Gwyneth Goes Skiing at Soho Playhouse
When seeing a show at the Soho Playhouse, one would be remiss not to arrive early and grab a drink at the bar downstairs, where Matt hooked me up with a jumbo G&T before I went to see the darling of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, Gwyneth Goes Skiing. On the bar sat a fishbowl beside some slips of paper and those little mini-golf pencils (which always put me in a good mood) for people to write their suggestions for a new product for Gwyneth Paltrow’s absurd-sounding, oft-ridiculed company, Goop. This was my first tip-off that there would be madcap shenanigans and… audience interaction. If you don’t know what Goop is infamous for, you’re gonna have to Google that one.
I tend to forget how far the Oscar and Emmy winner’s fall from grace has been. I always had a soft spot for her ethereal screen presence and sunburnt, freckle-faced look in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Shakespeare in Love, but perhaps I’ve said too much. The play was conceived by and stars Linus Karp and Joseph Martin, who play Gwyneth and retired optometrist Terry Sanderson, respectively. They have brought their hit not only to Edinburgh but also London, Utah (the scene of the crime), and now New York City. After this, the show will move to Los Angeles.
In case you don’t know: in 2016, Paltrow and Sanderson were involved in a skiing accident where they somehow crashed into each other. A few years later, Terry decided to sue for three hundred thousand dollars. The trial was a thing for a hot second. Sanderson lost, and Gwyneth countersued for one dollar to show she’s above it all—and on her way out of the courtroom famously whispered to Sanderson, “I wish you well,” a line that Karp’s Gwyneth gets lots of mileage out of.
They don’t make Trials of the Century like they used to.
The first few rows of the theater are equipped with snowballs we were entrusted to throw on cue when the moment came, setting the mood alongside the upstage backdrop of snowy mountains. A member of the stage crew came around and cast people in small but pivotal roles they would be called upon to play later. Everyone was down for the fun, and it’s a safe bet that the entire audience had been onstage at some point because, when the time came, they gleefully ran up and read their lines from a monitor rather seamlessly. This is the framework of the piece: a drag show more than a play, where it seems anything can happen at any time. Karp sometimes looks uncannily like Miss Paltrow as he struts and preens in a glorious blonde wig. Martin plays Sanderson as a bumbling, lonely fool with a deep, rumbling voice. He shows great skill as a ventriloquist in the second act, when his star-struck lawyer is played by the puppet on his hand. No one in the story is safe, as even Paltrow’s infamously named daughter Apple is played by an apple on a fishing pole held by a hilariously beleaguered stagehand.
It is a unique kink of drag that the artists can hold these people up to ridicule while celebrating their fabulousness at the same time. Around me, the audience was vocal and a little tipsy (there’s an intermission—so again Matt, again G&T), and they were howling louder than the laugh track on an episode of The Big Bang Theory, shouting “Yass queen!” every time Karp’s Paltrow delivered one of her many zingers to gleeful victims in the audience. By the end, the line between performers and audience is blurred, if not covered in prop snow, and most of the audience has been on the stage while most of the cast has been in the audience. It felt like being at a big party where we are all mad at Gwyneth Paltrow.
The audience even gets to vote on the outcome of the trial via a QR code and their phones. In the interest of transparent journalism, I took a screenshot and share it here. I was in the moment—don’t ask me why I voted for Sanderson. The night I was there, Gwyneth won.
Gwyneth always wins.
Gwyneth Goes Skiing is at the Soho Playhouse through November 16.
