Approval Junkie Tickets

By: Faith Salie in collaboration with Amanda Watkins
Director: Amanda Watkins
Producer: Audible Theater
Cast list: Faith Salie

Faith Salie brings her solo show, Approval Junkie, to the Minetta Lane Theatre as part of Audible Theater’s season. And she hopes you like it. Get Approval Junkie tickets on TodayTix.

Approval Junkie is a play composed of anecdotes accumulated throughout a life of validation-seeking. Salie has baked multiple birthday cakes for her son to better the odds that one would turn out right, fought hard to win her high school beauty pageant, and fought even harder to get her son into a good kindergarten. She even meticulously chose her divorce outfit. All these anecdotes have one thing in common: Salie needed to make an impression and gain approval from others. But over the course of the show, she explains how she recognized her need for approval, often in the wrong places, and worked to overcome it and learn how to get her own approval.

Salie has spent most of her career at the intersection between journalism and pop culture, having hosted her own satirical entertainment and news show, Fair Game from PRI with Faith Salie, and going on to appear as a regular panelist on BBC America's Would You... Rather?, Fox News’s Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld, and currently NPR’s quiz show Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me! Since 2009, she has also been a regular contributor to CBS’ Sunday Morning, tackling scientific stories and sometimes providing commentary.

Salie has also worked as an actor, having appeared in episodes of Sex and the City, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Married... with Children, among other roles. She performed the world premiere of Approval Junkie in 2019 at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, Georgia, near her hometown of Dunwoody. That premiere was a homecoming of sorts, as she began acting in and around Atlanta as a child, but the premiere of Approval Junkie Off-Broadway lets her perform in New York, the city she’s called home since 2006. Get tickets to Approval Junkie in New York on TodayTix now.

What to Watch For

• Approval Junkie is based on Salie’s 2016 memoir of the same name. The essay collection has been published with two different subtitles: Adventures in Caring Too Much and My Heartfelt (and Occasionally Inappropriate) Quest to Please Just About Everyone, and Ultimately Myself. The latter subtitle ran with the Atlanta production of Salie’s show.
• Salie has joked that she’s “now in recovery” from being an approval junkie, but her show isn’t intended as a judgmental lesson on how not to be one. Rather, she said in an interview with Encore Atlanta in 2019, “It’s something to recognize within yourself and then to harness … We are built for validation and there’s no shame in admitting that.”
• Salie had wanted to be an actress as a child. She began performing at 12 years old, and she’s played theatrical roles such as Lucy in You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown and Sally Bowles in Cabaret.
• The academic world has certainly approved of Salie! She attended Harvard University and became a Rhodes Scholar, and she has a doctorate in literature from Oxford University.