Envisioning The Wasteland

Since The Wasteland Comedy Hour was announced last month, several people have asked me what the fuck the show is about.  It’s going up at ImprovBoston but it isn’t improv, and it’s not a sketch comedy show, and it’s not a play.  We bill it as a “postmodern variety show” but nobody, including myself, knows precisely what that means yet.

My co-producers (Jason Haas, Matt Tucker) and I developed the show’s concept from three primary desires:

1. We want to produce a multimedia talk/variety show that relied heavily on shortform, written bits, and hosted by a pretentious literary figure (T.S. Eliot)
2. We want to write material that is unique, relevant, and entertaining, with an emphasis on relevant that is unusual of our improv backgrounds
3. We want a new show each week. That’s 7 hours of original material to write, develop, and rehearse.
4. We want to explore our love/hate relationship with the media, and the fractured ways in which we try (and fail) to communicate in 2007

It’s that last one that’s particularly heady and nebulous. I’m afraid it’s given our show the dubious label of “high-concept”—and fair enough, it sounds pretty pretentious. However, it’s just an earnest attempt to summarize the issues we feel are relevant to us at this time in our lives. It is not, really, an accurate indication of what a person should experience watching our show in our tiny theater. We want the audience to be entertained first and foremost, and if they leave with some memorable bits to chew on, so much the better.

The challenge for our (very talented) cast is multifaceted:

• Articulate what modern issues seem relevant to us, then break them down into digestible, chewy morsels
• Write entertaining pieces that aren’t just about a subject, but aim to say something about that subject
• Treat the audience with respect; don’t be heavy-handed or pedantic
• Create seven hours of diverse, unique material in 4 months

To aid with the organization of the project, the producers decided to give each show a “theme,“ which is just a set of organizing principals to inspire thought, discussion, and material.  Each of the seven shows in November/December will fall under a different organizing principal.  Although they’re still flexible at this early stage, the organizing principals are:

• Intimacy (Love/Sex/Family)
• The System (Politics/Social Order/The Law)
• Work (Class/Economics/Money)
• Aggression (War/Violence/Confrontation)
• The Body (Health/Fitness/The oddness of having a body)
• The Self (Art/Dreams/Creation/Identity)
• The Unknown (Religion/Faith/Abstraction)

Praise be on Haas for taking the first stab at the organizing principals, and on the cast for fleshing them out even further with each writers’ meeting.  It’s too early to know whether these principals will really stick, or how tangible their influence on a given show will be. But they’re certainly a lot of fun to think about, and write for.

So, that’s our ambitious, pretentious, delicious show idea. I’ll periodically write about my experience as a writer/producer for this show, in an effort to make the whole process more open-source.