The Wasteland Comedy Hour is over. Indulge me, if you will, as I fumble for a suitable postmortem.
The last show, “In Calvin We Trust,” was a good blend of silly and sentimental. We mixed with some comedy staples—god, religion, death—from new angles, and peppered in some darker material—our fears, the future, the cosmos—and steeped everything in a rich time-travel broth. Of our shows that require context to understand, I’d say “In Calvin We Trust” is up there with “Hitting Our Marx,” and I don’t know if there’s any one bit or sketch that I could extract, hold over my head, and scream “Look! This is how awesome our show was!” As we got deeper into our seven show run, we found ourselves intertwining sketches more and more. I’m looking forward to the day when we edit the footage from our live shows together, and host the whole experience in cyberspace—we definitely made a “live happening” that’s difficult to grok from our standalone video selections.
That said, here’s a thing:
Weird, right? It’s my send-off to the T.S. Eliot character I’ve been playing for the last three months. I figured he’s already dead, so there’s no harm in turning his pseudofuneral into an artsy-fartsy meditation on performers’ postpartum. Also, I love “The Long Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” and had to get Eliot’s real voice in the show. This seemed like an elegant solution, a kind of video elegy. The funny stuff in our last show was strong enough to buoy this downbeat, and I am eternally thankful that we have a team willing to take these kinds of risks.
Speaking of the team! Holy shit, do I love these cats. I wish I could throw them a parade. I wish I could remember every compliment that people have given me in the last five days so that I could replay it for the cast and crew, word for word, as I clap them on the backs and then maybe give them handjobs. The Wasteland Comedy Hour was a massive machine, an extremely demanding ensemble production that relied on our team’s ability to not just pull their weight, but to stretch well beyond their comfort zones, to be open to peer collaboration, critique, and construction, to set the bar high and then jump like crazy. They built a ship, drew a map, and steered everybody there and back again.
The time to bask in our success is quickly drawing to an end, as everybody switches gears, prioritizes new and old projects, and contemplates what to do now that they’ve blown six months on one big beast of a variety show. Myself, I’ll be continuing to improvise with my friends and colleagues in the cast, although I’ve put a moratorium on any new improv projects that involve significant rehearsal time. I’m reclaiming my weeknights and charting my own course for the immediate future—finding full-time employment for my days, and (screen)writing at night. It’s going to be rocky, moving from the comfort of a supportive, talented ensemble to spending nights alone with the inventions and failings of my own imagination.
But The Wasteland was a shot of liquid courage. We’re all moving onward; upward.
I think every risk we took in “My Thing Is Bigger” was paid off in full. We recreated the war on terror in unicorn costumes and got away with it. The audience rewarded our efforts with laughter, applause, and contemplative silence (in equal measure, always where appropriate). As the tone of the show shifted from silly to satirical to serious, even the simplest of jokes benefited from the larger context of our presentation: a quiet understanding that we danced on difficult subjects, and trusted our crowd to trust us in turn.
After the show we hit the Thirsty Scholar, and were surprised at how little we missed Bukowski’s thumping music and overcrowded aisles, currently buried under layers of construction material. The Thirsty Scholar doesn’t have the patented Bukowski beer or pub grub, but for a change of pace, we could have done worse. Several of our friends in the audience inquired after the linkage between our show’s opener and closer: respectively, an excerpt of Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead,” and a performance of Billy Bragg’s “Between the Wars.”
Muriel Rukeyser’s “The Book of the Dead” (excerpt):
These are our strength, who strike against history.
These who corrupt cells owe their new styles of weakness
to our diseases;
these carrying light for safety on their foreheads
descended deeper for richer faults of ore,
drilling their death.
These touching radium and the luminous poison,
carried their death on their lips and with their warning
glow in their graves.
These weave and their eyes water and rust away,
these stand at wheels until their brains corrode,
these farm and starve,
all these men cry their doom across the world,
meeting avoidable death, fight against madness,
find every war.
I haven’t been able to locate the full text online, unfortunately. It’s a long discourse on the Hawk’s Nest Incident, a mining tragedy that would be lost to history if it weren’t for Rukeyser’s odd hybrid of investigative journalism, activism, and poetry.
Tucker had pitched “Between the Wars” as our show closer, a kind of protest and peace offering, long before we had a macroscopic view of the show’s tone. We were worried that it would seem didactic without any direct tie-ins to the… you know… comedy. But after listening to the song a few times I began catching wisps of “The Book of the Dead,” and dug the poem out of one of my college textbooks. It was perfect. Both pieces tackle the issue of war from the perspective of those it hits hardest—the working class (here, miners). As if by magic our show could come full circle, and in Eliot’s shoes I could set the expectation of the evening by sprinkling a little melancholy into my opening monologue. Tucker and Pope nailed the Bragg song, start to finish, and I will not second-guess Tucker’s instincts again.
Of the material besides our closing song, I heard the most comments about this little mock recruitment ad I created:
It was super-fun to make, and lest I seem insensitive to all those young men in the Scouts: I am only familiar with the BSA’s hideous inner workings because I am an Eagle Scout myself. My time in the scouts was great, but I have completely dissociated myself from them over the years as spotlights continue to illuminate the larger machinations of the organization.
I spent most of Friday night in the wings, watching our videos and listening to the crowd. It rivaled some of my most visceral experiences on stage, and I left the theater with a rare sense of accomplishment.
I didn’t have hardly anything to do on Friday, a welcome breather before the show’s home stretch. Eliot’s typical role as show-facilitator was trumped, for this one episode, by Best Buddy, our douchebag Big Brother wannabe. This show was a technically complicated one made all the more difficult by our inability to do a real tech/dress run in the theater. We also had some pretty dark pieces (finally), which may have alienated some of our audience but ultimately aligned with what we wanted to say about The System. Our guest comedian, Baratunde Thurston, ended up being a perfect fit, and gave the audience a much-needed break from our Best-Buddy-altaverse. He did a killer set. By the end of the show we’d touched on many facets of the system—education, politics and government, social order, the law—without veering into the land of heavy hands.
A small taste of Best Buddy…
As these shows come together at the last minute, it’s often surprising to see how many threads and themes emerge in our material. On Friday, one of our threads was Mel Gibson. Who knew he was such an integral part of The System?
Not much to say about the money show. Full house again (yay), but whether it was due to the audience’s age, disposition, or post-Thanksgiving haze, we had to wake them up with a cattle prod. By the end of the show they were on board—except for the poor old folks who hated rap, and so hated the Will Smithian ditty that ended our show. I got some decent feedback from friends in the audience, despite feeling like the two sketches I wrote and directed completely tanked. C’mon, people, suicidal talking bananas are funny! Right? Right?!
Happily Pope’s ode to the glass ceiling went over well:
I checked out for a lot of the show, which was a small problem because I was on stage for much of it. As noted earlier last week, I lost my job on Monday, and many of the filmed bits we played on Friday took place in that office. I found it hard to focus. Today marks my first week of pavement-pounding and resume updating, and all the despair that these things entail. Although I’ll be posting (whining) about the job hunt pretty regularly on this blog, I won’t be writing about the circumstances that led to this situation. Indeed, many of them are still a mystery to me. It should be sufficient to say that my severance paperwork also included a non-disparagement agreement, a wise move on their part.
Onward. Upward. There must be a job in Boston that synergizes my creative and professional talents. I can only hope it pays.
Week three! We sold out the theater in pre-sales alone, which is great news for us but sad for our friends and family who tried to buy tickets at the door. If you’re planning on attending one of the four remaining Wasteland Comedy Hours, buy tickets in advance.
This show was a turkey. And by turkey, I am referring to a three-time streak of awesomeness in the sport of bowling—of course. A lot of the material came together at the last possible second, which will be the norm now that we’re mid-run. Another warm, supportive, and super-smart audience who appreciated our artsy moments as much as our dollops of, shall we say, raunch dressing. Highlights of this show included a five-part running musical exploration of Craigslist’s Missed Connections, a Hitchcockian thriller about babies, a talking cat, a silent film porno, and that part where we gave everybody in the audience a mix CD.
I’m working on getting a video uploaded. Hopefully by Wednesday?
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