Val Sinkler won’t tolerate your lazy observations or your safe, sanitized version of what art is supposed to look like. She’s not here for your comfort. Val’s the kind of performer who makes you understand why Genet wrote The Balcony in the first place, because sometimes the only honest thing left is admitting how fucked up and beautiful and necessary the performance of power actually is. When she played the Madam, you believed every goddamn word. Not because she was playing it, but because she understood that the character’s ruthlessness and vulnerability weren’t contradictions, they were the same thing looked at from different angles.
She came up in New York, which either breaks you or makes you bulletproof. Val got both. That city’s in her bones, not the tourist-brochure version, but the real one. The one that taught her you don’t ask for respect, you command it. The one that showed her perfection isn’t about being flawless, it’s about being uncompromising in your truth, even when, especially when, it makes people uncomfortable. When she’s Jocasta in Oedipus, you’re watching someone who gets that Greek tragedy isn’t ancient history, it’s Thursday afternoon. She brings this raw nerve to the work that’s simultaneously terrifying and magnetic.
She makes you feel like you’re seeing something you shouldn’t, something too real, too exposed. And you can’t look away.
Val’s interested in being real. She’ll demand everything from you, precision, commitment, honesty, because she’s already demanded it from herself. Some people call that difficult. Those people are missing the point. You don’t get work like hers from someone who plays it safe, who files down the sharp edges, who makes nice. The activism, the fire, the refusal to be categorized or quieted, that’s not a phase or an affect. That’s what happens when you’re actually paying attention to the world and you refuse to pretend you don’t see what you see. When you won’t perform obedience to a system built on looking away.
She’s complex because actual human beings are complex. She’s contradictory because anyone worth knowing contains multitudes. She’s got this combination of savage strength and deep vulnerability that would destroy lesser performers, but she uses it. She makes it the work. She understands that the cracks are where the light gets in, and also, nore importantly, where the truth gets out.
So yeah, Val Sinckler is volatile, brilliant, uncompromising, and absolutely necessary. She’s proof that when art really matters, when it cuts to the bone and makes you reconsider everything you thought you knew, it’s never comfortable, never easy, and always worth it.
