Essay: I would rather swim through raw sewage than go to the theater

Theater is my hell. Musical theater? I would rather swim through raw sewage, hitting sawed-off corpse dicks to the face. Honorable mentions include karaoke and improv. Back to the theater… it’s not fun for me. I enjoy reading plays by the greats; August Wilson, Tennessee Williams, and Arthur Miller. But when it comes to sitting in an audience, it just ain’t for me. There was the time I was taken to see Monty Python’s “Spam-a-Lot,” and while I wanted to see it, once I saw it, I hated it.

Back in the day, I had to endure a college play a friend’s girlfriend was in and fell asleep. Everyone got all mad and said I was rude. I was bored. Watching someone bawl and cry on the floor, pounding it, was exhausting. I mean, she was exhausting, so maybe that influenced it. Either way, it sucked. And what bothered me wasn’t just the crying — it was this mangled, polite expectation that I pretend it moved me. There’s this unspoken social contract in theater where you’re supposed to nod along, applaud on cue, and lie to everyone afterward about how “brave” the performance was. LOL. Fuck that. I never have. If something sucks, my face tells the truth before my mouth can stop it. Theater, especially bad theater, demands a politeness I don’t possess. It asks you to respect the effort more than the result, and that’s always rubbed me wrong. I don’t clap because someone tried. I clap because something had the juice. That distinction has gotten me in trouble my whole life.

So when my homeboy had his play run as part of Frontera Fest, a community theater project that takes place during the winter in Austin, I was not excited. I was excited for him because he’s a brilliant writer and you gotta support the homies. I want to see my friends have incredible careers. What I did not want to endure was improv, a monologue about Chicago — my hometown — and some other whack shit. But I went.

The theater was the size of a sneeze. The chairs were too small. I could smell other people’s cologne. I had my friend Nick next to me to suffer through it with, but when you’re packed in that tight, how am I going to make jokes? I couldn’t look at my phone because then I’m the asshole for finding dog videos on Instagram more entertaining than what was happening in front of me. Instead, I had to sit there and pray to the gods of intermission.

Someone thought it would be a good idea to have an actor pretend they were Jane Byrne, Chicago’s mayor when I was born. Odd choice. And then, to close out the night, someone let improv people be the last act, which in my mind is an act of fucking war. Improv is so fucking corny it makes me want to commit seppuku.

But here’s the thing. Not everything was garbage. Some of the show actually had the juice.

A poet did this monologue and poems about hypocrisy in being Christian, and it went hard. It was a challenging mind fuck of spoken word. I was into it. I don’t think it was really “theater” — it was something else entirely — but it got me.

My dude’s play was genuinely excellent. It was an esoteric They Live-tinged vibe that would make both David Lynch and David Cronenberg proud with its sly nods to consumerism and the general state of predatory capitalism ruining our lives. This is what I want out of community theater — weird shit that makes art majors feel something. My man Marty Shambles did that with his play The Luddites. Shout out to director Jaimee Harmon-Taboni who brought the vision to life. 

Congratulating him wasn’t a practiced act. I meant it. His play made me think, which is all I ask of art. If I’m going to sit in the sweat box, at least make me use the noodle. Which I did. And I wasn’t the only one: people clapped like they meant it. Not for politeness. Not because their friend was in it. Because something in the material landed. That’s harder to do than most people realize.

Now let me tell you about the play that won.

It was fucking terrible. Everything I hate about theater was on hard-on display. Fake crying, a broken mother, some weird push-pull, bad dancing, every box checked. It won because it was a numbers game — they bought more asses to fill seats. The algorithm even chases us into the least expected spaces. Had it been judged on artistic merit, we’d be having a different cup of cultural coffee, if you smell what I’m brewin’.

I get it. This is community theater. The whole point is to celebrate artistic value. In a world full of assholes pointing phones at themselves doing a silly dance, I’ll take someone pretending to dance like an emotionally abused swan or whatever the fuck that was. But does that stop me from wanting to die? No. That it did not.

Some people want art that soothes. Others want art that challenges. And others just want their friends to win, even if the product is a trite fistfuck of cliché.

When it was over, I could feel the weight of others having felt like they endured something rather than enjoyed it. No one cried, at least. If someone did, I would have lost my shit.

Please never make me go to the theater again.

Featured photo by Brett Brookshire courtesy of Frontera Fest

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