Karina Billini
When beauty standards change, who benefits and who is harmed? Who has the most influence over how we feel about our bodies? Celebrities? Social influencers? Our friends and loved ones? And who can explain the 650% surge in Brazilian Butt Lift surgery in the past ten years? In her riveting new play, APPLE BOTTOM, Karina Billini takes us inside a Miami salon that treats women recovering from BBLs. What unfolds is an intimate examination of female-to-female caregiving, body dysmorphia, and unsettling transformations cosmetic and otherwise.
APPLE BOTTOM will have its first public reading this Thursday, June 13 at 3:00 PM at the Ensemble Studio Theater as part of the 2024 EST/Sloan First Light Festival. The reading is free and reservations are encouraged.
Between rehearsals and rewrites, Karina somehow found time to share her thoughts about the play.
(Interview by Rich Kelley)
Tell us how APPLE BOTTOM came to be?
It was Fall 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and I had just finished writing a mini one-act Sloan play about the practice of holistic medicine in Dominican botanicas for EST as a Youngblood member (“She Comes from the Dirt”). I really appreciated how it just broadened my artistic lens and voice. So, I wanted to go after the large Sloan commission. I remember watching Linsay on a panel giving advice on how to pitch a successful Sloan play. She said to root the science in your truth. So what was my truth? At the time, Kim Kardashian and her sisters were really blowing up in popularity for their new large buttocks and wide hips that POC women in my community and family had been ostracized their whole lives for.
Kim Kardashian in 2014 Photo: Eva Rinaldi CCA 2.0
While the Kardashians were being celebrated for their new shapely figures, curvaceous women of color continued to be bullied. Why? Two things: 1) society’s long-standing racist beauty ideals where black/brown bodies have been marked as “excessive” against a white/middle-class construct and 2) the Kardashians had learned to “whiten” the curvy POC body frame by perfecting the “slim thick” frame: keep the wide hips and large buttocks of POC women, but still be thin…and white. I was infuriated at how the Kardashians were commodifying the brown/black femme body.
Meanwhile, I was seeing on the news how brown and black women were dying at an alarming rate from getting a BBL. At the time, brown and black women were taking advantage of the cheap pandemic flights and remote work to get plastic surgery, specifically BBLs, done. Most of these POC women already had natural curvy figures, but were criticized for “missing the ‘slim’ in ‘slim thick’.” It was all just too casual for me! Why wasn’t anyone engaging with the fact that we had a serious epidemic on our hands—that POC women were dying under the knife for a procedure that had the highest death rate of any cosmetic surgery?
Why this play? Why now?
Because black and brown women continue to fall victim to a cosmetic procedure that is deeply flawed, unmonitored, and dangerous. Here are some stats from August 2023. The numbers have gone up from when I started my research in May 2022:
1. +1M Brazilian Butt Lifts was done in this year alone (increased by 650% in past 10 years).
2. Up to 455 people died from BBL surgery in 2023.
3. 1 in 250 women in the US have had a BBL.
4. 11% of all cosmetic procedures are Brazilian Butt Lifts.
5. 1 in every 2,300 BBLs result in the death of the patient due to complication related to the surgery.
6. BBLs are 30 times more dangerous than breast augmentations.
7. In the US, $2.8B worth of revenue is generated from BBL surgeries each year.
What would you like audiences to take away from seeing APPLE BOTTOM?
I am not trying to make anyone pro- or anti-BBL. A person has every right to alter their body the way their spirit feels fit. But I do want to advocate for POC women to make that life choice based solely on their wishes and not on what is being dictated by society. If you are a woman of color struggling with body dysmorphia, I hope you feel seen. I hope we can begin a conversation exploring how systemic racism prevents black and brown women from having these body augmentations done safely (whether the difficulty is with cost, accessibility to effective pre/post care, research, etc). I want to call for reform, research, and remedy on this unethical medical failure that has been bestowed on brown and black women.
What kind of research did you do to write the play?
Buttocks augmentation before and after Photo: Otto Placik CCA 3.0
First and foremost, I want to thank Nicky Maggio, a director and dramaturg friend, who joined me in finding and sorting through BBL research during my time as a writer-in-residence at the 2022 New Harmony Project Conference.
I combed YouTube and the internet for about every vlog of recent BBL patients and watched all of them! Watching these women document their BBL journeys and post-care really allowed me to build character motivation, psychology, speech patterns post-op, etc. Through their vlogs, I was able to get a full idea of what it is to be in a recovery house like Apple Bottom Spa from the lymphatic massages to their everyday interactions with the attendants. (I also read plenty of negative reviews from dissatisfied patients at recovery houses based in Miami!) I watched recordings of live BBL surgeries. I listened to podcasts from plastic surgeons promoting or denouncing BBLs. I read epic manifestos dissecting the BBL as a cultural phenomenon and the societal and structural factors that play into it being a health crisis.
Did you encounter any surprises as you did your research?
A surgeon cannot see where the fat is landing inside your buttocks, which is why this surgery is so dangerous. Without visibility, a surgeon can accidentally insert the fat into a vein which can eventually lead to an embolism. That detail is always so shocking for me.
The play includes several scenes in which the characters disrobe before and after their operations. How do you imagine this happening on stage? Won’t you need to cast the play by body type?
This is a conversation I continue to have with the current artistic homes I’m developing APPE BOTTOM in. I have plans this summer to speak with intimacy coordinators and casting directors on how to navigate these factors in a mindful fashion. But it is important to me to show the truth of this procedure and its post care—and to show the body in its various stages during that time—however that may translate theatrically.
How important is it to the play that four of the five characters share a Caribbean background?
As a Dominican-American/Caribbean woman and playwright, very. We need more Caribbean characters on stage! And misbehaving!
The interactions among the five characters are so intense, flavorful and nuanced. Have you ever lived or worked with women like this?
APPLE BOTTOM is a love letter to all the vivacious women in my life. I’ve been fortunate to be raised, mentored, befriended, and loved by brilliant, resilient, fiery, razor-tongued women. When I went to New Harmony Project to develop and outline APPLE BOTTOM, I brought photos of the women in my life—photos taken at dinner parties, office gatherings or us lounging at the pool. And I turned to my dramaturg, Nicky, and said, “I want Apple Bottom Spa to have the same fervent energy.”
I grew up in a matriarchal Dominican family; the women run the show. All the women in my family are storytellers and every time we all get in a room together, you have to fight to get a word in. Everyone has an opinion about something; everyone is desperate to be heard. Everyone is half-listening because they’ve already done a deep analysis of what you just said and are planning a rebuttal. If you wanted to be heard, your voice and stories better be colorful and loud.
In the professional world, I have been really fortunate to be led and mentored by professional women of color who had a duality to them. They knew how to balance book and street smarts. And they were freakin’ hilarious; never shied away from a dirty joke. Every word was rooted in survival and humor. I wanted the Apple Bottom ladies to emulate that.
I’d like to shout out the fiery women in my life who have molded me: my sisters, my mother, my aunts, Renee, the HCE crew, all my spicy Italian playwriting teachers who have changed my life. A special thanks to the powerhouse women who continue to support and help develop this play: Linsay Firman, the APPLE BOTTOM cast, the folks at FLT, EWG, and La Jolla. Gracias. I am humbled by your womanhood.
Caro, the trans woman going through more than one kind of transition, seems to be the moral center of the play. What went into deciding to give this role to that character?
Caro came to me first and very vividly. I knew how she looked right away, her strength, even her name. Caro, in Spanish, means “fancy,” “expensive,” “of quality”—and that’s who she is—a quality human being. She will give up her life to save yours and I think that’s utterly beautiful. I knew I needed a moral center and medical expert in the play, but she had to be someone who wasn’t medically trained in a professional setting. I really shaped Caro around the women in my life who abandoned their medical training because life happened—so they pivoted their knowledge to become a home attendant or homemaker. My mother, for example, went to medical school, but left the profession because she was a poet at heart. But she’s extremely knowledgeable in both traditional and holistic medicine, and that has served her in childrearing and taking care of my grandparents. I shaped Caro around my mother—someone who was scrappy, brilliant, a quick-thinker, resilient, no nonsense but her heart on her sleeve.
Kimberly Smedley
I also shaped Caro’s image around Trans figures such as Kimberly Smedley, who went to great extents to make her illegal silicon injection business (butt augmentation included) as safe as possible for her LGBTQA community—by even studying under prominent plastic surgeons. Like Smedley, Caro has also trained with plastic surgeons to better equip her (now shuttered) injection business—and deploying these safety practices with the Apple Bottom Spa clients..The popularization of injectable silicone can be attributed to the Trans community as a means to not only affirm gender needs, but to help with physical safety. Physical safety. I just felt that was a reality that needed to be reflected and honored in APPLE BOTTOM.
What’s next for Karina Billini?
In the fall, I begin my final year at The Juilliard School and the Public’s Emerging Writers Group as a playwriting fellow—which is very very very bittersweet. I will be spending this summer doing a massive rewrite on APPLE BOTTOM while brainstorming the next three plays I’m required to write for Juilliard!
APPLE BOTTOM is one of six readings of new plays in development as part of the EST/Sloan Project in this year’s First Light Festival, which runs until June 17. All readings are free, but reservations are encouraged. The festival is made possible through the alliance between The Ensemble Studio Theatre and The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
