OK so I don't normally cover theater, but sometimes a story grabs you by the collar and goes hey, pay attention to this one, and that's exactly what happened when I read Vogue's interview with Sophie McIntosh about her play Benevolent.

Vogue calls it one of the most bracing plays of the year, right there in the headline, and... bracing is such a good word for it? Like cold water. Like the truth when nobody asked for it but everybody needed it. The whole piece is about the stuff that sits uncomfortably under the surface of nice, polite life, and I love that Vogue gave it that kind of billing because plays like this usually get a polite nod and a small room.

What got me is how she comes across in the interview. In my read of it, at least, there's no preciousness, no tortured-artist posturing. She just strikes me as someone who follows the discomfort rather than the tidy dramatic beat, and maybe that's my impression more than hers, but it's the vibe I left with and I couldn't shake it.

And the part that made me want to write about her at all: McIntosh wrote a play AND she runs Good Apples Collective, a theater incubator she built to support other writers and artists making risky work. She's essentially out here creating the conditions for more brave, strange, un-commercial theater to exist, which... do you understand how rare that is? Most people guard their little patch of success. She's building a bigger garden and handing out seeds.

The name itself kills me. Good Apples. As in, the opposite of the ones spoiling the bunch. As in, the artists worth betting on. It's so warm and stubborn, this insistence that the good ones deserve infrastructure, deserve money, deserve someone saying your weird play matters before anyone else agrees.

Vogue gets into all of it with her, the play, what shaped it, what she wants the collective to become, and she's funny and blunt throughout in a way that makes you want to immediately buy a ticket to whatever she does next.

I think the reason I couldn't stop thinking about this interview is that McIntosh is doing two brave things at once. The play is brave because it stares at something hard. The collective is brave because it's generous, and generosity in the arts always looks a little risky from the inside. She's doing both anyway.

Anyway. Keep the name in your pocket. If Benevolent is anywhere near you, go. And if you know an artist doing strange, honest work, be their Good Apples Collective. I love that this is the takeaway and I'm keeping it.