Our Theater Company Could Be Your Life: Some 20/20 Reflections on Theatermaking
So many artists I know are struggling hard right now. And not just financially, but in an existential way. Particularly those who’ve been in keen pursuit of mainstream success of late. For these folks most of all, it seems, the engine has stalled. That life-affirming feeling of forward momentum is gone. When do we get to go back to work? What will that look like? When will they reschedule the season? Now that the dull hammer of austerity has also begun to swing — with arts budgets slashed, or in so many cases, eliminated — the questions are not only about our personal trajectories but also about the entire framework upon which those trajectories rely. Will there be any money? Will that theater still exist? Will anyone still want to fund this stuff?
Understandably, people feel bogged down by this great abyss of not-knowing. Artists who have relied on the (semi)predictable machinery of professional theater are for now frozen in time, unsure what happens next, or where they fit, or how their skills or gifts could be of use in this strange new society that has yet to fully reveal itself.
So now’s when I awkwardly admit that though I see these questions in Facebook posts and Zoom webinars, they are actually distant from my own experience. What I mean is, with the systems and institutions and machinery of it all stopped — I, as a creative being, suddenly feel so much lighter. Genuinely and significantly unburdened.
Whenever I’m ushered into a college classroom to talk to young people about my work (which happens a few times a year), I do my best to offer an example of what life as a theater artist can look like without the slog of auditions, headshots, internships, prepared monologues and finding a way to make rent in New York or LA. I show slides of protestors carrying cardboard sunflowers I made, and pictures of myself screwing together a set outside a squat in Germany. And always a scan of the invitation above. As I discuss the projects on which I’ve built an artistic life, I try to make the talk a kind of rallying cry for audacity and independence. For not waiting for permission.
But back in January, I had begun, in my own ham-fisted way, to chase the kind of mainstream success I’ve always eschewed. I would spend my mornings combing through lists of things I could apply for, and checking them against the spreadsheet of applications I already had out. I wanted to make a living, to not be broke all the time. I wanted a TV writing job, or a review from Ben Brantley, or at the very least a meeting with the programming people at FringeArts. Because I’m in my late 30s and that’s where I should be by now, right? But in all of that, I’d lost sight of the reasons I started making theater in the first place, of the ideals and beliefs that I preach to the college kids. I was all misaligned. I’d forgotten the value of the values that inspire me. And that people tell me they find inspiring in my work.
So it’s been delightful throughout this great institutional pause, to have a chance to come back to myself. To the reasons I have always made work the way I do. To reconnecting with my own sense of “why.” This time has reconnected me to who I am — and who I want to be — as an artist. It has affirmed for me that I cannot (and now I understand, wouldn’t want to) separate my artistic practice from the deep personal relationships and mutual aid on which my artistic life has been built. That relationships and mutuality have always been both the source and the purpose of my work.
And so, for those for who are currently watching the institutional walls around them crumble, wondering where they will now find shelter, those panicking as the funding pool dries up when they have no evidence that another spring exists, I thought I’d share some of my own experiences — a bit of the view from my own unkempt path. I’m not sure how helpful it will be, but as a person who does have the good fortune to feel hopeful and inspired right now, I thought I should do what we’ve all been asked to do in the last couple months. I thought I should try to share what I have.
In September of 2011, I was driving from Glover, Vermont to a Rite Aid parking lot 17 miles from Belfast, Maine. I was on a journey to recover from a recent heartbreak.
A grad school buddy had sold me her ’91 Honda Civic with 240,000 miles, for $500 (payable in installments over a year, bless her), and I had used the car to travel up to the Bread and Puppet farm in Glover. There I volunteered in the kitchen for two weeks, hoping the mindless productivity of chopping carrots and potatoes would help me get my groove back. Indeed, working to feed 60 people a day, picking wild blackberries from the forests, and failing miserably at making a bechamel sauce for a 100-person lasagna did wonders to heal my heart and my sense of purpose and belonging.
A not insignificant part of the heartbreak had to do with suddenly not knowing where I belonged. I’d been living in Baltimore but felt ill at ease there. When I found myself in a long-distance relationship with someone in Pittsburgh, it seemed like the perfect out. But when the relationship collapsed, my entire plan for what would come next went with it. I cast about, looking for a plan — anything that would move me forward and away from where I’d been. A friend hired me to help direct a Hebrew-language production of Disney’s Hercules at a Jewish sleep away camp where no one (including me) spoke Hebrew. When the camp session was over, I took my paycheck and headed north to Glover.
One day at the Bread and Puppet farm, a small pack of punks from New Orleans showed up — they were bumming around New England waiting for the Louisiana heat to die down. I recognized one from Baltimore’s dingy artist warehouse scene and another who I couldn’t place until they pointed out that my old theater company, The Missoula Oblongata, had picked them up hitchhiking outside of Asheville a few years prior. I also met an aloof blonde couple, as well as Li, and David Sweet Cream — whose appellation was tattooed across the knuckles of his toes. They started talking about wild rice — how there was plenty of it in the marshes of Maine and it was all public land, totally unregulated. You just needed a canoe and a few big sticks and for two solid weeks in the early fall, you could harvest all you wanted. You didn’t need a license, you just needed to be able to lay low and not attract attention. I asked if I could tag along. They told me to meet them the next night in a Rite Aid parking lot 17 miles from Belfast.
On my way out of Glover, I stopped at a thrift store and picked up some cassette tapes to listen to on the drive. The Civic had a highly functional tape deck but zero radio reception. One of the tapes was the 25th Anniversary recording of Les Miserables. I sang along loudly, blasting the score on repeat the entire drive to Maine.
By the time I landed at the parking lot, I’d come up with an idea. Why not put on a production of Les Miserables, but you know, with punks? I didn’t have anything else to do. We were all still young enough that it wasn’t unreasonable to ask people to commit to a large creative project just for fun. In the psychic isolation of a solo road trip, it started to seem like a great idea. I could feel the familiar buzz of adrenaline indicating that my mouth was going to start putting a plan into action before my brain had fully worked out the details.
From the Rite Aid parking lot I followed a small caravan to a private home where we’d leave our cars for the week. Around midnight, we rowed out to the island with our camping gear. Initially, I’d been excited about leaving the trip with a bounty of foraged rice. But now all I cared about was pitching my Les Miz idea to this de facto focus group. As David cooked oatmeal over the fire one morning, I put it out there:
“I’m thinking about doing the musical Les Miz. But like, with punks. Or whoever shows up. Like, doing it in the woods or something. But really doing it. With a revolving stage and everything. Do you guys think people would be into that?”
The aloof blonde couple, who were leading the rice expedition, were unmoved. I’m not sure if they understood what I was proposing; but even if they did, they definitely couldn’t see how it would bring any of us closer to living off the land and collectively liberating ourselves and developing the skills we’d need to survive after civilization’s inevitable collapse.
But David’s eyes lit up. “Oh yeah,” he said. “You’re a punk rock celebrity. People would absolutely show up. I’ll cook for everyone.”
A punk rock celebrity. Wow. I had never thought of myself in those terms. As far as I was concerned, I was just one member of a well-loved but hopelessly nerdy theater group that had made a name for ourselves in underground circles simply by trying embarrassingly hard. But David, if you ever read this, I want you to know that that was the most flattering and encouraging thing anyone has ever said to me.
A month later, I’d driven the Civic out to Minneapolis, where I’d been hired onto the BareBones Halloween Extravaganza for the month. From there I called Patrick Costello, who had occasionally booked The Missoula Oblongata in Charlottesville, Virginia, where he lived. I didn’t know him well, but I knew he was a printmaker and had access to a letterpress machine.
I needed 200 invitations printed. Could he help me? And could he design them? I tried to make the text feel radically inclusive while also conveying that there was leadership to the project. If you signed up, you’d be in good hands. Patrick printed the fliers and sent them to me. Over the course of October, I hand mailed them to everyone I’d ever met along my touring travels. No emails. No social media. Nothing that would put us on the radar of MTI. They went to promoters, queer land projects, infoshops, art collectives, bands, DIY spaces, and coffee shops. I also sent them to plenty of people I didn’t know, but who I thought might be game. But if I couldn’t get a physical mailing address, it didn’t get sent.
Let me back up.
In the spring of 2006, I was living in a punk house in Missoula, Montana. There were seven of us living there, plus a dog (maybe two?) and a cat. One roommate slept on a platform high up in a tree in the backyard. Two people lived in the unheated basement. The bathroom sink was perpetually clogged. When I moved in and needed a bed, I walked a few doors down to the alley behind the mattress store and dragged home a king size pillow-top that was someone else’s trash, but would take up almost the entire footprint of my small room. Our backyard had a mini greenhouse, a porch, a hammock, a fire pit. When Frog got tired of the streetlight in the alley shining into our rooms every night, he shot it out with a .22 and to our delight, it never got fixed. Once in early April, in the middle of the night, Wally and Mead tore down the alley in Lily’s pickup truck shooting off fireworks from the truck bed to announce that it was 01–02–03–04–05–06 (1:02am and 3 seconds, the 4th month of the year, the 5th day of it, in 2006). We all cheered and threw cardboard effigies of the numbers into a bonfire.
The house was called The Lab, but it hadn’t yet become a show space. It was just a place where people hung out and lived and stayed when they passed through town on tour. There was a lot of post-Katrina grassroots organizing going on in New Orleans at the time, and The Lab was a way station for many punks heading down to volunteer as medics or gutting houses, or distributing food, or any of the other ten million things New Orleans needed right then.
Lots of punk and noise bands stopped in Missoula, too. Besides Minot, we were the only place to play between Minneapolis and Seattle. And to get to Minot, you’ll drive an hour out of your way, heading north from Bismarck. Missoula sits right on I-90.
The nice thing about small towns is that the economies tend to be more informal. There’s not the great sense of competition for resources that exists in cities where space and time are always at a premium. I can’t remember if we paid for it or not, but in the spring of 2006, the nascent Missoula Oblongata got access to an unfinished basement space downtown, right across from the coffee shop where everybody hung out.
The basement was a total deathtrap. It was dusty and windowless, with one door, accessible only by a rickety wooden staircase. But no one bothered us and we could fill it with junk and spend all our time there rehearsing our first play, The Wonders of the World: Recite.
The plan was that both we and the set would fit in the back of Peter’s minivan and we’d tour around the country just like all the punk bands that had passed through our house. Frog would wire us a homemade lighting board from stuff he found at the junkyard, and though our set would be elaborate, we’d be able to assemble it in any kind of venue in a couple of hours. We would bring theater to the punks, and we would be ambitious.
The etymology of the word “ambition” goes back to the same root as “ambling.” As in, going around, traveling. It comes from traveling around on foot to secure or drum up votes for political office. Going around the country did earn us a reputation, but what we were really after was demonstrating and inspiring the belief that our community of freaks and weirdos — those living on the fringes — deserved well-crafted, carefully made art. We were (tacitly at first, and then with righteous proclamations) pushing back against the idea that the joy and spontaneity and communitas of the punk scene was necessarily linked to a rejection of craft.
The playwright Savannah Reich, in her wonderful zine “The Magic Mountain, or: Thomas Mann is not a Punk” describes punks’ relationship to expertise like this:
“This was my first idea of punk; it means taking all the broken or ugly or incorrect parts of ourselves and holding them up high. It meant bad haircuts that we gave each other with dull scissors; forming bands when we couldn’t really play our instruments;…calling ourselves ‘kids’ well into our thirties. Because who is anyone to tell us what is ‘good’. Because maybe any skill that we couldn’t teach ourselves wasn’t worth having. It was raw power, this idea.”
Indeed, on the one hand, it was awesome that anyone could start a band and anyone could make a puppet show and anyone could publish a zine. Sure, you couldn’t afford a $75 ticket to see a real play in a real theater, or to see a major band play in some stadium that’s been renamed after a bank. But you didn’t need to, because for five bucks you could see six bands play in your friend’s basement, and the music would be hella more relevant to your life.
In the book Our Band Could be Your Life, describing the rise of independently touring bands like Black Flag and the Minutemen, Michael Azerrad points out the simplicity of the process:
“All they needed was to believe in themselves and for a few other people to believe in them, too. You didn’t need some big corporation to fund you, or even verify that you were any good. It was about viewing as a virtue what most saw as a limitation… The Minutemen called it ‘jamming econo.’ And not only could you jam econo with your rock group — you could jam econo on your job, in your buying habits, in your whole way of living. You could take this particular approach to music and apply it to just about anything else you wanted to. You could be beholden only to yourself and the values and people you respected. You could take charge of your own existence.”
The mission of The Missoula Oblongata was to apply all of this, which we knew from our daily lives, to making theater. So we tried to walk a delicate line between the scrappiness that we identified with, and the belief that our audiences deserved to be treated like they’d paid $75. Like they were worth impressing. After all, if we were all preparing for the fall of industrial civilization, shouldn’t we be preparing to have some good entertainment in those times, too? Foraging for wild rice in the name of food sovereignty, sure. But was anyone thinking about storytelling sovereignty?
So when The Missoula Oblongata set out on our first tour, we made our play as intricate and virtuosic as possible. We gave 100 percent on stage. We had a live musician. We had special effects. We fed the audience cake and led them in singing a round. We had a dance number and magic tricks. We were religious about warming up, not being seen in costume before the show, making sure every venue (even living rooms) could provide a complete blackout. In retrospect, it was maybe kind of silly. In the moment, it felt like part of a divine mission.
Our first tour was in the summer of 2006. We performed The Wonders of the World: Recite! in vacant lots, warehouse lofts, backyards, a library. The show blew people’s minds. I can say that, because it’s been said to me by many people over the years, and I’m grateful for that. It featured the kind of self-assured writing only 22 year-olds are capable of.
After the show, people would come up to us saying things like, “I’ve never seen a play before. But now I think I like plays.” Or: “I’ve always hated plays. But I like your play.”
But the best compliment, the thing that always made me feel like what I was doing was worthwhile, was when we would come back to a town the next year, with a new play, and the same kids (using Reich’s definition of “kids” here) who’d hosted us the year before — in a town like Minot, ND — would say, “We liked your play so much we made our own play! We have our own theater troupe now.” That was the best.
Amy Spencer describes this mechanism of reciprocity well in her book DIY: The Rise of Lo-Fi Culture: “Unlike the message of mass media, which is to encourage people to consume, [DIY media] encourages people to take part and produce something for themselves.” Theater as a medium will never be able to replicate infinitely in the way that digital media can. But still, the exclusionary costs and bureaucracy that are part and parcel of Broadway, Off-Broadway, LORT and all that stuff, end up creating the same essential effect as mass media. There are gatekeepers and green lighters. There are career makers and patrons. There are what the performer Chris Davis calls “The Presented”, and then there are the rest of us. And no one is sending the rest of us the message that we should be taking part. That anyone is interested. Success is defined by getting to perform in a venue that is only accessible to the wealthiest people within a major metropolitan area. That is what we are all striving for. To make work that by design only a very small (and not at all arbitrary) percentage of people will ever be able to access.
I’m no fan of mass media, but at least most Americans can afford a Netflix subscription. I can only afford to see professional theater in my town (the poorest large city in America) because a Pennsylvania state program offers $2 theater and museum tickets to people on government assistance (Medicaid, food stamps, cash assistance). It’s a nice perk, but it’s also a great example of the exception proving the rule.
From 2006 to 2010, The Missoula Oblongata’s reputation grew. People around the country, at least in certain circles, began to know who we were. We sometimes got invited to perform in real theaters, but for the most part it was still punk houses, music venues, community spaces. We kept making shows, kept touring them ambitiously, and with donations we’d collect after each performance, we turned a small profit. The shape of my artistic life began to harden and set in the mold that The Missoula Oblongata had created; so by the time that company fell apart due to interpersonal conflict, the mold, for better or worse, was all I knew.
A week or so after I mailed out the invites to the Les Miz project, my phone started ringing. A person I’d met once in Kansas City called me to declare that though she was capable of playing any role, she had to play Fantine. Stephen Cooper called to tell me that he’d once been arrested for singing “Empty Chairs at Empty Tables” drunkenly in the subway in the middle of the night, and did I need a musical director? A person whose name, gender, and age were impossible to divine from their messages sent a recording of themselves singing “Castle on a Cloud” with their ukulele (they would end up stealing the show as Eponine). I knew I couldn’t do it without Sarah Lowry, who’d long been part of my immediate artistic family as part of The Missoula Oblongata and even before that. She signed on as assistant director, which made the show both possible and incalculably better than it could have been without her. One person mailed me a hand-written resume and headshots taken in a photo booth. Patrick, who had printed the invitations, emailed me a recording of himself singing, then sent another email a minute later saying that he was horribly embarrassed and that if the recording was laughably bad, that I should feel okay about never mentioning it to him again, no hard feelings. He’d still be willing to come and help make props or something. Listening to the recording, I was stunned. I thought, “We have our Enjolras.”
I met a guy named Mitchell, who was engineering a small revolving stage for the BareBones project we were both staffed on. Once we’d gotten to know each other, I cornered him: “How’d you like to build one of these, but twice as big, half way across the country in the woods, with no electricity and zero budget?” When I went over to his house a few weeks later, I saw the invitation had been tacked above his desk.
I didn’t really have a plan for what the show would actually be. I didn’t know that we would end up producing the full 3-hour, 405-page-score, 4-part-harmony, 55-person-cast-and-crew show. That we would do the whole thing, note for note, as written, without having gotten the rights to perform it, or that Jaco Connolly would show up from California and spend the entire month making nothing but handmade hats for every single character. That we would in fact have a 20’ diameter revolving stage, a giant golden proscenium, a scalloped curtain, an orchestra, all of it. That it would take two school buses, a pickup truck, a station wagon, and a minivan to transport the entire cast, crew, and set for our sold-out week-long tour down the East Coast.
It’s not easy making work this way, though. I do my best to make it look — and, for my own sake, feel — glamorous; but the truth is, it’s exhausting to try to be a decent artist while also being your own producer, production manager, booking agent, bookkeeper, PR person, tour bus driver, and fundraising team. It’s also depressing to have been touring for 13 years and still be able to roll up to what is contractually your highest paying show of tour, to find that it’s in a non-air-conditioned storage unit in the middle of the summer, with no working bathroom, and it hasn’t been advertised, so only three people show up. It’s discouraging to feel like you’ll never get a grant larger than $2,500, because you simply don’t have the right connections. And no matter how many times I repeat to myself the Beth Pickens mantra of “don’t compare and despair”, every time an artist friend gets a splashy review, or included in a season, or named to some list, it’s hard not to feel like my life has just been one self-sabotaging decision after another.
Which is all to say, in early 2019, I bit the bullet and applied (and was accepted) to a local graduate program in performance. Now, I already had an MFA in theater from a radical little program that had suited me quite well. It had come with a decent education, but it hadn’t provided the kinds of connections and inroads that seem to be what most people get from MFA programs. It’s never helped me land a gig or get a job or meet collaborators, or anything like that. But this new program I’d applied to promised all of that and more.
It would cost me $10,000 per year, even with the scholarship they offered me. I’d be in class almost 40 hours a week for two years. I normally make a significant amount of my income performing and creating work, but with such a rigorous school schedule, I wouldn’t be able to tour or participate in other collaborations until I was done. In other words, I could commit to this program that promised real industry connections and legitimacy — which I assumed would in the end make my life easier — but in the meantime, it would be a great pause, and it would cost me $20,000. Having exhausted my ability to take out student loans (which, yes, you can do), I had no idea how I’d pay for it. But if I could figure it out, the world of connections and festivals and grant panelists would all, I was sure, be laid before me forever after.
I don’t want my interest in the program to seem purely cynical; because I was genuinely excited to find new collaborators among my classmates, and to dive head first into a rigorous training program. During my admission interview, I choked up when I started talking about the importance of creative community, and how lonely for collaborators I’d felt since moving to Philly. During that same conversation, the director of the program told me he actually talked about my work in class, to the very graduate students I’d be joining. He spoke of it as an alternative way of making work, of making a life in the theater. I was both flattered and insulted. On the one hand, I was proud to be worth mentioning. On the other hand, why not just invite me in for an artist talk or workshop sometime? It seemed clear that the very qualities that made my work worth noting were precisely the ones that were keeping me from those kinds of opportunities.
I spent the next few months turning over the question of whether or not to go back to school. I took my solo show on the road for a summer tour and treated it like a month-long bachelor party for the DIY version of myself. I stayed in nice hotels. I built in extra days to have fun and relax in Vegas and at the Grand Canyon. And every time I connected with an old friend on the road, I put to them the question of whether I should keep doing things as I always had, or say goodbye to all that and grow up.
At one point, I had lunch with a super smart friend who has a real job in the world of professional fundraising. I asked them what they thought. They were more decisive than anyone else. They said, “Right now, anyone who asks me if they should go back to school, or make any kind of plan that’s about some kind of long term investment in institutions and systems, I say don’t do it. The world is all going to end. I don’t think this is a smart time to be buying into established power structures.”
As I wound my way across the country, those words kept echoing. By the time I got to my friend Rachel’s house in Texas, I was ready to send an email to the program’s director thanking him for the generous scholarship, but saying that I simply couldn’t afford it. He wrote back saying he understood, but was disappointed. He’d been excited for — and I am directly quoting the email here — the other students to learn from my experiences and artistic desires. I wrote back to remind him that I did live locally and am often invited to do master classes and guest workshops at the university level. I didn’t ever hear back.
I will now invoke a real tragedy:
In late 2016, the Ghost Ship, a warehouse space in Oakland, burned down killing 36 people who were there for a music show. If you don’t know about the fire, there’s plenty to read on the internet. I won’t outline the details here, but know that it was horrific.
I didn’t personally know anyone who died, but the tragedy hit me and so many people I know as though it had happened next door. I live in a neighborhood with a deep and tangled mycelium network of punks and queers and activists — all existing in various rings of the margins, their orbits continually crossing and uncrossing. So when the Ghost Ship fire happened, it was not much of a leap to imagine something like that happening here. What if 36 people from West Philadelphia all vanished in one night? Literally went up in smoke? What would the Satellite Café look like the next morning? Or Clark Park? Or the backyard of Dahlak? How would people go on?
I never played at the Ghost Ship, but I have played in hundreds of places like it around the world. I have rehearsed and partied and had my life changed in those kinds of spaces for almost 20 years now. Even today, the studio I make work in is also a DIY performance space, a sewing studio and an indoor skate park. We have no lease. We have no reasonable egress plan in an emergency. The building is uninsulated and in the summer, other tenants set up air conditioning units that exhaust hot air from their spaces into the building’s hallways. It’s a mess, but it’s the only way we can have a space to make what’s most important to us.
The fire had been front page national news, but was confusing to people who didn’t understand the subculture. So a lot of us “in the scene” were asked for interviews after the fire, to make statements to help the uninitiated understand what these spaces are, and to discuss how we were responding now that we finally understood that this way of doing things was dangerous.
When Philly’s NPR affiliate reach out to me, I demurred. I didn’t think our illegal space needed any kind of spotlight shone on it right then. But I read (and have since reread, many times) the musician Kimya Dawson’s statement on Facebook about the fire. It brings me to tears nearly every time I read it. I believe it’s worth quoting at length:
“I have played in so many spaces with precarious floors and beams and stairs and not enough exits and certainly no sprinklers. Warehouses, squats, basements, rooftops, barns. Playing music saves my life. People tell me listening to music saves their lives. People telling me that my music saved their life saves my life even more. And we take the risks. Playing and listening in unsafe spaces. Because when we feel like we are dying anyway the risks don’t seem as risky as the risks we already face every day. The risk of self destructing. There aren’t enough places for us to gather. Our favorite places get turned into parking lots. So many clubs with their overhead and their staffs and their contracts and their lack of inclusivity and lack of tolerance and their age restrictions and their bars and their bigots. Those spaces are also unsafe just in different ways. Those spaces break you if you don’t make em the money. Because it’s always about the money. The fucking money. They will make you feel like a failure. Like a piece of shit. But all we can do is art. So we meet underground. We lurk in the shadows. And there it isn’t about success or failure. We sing and scream and cry and laugh and dance and group hug like cinnamon rolls and tell each other to get home safe and stay safe and be careful because the world is scary and the world is risky. We know we have to take care of each other.
So we meet in warehouses. Where we can just love on each other and escape from all the scariness and sadness. We take care of each other in our unsafe spaces that can feel so much safer than your safest spaces.
If I hadn’t had people inviting me to their unconventional venues over the years I would have been dead a long long time ago.”
It is not a fluke, or a glib joke, that The Wonders of the World: Recite!, The Missoula Oblongata’s first play — the one that caught everyone’s eye — was about the end of the world. The whole plot is that there’s a grandmother and a grandson who live in a lighthouse, and the mailman used to have a thing with the grandmother, but she got a better offer. Nothing much happens until at the end a meteor hits the earth and kills everyone, including the audience.
Life has always, to me, felt precarious. I think in large part because I remember being seven years old and being taught in school (just a regular old public school in South Florida) that the Earth was dying and it was our responsibility to do what we could to fix it. You know, reduce, reuse, recycle. As someone with what a therapist once called “an overdeveloped sense of responsibility” I internalized pretty quickly that we all had to do literally everything we could. This was an emergency. But then I looked around and realized how some of us weren’t doing anything — how so many of the other second graders in the cafeteria were just bringing Squeeze-Its with their lunches every day like they didn’t care that the packaging would never biodegrade. So there it was. We were all gonna sink like the polar bears.
But it’s unwise to put too much stock in individual responsibility and consumer choices. The real drivers of these things are institutions. The organizations and structures that make up the systems — which yes, are run by people, but people with a lot of money and power. But I’m an educated, straight, white person from a very comfortable middle class upbringing and I have never had any indication that institutions would bend to support me or my friends or my interests. And that is directly because I have never had any interest in supporting or investing in theirs. As Andrea Smith so succinctly puts it in the preface to The Revolution Will Not Be Funded, “Do you think the system is really going to fund you to dismantle it?”
The nonprofit industrial complex and the organizations that make it up are primarily interested in perpetuating the paradigm of their own importance and making money for their executives. If you’re not so sure, look at the budget of any large organization. Look at what it pays its executives and compare it to the amount of money they disperse to their employees and to the artists they are ostensibly supporting. This is not to say there are not exceptions, but on the whole, large arts and culture organizations are interested in keeping money flowing through their coffers, enriching themselves, and keeping themselves relevant in order to continue to do so.
People forget that the Ghost Ship fire happened just a month after the 2016 election; in a moment when so many of us already felt newly under siege. I spent election day 2016 driving from the Standing Rock protest to Minneapolis. As electoral college votes started rolling in, I listened casually on the car’s radio. It didn’t matter much. Hillary was going to win and shit would stay the same. But out on the North Dakota prairie I’d gotten a feel for what an alternate future could be like. “It feels like the good version of the apocalypse” I’d reported to my sweetheart over the phone, after my first night at the protest camp. “It’s like, all these different people from all over the world, all showing up to help, having nothing in common, just making shit happen.”
By the time I got back to Philly a few days later, we all knew that the things we loved were now in graver danger than ever. We knew that things would be unleashed that would not be easily stuffed back into a bottle. Though it wasn’t actually caused by Trump’s election, the news of the Ghost Ship fire made it feel like our fragile and homemade scene — built, like lichen, though relationships forged over long periods of time — was indeed to be a casualty of the coming wars. If felt like both a harbinger of what was to come and a reminder that actually, it’s been terrible, and precarious and unsustainable all along. Like Dawson’s Facebook post said, our lives have always been in danger, even if no one ever admitted it.
But as much as The Missoula Oblongata toured like a punk band, playing in a lot of punk venues, we always made a point of denying that we were in fact punks. Maybe we just didn’t want to be a part of any club that would have us as a member. Or we didn’t want to have to give up wearing vintage dresses. I don’t know. But at one point I found myself dating a guy who I had met when The Missoula Oblongata played the 40th birthday party of Cindy Crabb (talk about a punk rock celebrity) at a weekend-long festival in Ohio. After declaring his fandom, he’d handed me his business card. It read: “A handyman who is honest and reliable.”
Some weeks later I was on a four day road trip with him to Tennessee in his ’82 diesel Golf, on our way to his old friend’s wedding. It was our first date. At some point, as we were winding through Kentucky, he said something about both of us being punks. I corrected him. But the conversation was over before it began. He said, “Stop it. That conversation is pointless. It’s like asking, ‘Is the world going to end?’ We already know the answer. It’s like, yes it is, and yes you are, and it’s not worth talking about beyond that.’” I’d never heard anything more romantic in my life. Some months later, he would break my heart, inciting the very journey that would lead me to the rice marshes in Maine.
I initially started this essay because I wanted to write about Less Miserable (as the Les Miz project eventually became known) and how it feels to me newly relevant in this moment. I wanted to offer it up as an example of how it is possible to make ambitious, impossible, virtuosic work with no support, no funding, no infrastructure, no precedent. How you don’t need a board or a programming director or industry connections or permission or even a rehearsal room. You don’t need foundation support or a workshop or a residency. It is wholly possible to do the impossible with just the resources of your community and the ambition of a group. It really, really is.
But when I begin trying to describe the process or the show itself, or what was magic about it, the lush topographical map of the project and its implications flattens in my mind. It gets a little nuts-and-boltsy. There are anecdotes I recall but they’re either goofily trivial or had-to-be-there profound. So for now anyway, I’m not trying to share the “how” of the project. If anyone wants, I can explain that stuff over coffee. But it’s not what really interests me.
What’s so much more essential, what resonates for me in this moment, is the project’s “how much.” As in, how much can we do by ourselves? And how much more can we do when we ask a friend for help? Or when we’re willing to be that friend for someone else? How ambitious can we be communally? How far can we go just for fun? Not for likes, or comments or funding or going viral — just for the thrill of accomplishing the impossible. To get a glimpse of what a different kind of world, a different way of ordering our priorities and relationships could look like. And the gift of forever after knowing in your bones that it can be done. For the exhilaration of bringing your whole self to being part of a group, with no goal beyond how physically good that feels.
Kim Gordon of Sonic Youth once wrote, “People pay to see others believe in themselves.” It is now almost eight years since I put on Less Miserable, and people still tell me that seeing the show made them feel like anything was possible. That they felt empowered simply knowing that other people had done something like that. For me, putting on Les Miz set the bar pretty high in terms of what we can accomplish when we are generous with ourselves, our collaborators, and our community. Not every project clears or even approaches that bar, of course. Not every project has to. But it’s good to know that that power is accessible when we need it most. As Jill Dolan wrote in Utopia in Performance: Finding Hope at the Theater (and really, if you haven’t read that book, you should), “The experience of performance, the pleasure of a utopian performative, even if it doesn’t change the world, certainly changes the people who feel it.”
Today I live with a man I love deeply, but who, from inside our leaky cinder block bunker loves to tell me that I am not, in fact, a punk. Where was I during the battle of Seattle? Probably in my freshman playwriting class. Have I have ever liked the loud, fast music he puts on while cooking breakfast? Have I ever even listened to the Minutemen, from whom this essay shamelessly takes its title? Definitively no. When I control the stereo, I blast the original cast recording of Sweet Charity, and the 2019 revival of Oklahoma. So sue me.
But I’m lucky to be living through this isolation with someone who has held my same it’s-all-going-down worldview for a long time. I’m lucky to be with a punk. One thing he is fond of saying is that the world has ended many, many times before. It’s just a question of whose world is ending. Or, who is the world ending for? Like, the world definitely ended for the people of Pompeii back in 79 (the original 79). Or, if you lived in Aleppo, chances are your world ended sometime in the last ten years.
See, on March 11th of this year, I got an acceptance letter from the MacDowell Colony. It was the most prestigious, mainstream, exciting thing that had ever happened to me. I was doing air guitar for like, 20 minutes after I read the email. In that moment, I felt like I had outsmarted that MFA program I declined to go to. I was winning the race with the parallel universe version of myself. But then by the 13th of March, I had gotten another letter from MacDowell that in effect said, “Actually, please hold while we wait for this virus thing to blow over…” And it felt like the world was finally ending. And not because this potential quantum leap of an opportunity was now going to slip through my fingers. But because I realized it really didn’t matter actually. The fellowship would be awesome, but would ultimately be another stepping stone on a path to who knows what — probably just other stones.
Losing the opportunity to go to MacDowell would only really mean losing some hypothetical imagined future, where the connections or the work I made there led, in some convoluted (but surefire) way to be being a part of some TV writers room and making enough money to no longer qualify for food stamps. But it wouldn’t affect whether I could keep doing the things I love. It wouldn’t stop me from being able to make the kind of work that sits in my heart, that feels like a part of me. Like it is the reason I am here.
Recently, a writer friend who lives rurally emailed to ask “how things are up there” — in the densely packed urban Northeast. I told her about the Zoom-based reality shows I’ve been producing (with Patrick Costello, who did indeed end up playing Enjolras in Less Miserable, and with whom I’ve been closely collaborating ever since). These shows are fun and goofy and give people an outlet to express themselves, connect with others, and participate in something outside themselves for an hour or two a week. Sometimes they even get deep, and a casual discussion of a cookie recipe turns into a story about an elderly neighbor who’s gravely ill. Sometimes I appear as my clown character alter-ego, and sometimes I’m just myself in a hoodie and the pajama pants I’ve been wearing for seven weeks.
These projects have kept me busy and inspired. They’ve been a steady tether to friends and my larger community throughout the quarantine. They’ve reinforced the strength and warmth of collaborations formed over years of hard work and solidarity.
The reason I was driving back from Standing Rock on election day in 2016 was that Patrick had asked me to help him with an important project he was working on in graduate school. It was for his mid-semester critique and the stakes were high, so I’d booked my flight back to coincide with that rehearsal process.
The morning after the election, he called me — both of us crying, like everyone was — and he told me that if I needed to stay in the Midwest, to go back to the protest, I should do that. He understood if that felt more important now. But there were thousands of people out there on the prairie who could chop potatoes and sort through clothing donations — which is what I’d been doing each day. There wasn’t anyone else who could light my friend’s show for him in the way we had developed through years of collaboration. There wasn’t anyone else who could offer the kind of critical feedback you should only really trust a few people in your life to give.
In my email response to my friend, I referred to these Zoom shows Patrick and I have been doing as our media empire, saying that they were: “Hilarious in that they take up lots of time and serve no real purpose except for keeping me and other people entertained. But I guess that’s what all my projects always do, I just never really thought of it like that before.”
As I write this, I’ve been withholding rent on my studio space for two months, hoping the landlord will be understanding or lazy enough to forgive the lapse, seeing as how all theater work is indefinitely on hold. I’ve watched as the emails roll in from Fractured Atlas that they’re cutting one program, then another. I sign the petition begging Philadelphia’s mayor to rescind his decision to eliminate the Office of Arts, Culture and the Creative Economy, which funds a great many small arts projects around the city each year. I read a lot of the news each day, feeling it’s some kind of civic duty. And I keep coming back to another quote from Dolan’s book. The one where she says, “Perhaps these aren’t moments of defeat; perhaps they’re moments of relief, messianic moments that herald the arrival of a new and better world. Or perhaps the seeds of utopia are only present at times of failure and apocalypse.”
At one point in Les Miserables, Enjolras, who is the leader of the student rebels, sings: “It is time for us all to decide who we are. Do we fight for the right to a night at the opera now?” The next thing we know, the students — who have no military experience, no street cred, no reason to believe that they have what it takes to overthrow a well-entrenched system of monarchy — have built a hodgepodge barricade out of the garbage lying around them in the street. We see them fighting for their lives with everything they have, singing in harmony, the revolving stage spinning beneath them.
[all photos by Jori Ketten]
Though all photos were taken with the subjects’ permission, if you see yourself in one and would like me to take it down, please let me know. Thanks.
