Confessions of a Sugar Baby at The Crow

Written and performed by Allison Dayne. Directed by Cameron Lopez.

A raw, fiercely comedic 60-minute solo show, every word true. When an uninsured 29-year-old actress collapses and is given eight months to live,the hospital demands $800,000 in cash upfront at a predatory 785 interest rate, her parents have already liquidated their retirement for her father's cancer, and her trust-fund boyfriend declines: "I don't think it's healthy for me to help you fix your financial needs. I'm a feminist." She refuses to take on the debt, even if it means dying: "The moment you have debt, you've invited someone to own you. And I'm not interested in being owned at all." Then a clinic nurse gives her the only useful advice of her diagnosis: "You're a white girl with a fat ass in Atlanta. You know what to do."

So, she builds a profile on Seeking Arrangements, becomes a girl named Justine, and transforms into a high-paid, untouchable sugar baby with one strict rule: no sex, ever. Deploying her acting training, Meisner, Stanislavski, scene objectives, on custom-scripted dates, she becomes a doting plus-one at a daughter’s wedding, a fake fiancée in a hospice room, a dance partner for an 80-year-old widower in his dead wife’s dress. She pays for surgery after surgery in cash, the rule intact, until a $50,000 emergency forces her to consider breaking it. When people ask if she’s okay, she has a standard answer: “I’ll die from it, just not today.” It’s a story about medical debt, survival work, and the male loneliness epidemic, and it ends with her looking the room dead in the eye: “It’s not what you had to do to survive. It’s the fact that you DID survive.”