Wonderland

Wonderland is a dark comedy about the illusion of control, set against the unsettling possibility that in today’s gig economy, a BDSM dungeon might be one of the few workplaces where power is both visible and within reach.

As a working artist in New York, I’ve taken on countless jobs to survive: dog nanny, professional bridesmaid, strip club manager. Each one demanded I become whatever the job required. That last one gave me eight years inside a female-run club where the women on that floor held the power in the room. They were artists, like me. They were paying rent and funding their own work in a city that had stopped supporting them.

I started at the front desk and became the general manager, and somewhere in there I found a version of authority in myself I hadn’t known was available to me. What fascinated me about that world, and later the BDSM dungeon, was its clarity. The power dynamics that felt so muddled everywhere else were explicit here: who held power, who gave it up, and under what terms.

That experience left me with a more complicated question: what happens when the person a job asks you to pretend to be is someone you actually are?