The shed is stuck in Georgia.

But I made excellent progress getting most of my stuff into a storage unit, and the move will resume when the shed arrives. I was very much so chomping at the bit to get out of here. I didn’t want to have to go to court, but instead be able to say, “Oh, I already moved out.” Now I have to stand before the judge and beg for my 3 days  I’ve never been to court before. That’s one of the things about not owning a car. You go to court a lot less.

Anyway, I decided not to camp or get a hotel room (I was really not wanting to still be here) for the sake of the cats, who have been through enough today. On moving day for real (which I’m guessing will be day after tomorrow? 🤞), it should be pretty straightforward to grab them and my stuff and go. And then there we will be!

And as much as I am hating this anti climax to the day …my body is very mad at me and does not want to build a shed on the same day it lifts and shoves and heaves every heavy thing. So it all works out for everyone, except my brain. This is not a one day move.

Now that that is out of the way, I want to bring us to the subject of:

FUCK THE THEATRE AND ITS LONG HORRIBLE SUICIDE.

This is apropos of nothing but a memory of how betrayed I felt going to see shows at Steppenwolf. How their sets dripped money, but the direction was canned. How they had a ridiculous focus on celebrity. How their theatre just totally fucking sucked.

And yet, we (young actors at the time) were all told about how they began in a church basement, with an emphasis on great acting–no frills. And how they did not chase celebrities–no, they spawned lauded and respected actors!

I remember sitting in that audience for their horrid production of endgame, a play SET IN A BASEMENT that STILL had a ridiculously over the top set and an actor from CSI in the lead, and thinking, “With all of their funding, why don’t they make a BUNCH of Steppenwolfs throughout the state of Illinois? Keep the focus on building companies of great actors, like what supposedly made them great? Make a lot of them, so there are employed artists throughout the state, doing good work, bringing great theatre to all the books and crannies by people from those nooks and crannies?

Every business does this. What if Waffle House were just one waffle house, but the seats were made of gold? I mean, who would give a shit? But they bring waffles to the masses in shitty diners all over the place and that is much better!.

We try to bring education to the masses and hospitals to the masses and everything good, we generally want to bring to the masses.

But theatre just fucking sucks at this. I don’t know what the hell is wrong with them. They spend so much fucking money to try and prove they are stupid as the internet and as wasteful as the movies, but in a medium that refuses to decentralize or franchise. Make it cost as much as possible, make it as difficult as you can to turn a profit, and while you’re at it, please make sure the work is mediocre at BEST. Make sure people leave every show saying, “Well…I liked the sets!” Or “They all tried to so hard!” In an effort to justify the money they just spent.

And do you know why? Do you know why they refuse to stick to their mission, remember who they are, and deliver good theatre to the masses, using their funding to start many black box theaters rather than one fancy theatre?

Because they are snobs, and it is as simple as that. Because that would 1. Be something akin to community theatre. 2. Would have to acknowledge that there might be excellent actors in zip codes you might not expect. 3. Makes the actors who started it all a little less God like. Is Gary Sinese REALLY that great? What happens if there’s a little unexpected competition?

It didn’t have to be like this for the theatre –complete irrelevance.

What would the world look like if the world’s YouTube creators had another choice? What if they could work at their local theatre? Their local Steppenwolf theatre? Would people choose to make content alone in their rooms? Or would the internet have been competing with the theatre for good talent?

It makes me mad, because nothing teaches you what engagement ACTUALLY means like playing with people, while trying to keep people engaged with you. A populace well educated in theatre doesn’t have these fucking problems of forgetting their humanity.

I really don’t think I’ll ever forgive the big name houses for being such bigoted snobs in their practices. When the art world gave up on humanity and art, so did everyone else. Because of course they did.

And how could the internet not win? Promising everyone a platform? The chance to be a star? Giving everyone the chance to create their hearts desire, no waiting, for free–

So long as you just build the fascism machine.

Women in particular have been taught for a while now that being mad at incompetence is the most bullying thing you can do (Karen=Talk to the manager=hurting low wage workers=Racist=Women who are mad at incompetence are racist. According to internet telephone). This is unfortunate and another one of those things that is probably by design, because as we know, women are always looked to for the moral center of culture. And we’ve been fed a pretty steady diet of “If you assert yourself, you are worse than the patriarchy and in fact are the patriarchy” for the past decade or so.  Allowing for the enshittification of everything.

I’ve been very encouraged by Mastadon and Peertube, though. And also a little salty:) Because I wish it weren’t tech to lead the way on what ethics and decentralization can do. It should have been the arts. But outside of the mainstream tech areas, something is happening to right the ship.

And since theatre loves to chase tech, perhaps at this point, if they are looking in the right direction, they may stumble on a good idea to copy, for once. The good news about being the losing dog in the fight is that it makes you turn towards the counterculture.

Counterculture is where theatre thrives. They killed themselves trying to be everything they were not. I feel that we may have finally reached a tipping point where theatre might get back to its roots, and may gain some new ideas about how to be a public good–how to spread empty spaces for players to fuck around in. Not just reviews of plays you’ll never see that sound pretty crap, honestly.

Or at least they will when I’m through with them:)

Sitting in my apartment all splattered and empty like a dog chewed corpse, I’m taking this time to mourn all that was, all that was lost, all that hurt, all that should have been too stupid to have ever been allowed.

And then I’m going to leave it all behind and commence a fresh start. One I feel is on the way for all of us.

In an era of untruths, we will return to fundamentals to get our bearings. And that’s precisely what the theatre needs: to be an empty space that players fill with humanity and revelation.

I want to live to see the theatre filling the world with empty spaces to come together and play in. There is no social mission higher, and there is nothing else for a nonprofit theatre to be focused on.

Because the theatre has failed so miserably, has become so irrelevant, it will seem stupid, this idea that it would even matter if there were garage theaters and basement theaters and storefront theatres in every zip code.

But when people have a chance to feel passion on a stage by coming together with someone else in a real time and space, they will not go back to YouTube. They just simply won’t. Because it feels too good and means too much.

And when you remove all of the ego and donor money and billing–just put people who are good at playing in an empty space with other people who are good at playing, and let them play–theatre is electric. It almost never happens in this day and age.

But some of us remember when that was possible. Some of us have witnessed it and been a part of it.

In the “empty space that brings together community” pageant, theatre beats the internet hands down.

We all have died a gruesome death. But we are being born again. It still feels like death, doesn’t it? A tunnel, a light, the unknown, the great beyond. The labor of being born is as frightening as the labor of dying.

But we will emerge. And we will start again. New. Better.