Stoya Returns to NYC Theater This April in New Dean Haspiel Play

NEW YORK—Last October, adult industry A-lister Stoya proved her versatility as an performer, making her legitimate theater acting debut in the Off-Off Broadway play Harakiri Kane, authored by comic book artist and writer Dean Haspiel. In April, Stoya tests her acting chops once again as she returns to the New York stage—appearing in Haspiel’s new play, The Last Bar at the End of the World.  The play is an “existential tragi-comedy about a dying graphic novelist, his best friend, and the sages, teachers, lovers and losers that fill up his cityscape ... that asks the question ‘Why are we here and what do we have to do to move on?’”  The play, Haspiel’s third to be produced Off-Off Broadway, also stars Seth Gilliam—best known as “Father Gabriel” on the hit AMC TV show The Walking Dead, and “Carver” on the now-legendary HBO police drama The Wire. In a promotional video for the play, Stoya describes her part as “Stella, a woman on a train.” “I’m not a love interest, or a girlfriend, or a wife,” she says in the video. “Those kinds of roles are rare for women.” In an interview discussing her earlier role in Harakiri Kane, Stoya explained what drew her to theater from her successful career in porn. “I took a lot of dance lessons in my youth, and have been a pornographer since the late 2000s. There’s a commonality with those two and acting, which is that they’re easiest when you’re fully present,” she told the site Comicon.com.  “Otherwise, delivering narrative through dialogue in front of a live audience is a whole different level of work.” But though her role in Last Bar will be her second in a Haspiel play, it will actually mark her third collaboration with the veteran comic book artist. They first worked together in Haspiel’s native medium of comics, when Stoya wrote a story for the 2016 “Sex Issue” of the long-running science-fiction comics magazine Heavy Metal. She wrote the story as prose, with Haspiel adapting it for the comic book page and, of course, providing the artwork. The story, titled “One Such Partner,” was described by the pop culture site PopMatters as “a scene from the writer's past, (that) tells the well-written memory of a youthful sexual encounter with fondness.” Except that in the Heavy Metal version, Haspiel rendered the characters in Stoya’s sexual memoir as “humanoid aliens driving through space.” The Last Bar at the End of the World will run for seven performances, opening on April 10 and closing April 15—with nightly shows at 8 p.m. and a Saturday matinee at 2 p.m.—at Manhattan’s 74-seat Urban Stages Theater. For advance tickets, click on this link. In New York theater, the term“Off-Off Broadway” refers to theaters with 99 seats or fewer, while “Off Broadway” theaters generally have between 100 and 499 seats. Anything bigger than that is considered “Broadway.” These theatrical adventures are far from being Stoya’s only foray into mainstream. In addition to writing articles and being interviewed by multiple mainstream media outlets, the Serbian sylph also has a leading role in the sci-fi drama Ederlezi Rising, which was shot in Serbia and opened February 25. Directed by Lazar Bodroza and starring Stoya with Sebastian Cavazza, the movie is described thusly on its official YouTube trailer page: “She was his android slave. He fell in love and turned her into a person.” Stoya was interviewed on a Serbian talk show, and the trailer features quotes from Haspiel (“Adam and Eve in outer space”) and MakeLoveNotPorn founder Cindy Gallop (“amazingly atmospheric”). To find out more about the movie, visit Ederlezi.org. Above, a screen shot from the Indiegogo video for Last Bar at the End of the World.