Pepper Slit doesn’t care if you’re in the mood for egg cream. She doesn’t care if her landlord wants her to pay rent. She cares about providing the most captivating evening possible to the 35 lucky guests who are welcomed each night into her subterranean treasure trove full of vintage memorabilia. Through a music box, a coconut bra, and illicit phone conversations with President John F. Kennedy, Pepper takes her audience down memory lane to the good old days of New York City. We laugh, we gasp, we might even get teary-eyed.
Pepper Slit: Live in Her Living Room, starring former SNL cast member Chloe Troast, and directed by Sam Blumenfeld, runs at New York’s East Village Basement from July 21st to August 29th, with possibly more new dates being added to fulfil the demand. With a cast including Sam Blumenfeld, Gus Laughlin, Josh Nasser, Charlie O’Connor, and Jamie Linn Watson, the show flies by with gags, songs that showcase Troast’s powerful voice, and sensuous dance moves that make you want to repent when the French nun appears.
I had the chance to talk with Chloe Troast, the artist behind Pepper Slit, to get a sense of Pepper’s lore and an inside look into the process of developing a complex character who ultimately just wants to be loved – as well as her never-before-revealed recipe for egg cream.
The Cold Magazine (CM): I saw the show last week, and I just laughed so hard. I loved it so much and I’m really curious about the origin story of Pepper Slit. I know you’re inspired by Liza Minnelli and Follies and such, but I’d love to hear more about the conception.
Chloe Troast (CT): I’m so glad. Honestly, it was kind of like I was riffing with my friends. We were all in a sketch group. It was 2018, around that era. We were performing a lot around New York. I was still in college at NYU. I think I just did, a funny, hammy, you know, New York thing – almost a vaudevillian, old Hollywood voice.
We were just all being silly. A couple of my friends were doing a short film not long after that, and they said Can you do that character for this? That was the first iteration of Pepper Slit as a person. It was just one scene at the end of this short called “Understudy Angel”. I think it’s on Vimeo, but it’s Steve Raia and William Kenton’s short film. They just had me go off on classic Broadway tunes because the character in it is meeting a famous Broadway actor.
I had grown up in the era of Broadway that was extremely polished. Broadway was these ultra-talented, incredible performers. The era before them were these kind of gritty, unpolished, loud, belting singers, because they didn’t have microphones for a long, long time. A big hammy person with a giant voice – that’s who a Broadway star was. I’ve always been so intrigued by who those people were. And so that was the basis of [Pepper], a real Broadway star from like the thirties or forties or something.
That’s the long version of how it started. In 2018 I came up with Next Stop World War II, which is in the show where I get shot by a million bullets. That was actually in my SNL audition, but super pared down. I didn’t have any tearaways or anything. That was the first time we did it in a sketch group, and then I started doing it on stand-up shows and hosting as her for a variety hour with other comedians and musicians. It was so fun and was a part of my brain that I don’t always get to use for normal comedy because it’s slapstick, farcical, like there’s rim shots after jokes. It’s campy, and sometimes my other stuff that I do with sketch and improv is way more low-key and grounded and myself.
CM: Do you have a routine or a ritual to get into the mode of Pepper Slit?
CT: Well, now the makeup and the wig. Once I started hosting as her in the variety shows, the wig and the makeup started to become so important to me to getting into her mindset.
I wear so much makeup for it that it really feels like I’m putting on grease paint. The eyelashes that are drawn on is the way that maybe she would have been taught to draw on her eyes for the back mezzanine to be able to see her. We used to have this really big red wig, but we had so many costume changes that we had to get smaller so it wouldn’t interfere. When I have all that on, I no longer see myself because most of the time I’m so plain. When I have all of the bits and bobs on, I feel like I’m going on in Vegas. It feels almost like painting a portrait of her that I’m stepping into.
But all those things, you know, they take a minute. So getting into that slowly. A lot of her sensibilities are super unfiltered and almost like a baby or a toddler. I think as a normal person in society, we have lots of filters. I have to take that filter off and allow myself to regress into being just a little brat.
CM: That sounds healing, actually.
CT: I mean, you could call it inner child work. I do feel very free when I step into her shoes because there’s a way you forgive her no matter what she says, even if it’s terrible. So, honestly, sometimes the worst thought that comes to mind is what she says.
At first it jars people, but it actually makes people feel comfortable after a while because they think, Anything goes here. And nobody’s feelings are hurt. Because she’s going to get to everybody. Every type of thing she’s going to clown on, and she is such a buffoon herself that you could never be mad at her because you’re laughing at her expense, which I love. I genuinely love when people laugh at me being stupid, you know?
CM: Totally. She’s very endearing and, and I felt myself warming to her more throughout the show. So much of the show is dependent on audience participation. Have you had any issues with this?
CT: Oh yeah. I mean every day is so different. I think that is what has made it feel crazy – we’ve already done 15 shows in a row and I have not found a groove that’s monotonous. That might sound like, oh, you haven’t found your groove yet. But I think the minute I find myself being bored or like my mind starts to wander is when I go uh-oh, lock back in.
I can never go on autopilot, really. So that’s the most amazing thing for me, because I’m ADHD and I get bored with things super easily. But I can’t do that for this show because I’m genuinely looking for reactions to things. If someone says something that I’m not prepared for, I have to be conscious enough to respond.
I’ve not been bored yet because exactly like you said, there is so much that the audience brings for me. Sometimes, you know, it’s a 7pm Monday show and people just got off of work. Then they walk into a basement and I start this kooky, insane journey. It sometimes takes a little bit more lubrication for nights like that.
Whereas on Saturday nights, you get two more drinks and you get just a little sauce in you or something and people are immediately responding. I don’t feel as though I’m doing anything different, as soon as I say, Hey, does anybody want this? at the 9:30pm show on a weekend, everyone’s like, I’m out to party. I’m having a good time. I’m at a show.
I think after 9pm on any night, it’s people that are really willing to go places with you. It almost feels like a midnight show. We honestly talked about doing something like that, too. It’d be so fun to do a midnight show that was free. We can pack as many people as we want and it’s loosey goosey Crazy Town USA. Because it’s so fun when people are just jumping in every time that I ask them to.
CM: Absolutely. I think the audience participation element adds a sense of magic to the show and also speaks to your ability to navigate that space and not just go into autopilot. The show is constantly writing itself when you’re doing it.
CT: There’s little rewrites always – every, every night. It’s a dice that you roll when you have such a small audience. Like everyone here coincidentally could be having a bad day, but you still gotta be like, No, everybody’s going to get on our side. And by the end it always happens.
CM: Why does Pepper offer her guests egg cream?
CT: I feel like it was some joke riffing thing that I had requested. Maybe I was pretending to order a drink at the bar and I ordered an egg cream or something and was like, wouldn’t that be ridiculous? The concept of someone who’s so old fashioned that they still believe they can order an egg cream anywhere. I also didn’t know what an egg cream was. Also, eggs are not involved in the drink whatsoever. And…egg cream… If you’re really thinking about it, it’s like, is it cream of egg? It’s a disgusting sounding thing, for sure, but it’s so old school and classic. I think it was in this little documentary thing that we made of Pepper Slit that’s online.
CM: Oh, where can I find it?
CT: It’s called ‘Interesting Americans’.
CM: I love all the lore that pre-dates this current show.
CT: Oh yeah. Well, that’s a funny one because we had a lot of time to riff. That was a real impetus for this show because we rented out an antique store that was meant to be her apartment. Then I went through all of these objects when I was at this store, picking them up, even though I’d never seen them before.
I was explaining what the object was and what part of my life it was from. There were a bunch of old school Pepsi things. And I was like, I was a Pepsi girl. I was the Pepsi girl. Like, Pepsi, Pepsi, Pepsi. I love Pepsi. And they’re like, Are you still paid by them? And then I was like, no. And it’s like, so you don’t really have to do that.
It’s fun to riff on a bunch of objects and that’s kind of how this show ended up falling into place because I just liked the idea of that so much – objects helping you go down memory lane.
CM: I think the objects added a real element of sadness and dimension to the show. I really wasn’t expecting to feel sad for Pepper at certain moments. I was curious about the process of curating the space and set design. Did you have the music box – which provides an element of near sincerity – before you wrote about the show, or vice versa?
CT: I think the music box was the last thing to be put in the show. It felt like we had so many touchstones and things that we wanted to take from different shows and to use objects in order to tell that story through moving.
A lot of the objects came after the bit was already written. We’d already done “Next Stop World War II” before we had done something with egg creams. Particularly with the music box, we wanted there to be a little bit of a magical element. Maybe all of these really surreal memory moments are really happening in front of you because this music box contains some kind of magic, or the music box is just what opened her heart up and her mind up to tell these stories.
We wanted something like Pandora’s box where you can go into Pepper’s head. We were really thinking about how we want people to feel. A lot of the moments that came at the end organically came out of being like, Oh man, after this, I kind of feel bad for her and I’m so sentimental.
I’m in my childhood room right now and I have like a million tchotchkes. And it’s the same if you go to my apartment. I actually am coincidentally also moving. I’m doing this show and it’s a show about moving. Objects have an energy that either helps you or hurts you. I’m holding onto these things and I think that brings a weird energy. I always feel really connected to objects in that way.
CM: I think it’s a great mode of storytelling. And I do think moving is one of the most stressful emotional things you can do.
CT: It can be painful, but also so relieving. And maybe it’s a little bit cleaner wherever she is [now], but you don’t know where Pepper goes at the end. The ending is so goofy, goofy, stupid, and I won’t reveal it – no spoilers, obviously – but we wanted the ending to be an allegory for whatever you believe happened to her. Whatever it is, she’s enlightened and understands things better.
CM: Endings can be so difficult, but I think having an open-ended final scene leaves the question: what’s next for Pepper Slit?
CT: Who knows? She could kind of live on in so many different forms and hopefully she does. A thing that we talked about in terms of writing the show is that for a lot of people – even though this character has been close to me for many years – this will be their absolute first moments with her.
So does it make sense that it’s her end or do we want to open the door for it to be a real beginning? I don’t think you’ll get to actually understand her unless she’s at a breaking point and actually changes and I feel like that happens at the end. So you meet her when she’s ready to disclose everything about herself and I don’t think she would have ever done that at any other time in her life.
CM: Can I ask, what is the recipe for the egg cream that you use?
CT: Oh yeah! The egg cream is oat milk and this frothy thing that helps stuff froth and then it’s in a nitrous container and we actually carbonate it so it just becomes super frothy because we added the thickening agent. But it’s oat milk!
I drink it during the show and it’s kind of nice because, I mean, it’s a hot summer and I get hot and tired. So honestly, sometimes in that moment, it’s actually quite quenching. Cold carbonated oat milk!
Pepper Slit: Live in Her Living Room runs until August 29th, 2026, at the East Village Basement, 321 E 9th St, New York, NY 10003.
