outcome of a community eager to define its outsiders?
Gradually, the play introduces a revelation that casts her behavior in a more troubling light. Beneath the sarcasm and reckless bravado lies a painful history of exploitation and neglect. The young woman recounts a recent sexual encounter with an older, married man—an episode that she now fears may carry consequences more serious than mere embarrassment. The story hints, with disquieting ambiguity, at the possibility that genuine consent was never fully present. In this context, her defensive abrasiveness begins to read less as cruelty than as a brittle survival strategy.
Aycan navigates this emotional terrain with admirable dexterity. A character so steeped in hostility and impatience could easily flatten into a single tonal register, yet the performer locates an unexpectedly wide range of feeling beneath the surface. She allows the audience to glimpse the intelligence and woundedness that coexist within the protagonist’s brusque exterior. Each shift in posture—a slackened shoulder, a tightening jaw—becomes part of the storytelling. By the time the character addresses the audience directly, stepping beyond the invisible fourth wall with conspiratorial frankness, we are not merely observers but uneasy confidants.
The technical elements amplify this immediacy. A buoyant, occasionally whimsical sound design ripples beneath the monologue, while the venue’s modest lighting apparatus is deployed with surprising imagination, sculpting moments of intimacy and sudden exposure. Even within the confines of the intimate venue at the downstairs bar of SoHo Playhouse, the production generates a sense of spatial expansiveness, suggesting the unseen streets and living rooms of the town beyond the stage.
The play’s title carries a quietly resonant metaphor. For those unfamiliar with the confection, gobstoppers are large boiled sweets intended to dissolve slowly in the mouth. Their very size forces the eater into prolonged silence. One suspects that this accidental muteness appeals to the protagonist: words, in her experience, tend to produce calamity. The sweet that nearly kills the elderly man—later spat out and landing accusingly at her feet—becomes an emblem of the misunderstandings and humiliations that cling stubbornly to her reputation.
If Gobstopper has a structural flaw, it is an oddly tantalizing one. Whereas many fringe productions might benefit from judicious pruning, at a mere 45 minutes, this play concludes almost too abruptly. Just as the character’s emotional contradictions grow most compelling, the narrative halts without the customary resolution. We are left to speculate about her future: will she remain in this judgmental community, defying its verdicts, or will she heed the escapist yearning hinted at by the strains of Enya drifting through her headphones and seek reinvention elsewhere?
Yet perhaps the absence of tidy closure is precisely the point. The young woman at the center of Gobstopper is impulsive, abrasive, and frequently wrong—but she is also unmistakably human. The play resists the temptation to absolve or condemn her outright, instead presenting a figure caught in the crosscurrents of personal error and structural misogyny. In doing so, it offers a quietly devastating reminder of how swiftly a community can convert a complicated life into a single, reductive label.
In its writing, performance, and staging alike, this production demonstrates an uncommon assurance. Aycan’s performance alone would make the evening memorable; together with Michelle’s sensitive direction, it becomes something rarer—a portrait of a difficult woman rendered with empathy, humor, and unsparing clarity.
Click HERE for tickets.
Review by Tony Marinelli.
Published by Theatre Beyond Broadway on March 10th, 2026. All rights reserved.
