New York Magazine - USA (2021-02-01)

68 newyork| february1–14, 2021

TheCULTUREPAGES

Let Sharon

Mashihi Whisper

in Your Ear

Herstrange,intimatepodcast,

Appearances,feelslike

a breakthroughfortheform.

ByEmilyGould

appearancesisavailablewhereveryougetyourpodcasts.

M

idway into the nar-

rative podcast Appear-

ances come three of the

most compelling minutes

of audio I’ve ever heard.

As the series’ protagonist, Melanie, awaits

the results of a pregnancy test, we listen to

her internal monologue. “Every morning,

I wake up, and in my journal I write the

words I am alone,” she tells us. She medi-

tates on how much pee can drip out of you if

you sit on the toilet long enough. Seconds

tick by; suspense builds; pee drips audibly.

I listened, rapt, as I watered a friend’s plants.

My body was sweeping up dead fern leaves,

but my mind was entirely in Melanie’s bath-

room. It was the first time I had ever feltas

transported by audio as I have beenbyread-

ing—felt almost inside another person’scon-

sciousness. “Okay,” Melanie finally whispers,

picking up the stick. “Not pregnant.”

It didn’t occur to me to wonder whether

those three minutes had really happened,

but that’s the question undergirding

Appearances, a sweeping, metafictional

podcast based on the life of its creator,

Sharon Mashihi. Mashihi plays the 35-year-

old Melanie Barzadeh as well as Melanie’s

mother, Vida; her brother, Bobbak;her

father, Jamsheed; and her nosy neighbor,

Faribah—all of whom live in a tight-knit

community of Jewish Iranian immigrants

in Great Neck. We barely hear anyoneelse’s

voice on the podcast except that of Melanie’s

55-year-old ex-boyfriend, Ponch, whois

played by Mashihi’s ex-boyfriend Thatcher

Keats. Mashihi’s performances—as vulner-

able, scathing Vida and dull, hidebound

Bobbak—create characters who sound

immediately distinct. The only ones whose

voices are (intentionally) difficult todiffer-

entiate are Melanie and Sharon, who pops

up as herself occasionally. “I will admit to

you,” Mashihi says, self-mockingly, in the

prologue to Appearances, “these voices are

exactly the same.”

At the outset of the series, we learn that

Melanie has decided to become a single

mother using donor sperm, which she is

almost sure will alienate her from her tradi-

tional family—especially her mother. Apart

from Melanie, Vida is Appearances’ most

vivid, sympathetic, and maddening charac-

ter. She loves Melanie fiercely while refusing

toacceptalmost anythingabouther. Atits

core,the showisabouta mother and

daughterwholovebutrepeatedlydamage

eachother. “That’skindofthewholepoint

ofAppearances—toperforma versionof my

parentswhosuckinwaysthat my real

parentsmay notactuallysuck,” Mashihi

te llsmeona recentfrigidafternooninFort

GreenePark.“Let meplay themoutsucking.

Let meplay themoutwonderful.Let mesay

thingsI perceivethat arenotsaid.”

To the extent it’s possible to take the pod-

cast world by storm, Appearances has—

impressiveconsideringitwasindepen-

dently produced and had no marketing

budget. News of its existence has spread

mostly via word of mouth among the audio

cognoscenti. Lydia Polgreen, who runs

Gimlet Media, heard about it from the doc-

umentarian Lynn Levy, who compared it to

both Sheila Heti’s novel Motherhood and the

TV series BoJack Horseman. “It feels like a

creative breakthrough for the form,” says

Polgreen. Radio plays are as old as radio

itself, and Appearances’ docufiction style

will be familiar to anyone who has read Karl

Ove Knausgaard or watched Kirsten John-

son kill off her father in Dick Johnson Is

Dead. Yet the intimacy of audio makes com-

bining fiction and documentary seem new,

particularly when it features a magnetic

voice at its center. Is it possible to be an art-

podcast star? Mashihi has a knack—

apparent immediately in the tentative “Hi”

that begins the show—for exploiting the

intimacy of hearing someone whisper in

your ear. The only thing separating her

from auteurs like Phoebe Waller-Bridge

and Michaela Coel may be the medium.

Despite its current financial boom, pod-

casting is still a cultural niche without TV’s

reach or literature’s prestige.

Mashihi is dressed too lightly on the day

we meet, in a vintage red cloth coat. She has

giant eyes and a thick rope of brown hair

slung over one shoulder. I’ve spent so many

hours listening to her anxieties about preg-

nancy that it seems natural the first thing

we would talk about is her fertility. While

Melanie eventually gets pregnant, Sharon is

37 and still figuring out how to have a baby.

Her hormone levels, she says, are those of a

woman ten years older. As we wait for cups

of almond chai to be prepared, I try to reas-

sure her with details from my own pregnan-

cies. The tea is an excuse to take off our

masks. When she sees the lower half of my

face, she tells me my mouth is the kind she

has always wanted, a compliment that sums

up her entire vibe: self-effacing, weird, and

unusually direct. As I check to make sure my

phone is recording us properly, she says, half

to herself, “Right, because this is the first

question about the process.”

Mashihi describes herself not as an actor

but as an “act-y person.” “I have three medi-

ums: film, performance, and audio,” she

says. “But audio is the medium I’ve been

able to get paid work in, so it is the medium

where my skill far surpasses my skill in the

other mediums.” For a while, she took a class

on Buddhism in theater, in which students

would conjure their ancestors and enact

scenes between them. She has worked in

film production, collaborating with her

friend Josephine Decker (Shirley). She

spent several years working for NPR shows

like Studio 360 and The New Yorker Radio

“I want to

micromanage my

audience’s

experience.”

“