SHELL Previews at The Tank Ahead of Edinburgh Fringe Festival

Shell will have previews ahead of its showing at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. The previews will take place at The Tank (56 Seat Theater), 312 W 36th St., New York, NY 10018, on Thursday June 26 @ 9:30 PM, and Saturday June 28 @ 7:00 PM.

What if your sex ed class turned into a drag-infused, clown-led ritual of self-reclamation? What if your body could finally say what it wanted? Shell is an awe-inspiring solo show that cracks open questions about gender, anatomy, and desire, with the help of a sex-ed-obsessed hockey player and a powerful, otherworldly Peanut.

Bold, strange and funny, Shell is equal parts interactive workshop, theatrical spectacle, and spiritual release. It's drag. It's clown. It's queer sex education like you've never seen before. We meet Andy: a lovable, cringe and camp "hockey bro" who is starting a sex education club on his college campus to B(reak) R(eproductive) O(ppression). He's passionate, confused, and believes he can "CHANGE YOUR LIFE!" Peanut is full of power, pleasure and a slightly terrifying hunger for desire. Told through an interactive sex ed class, which involves audience members participating in activities and lessons, they dare you to name your desires, to feel your body, to awaken your spirit.

Written and performed by Ana Evans and co-created and directed by Linnea Scott, Shell is inspired by the lens of "parts work" therapy. Through surreal comedy and intimate audience participation, Andy expands our understanding of Reproductive Oppression, while Peanut deconstructs binaries and begs to know what you really want. By embodying these two aspects of identity, Evans explores an evolving relationship with the body, attempting to break open the constraints placed upon it in search of the spirit beneath.

Writer and performer Ana Evans comments, "This show is a ball of light that I hand off to an 8- year-old me, 18-year-old me, and then take back into the world with the 28-year-old me. It holds lessons I needed then and still need now about body, sexuality, and identity. Shell is unique in that the show literally cannot happen without the audience working through these lessons with me. Together we confront how limited traditional sex education is. Together we practice naming, feeling, and embodying our desires and discovering what such an unleashing reveals. I want each person to leave feeling like we collectively opened a floodgate, our spirits bursting through the goddamn door."

In this unapologetic queer celebration, which is full of surprise and transformation, Shell invites us to examine our relationship to the physical body, our understanding of it in a literal way, and then dare to dream of who we are outside the confines of our physical form.