Katya Zamolodchikova

She paces the boards in towering heels, clutching the microphone with both hands, visibly sweating through heavy foundation while her eyes dart around the balcony. A bit rarely has a conventional runway. She will start describing a routine visit to a dental hygienist, derail into a vivid aside about tapeworms and Soviet gymnastics, and punctuate the turn with a dry, guttural wheeze. The audience is laughing partly at the language and partly because the room feels five seconds away from an actual medical emergency.

She packs theaters with crowds that track every twitch. Alongside Trixie Mattel on web shows and podcasts, she is the runaway train to Mattel’s disciplined rhythm. On her own, she drops even the pretense of an anchor.

Her solo stage show Help Me I’m Dying plays more like an eccentric cabaret than a tight club set, stitching monologues together with video interludes and sudden acrobatic drops. She does not do neat setups. She builds momentum by piling grotesque personal anecdotes on top of highbrow literary references. The weakness is that without a strong narrative thread, the mania can spin in circles and run out of gas.

The persona began in Boston art school, blending the name of an Olympic gymnast with the grime of John Waters cinema. That video-art lineage still dictates the performance. It never looks like someone working a club rotation because it was built from the start as living sculpture having a nervous breakdown.