Philosopher Stefan Molyneux engages deeply with a caller, a millennial from the Midwest, who shares his struggles navigating the theater industry amid the ideological shifts brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic. The caller recounts his initial excitement upon taking the leap into a full-time theatrical career, filled with aspirations after years of training at institutions such as Boston Conservatory. This hope, however, soon transformed into disillusionment as the pandemic decimated live theater, leading to a landscape now dominated by politically charged narratives and identity politics.
The caller describes his unsettling experiences upon re-entering the theater scene post-lockdown, revealing a community rife with ideological fervor where dissenting opinions are treated as taboo. He articulates a powerful longing for the traditional integrity of storytelling, which he feels has been replaced by an environment more concerned with political correctness and expressing overt messages than with the purity of artistic expression. "The idea that anyone in the community would disagree with the opinion of the mainstream urban monoculture has become absurd," he laments. This ideological capture has thrust him into an identity crisis where he feels forced to conform in order to maintain his livelihood, stifling his authentic voice and stifling the very art form he cherishes.
Molyneux responds insightfully, pointing out the incongruity between the stated aims of the theater community and the reality, wherein artists feel compelled to dilute their creative instincts to fit a narrow ideological mold. He asks the caller about the darker implications of his frustrations and explores whether the theater world, so diligent in its pursuit of progressive ideals, can be salvaged. In this exchange, the caller reflects on the stark irony that many who once championed diversity now engage in exclusionary practices, reminiscent of the very societal issues they claim to stand against.
As the conversation unfolds, the caller grapples with feelings of isolation and the challenge of finding his place in an environment where he feels he must either "drink the Kool-Aid" or risk ostracization. Insightfully, Molyneux encourages him to channel his frustrations into creative outlets, discussing the potential for satire and the exploration of absurdity in the theatrical space, reminiscent of classic works that have used comedy to critique societal structures. He emphasizes the importance of using art as a means of expression rather than oppression, advising the caller to harness his unique perspective to write narratives that challenge the status quo and encourage deeper, critical thought among audiences.
The connection between the caller's personal journey and the broader trends in the arts highlights a critical discourse on the future of live performance. Molyneux's mentorship-like responses serve to inspire the caller to envision a future where authenticity reigns, prompting the question: can theater and its artists reclaim their role in society as purveyors of truth? The conversation closes with a sense of cautious optimism; though the path ahead is fraught with obstacles, the potential to reintroduce authenticity into theater may pave the way for a transformative revival within the industry. In an age where ideological straitjackets often limit creativity, this dialogue serves as a rallying cry for artists to take bold steps toward reclaiming their narratives and the core essence of theater itself.
0:02 - Theatrical Dreams and Disillusionment
39:52 - Struggling with Ideological Capture
44:26 - The Future of Theater and Personal Aspirations
45:04 - The Struggle to Find Balance
46:20 - Shifting to Tech and Entrepreneurship
48:39 - The Financial Toll of Art
49:38 - Seeking Artistic Integrity
51:18 - Reflections on Connection and Alienation
51:53 - Redirecting Artistic Fulfillment
54:07 - The Challenge of Writing
56:39 - The Fear of Repercussions
57:48 - The Echo Chamber Dilemma
1:00:44 - Exploring Absurdity in Art
1:03:09 - The Role of Satire in Society
1:04:53 - Finding Humor in Darkness
1:06:44 - The Tension Between Ideologies
1:10:17 - The Absurdity of Artistic Expression
1:17:29 - The Future of Art and Society
[0:00] So I am a mixed-race gay millennial from the Midwest. Like you, I majored in theater, got my master's degree in Boston, and was finally at a point where I could actually live off of theater with some supplemental work. So I quit my job. I was working as a genius or as a mobile technician at Apple, at an Apple store in Cambridge in Massachusetts. And so I eagerly anticipated a year with the five contracts lined up and enough planned income to actually sustain and even save money. This was December of 2019. So as you can imagine, the year didn't go as planned. I found myself without contracts and broke because of the pandemic, with the whole industry utterly crushed by COVID in a way that no other entertainment-related industry was, at least as far as the arts is concerned. So it has not recovered. In the subsequent five years I've lived.
[0:48] Live theater has become an artistic wasteland. I've tried to keep doing shows, but when things began reopening, the environment and the community that I remembered had been transformed into this radical, hate-filled tribe of virtue-signaling, ideologically captured zealots. There is no more storytelling. Everything has a message. Everyone has an agenda. And the idea that anyone in the community would disagree with the opinion of the mainstream urban monoculture has become absurd. They assume you agree with their absurdities, all of them. If you're in theater, you hate Trump. You believe in intersectionality, in critical race theory, in sterilizing effeminate boys and more masculine girls. I do shows, and the integrity and virtue of storytelling has disappeared. The people are nihilistic, disingenuous, constantly angry, and every production I've done feels like a parody of what great theater was. I feel lost. I have no respect for my fellow artists, the people I once looked up to. I dare not voice my personal opinions. Maybe this production of Wizard of Oz doesn't have to be about the patriarchy. What is wrong with this straight actor playing a gay role? Aren't we just actors?
[1:50] So I keep my mouth shut because literally one wrong comment, social media post joke, and I would never work in that town again. I can't do it anymore. I love performing more than anything else in the world, but I don't love that in order to play any roles, I have to also play the role of one of them. At the end of the day, none of it is good. I spent nearly two decades training and learning and honing my skills for a job in industry that simply doesn't exist anymore. So I have all but stopped auditioning. I've redirected my energy into tech and graphic design, making music when I can, but it is not enough. I go months without singing and I start to go crazy. I hold on to the hope that the world I remember will come back, that people need theater as a form of human connection to learn to be challenged, exposed to ideas that, God forbid, make them question the narratives, assumptions, and perspectives they hold. Theater's essential purpose, as Shakespeare said, is to hold, as it were, a mirror up to society. But now I feel like it just holds a smartphone with an Instagram filter, and it's too busy affirming your beliefs and agreeing with you to allow any moment of transformative contemplation. Even if there were still an abundance of contracts and well-paying opportunities now, I wouldn't want to be part of this epidemic of the uninteresting and its volatile environment of opinion landmines ready to blast the critical thinking out of any dissenters. What advice would you give to those of us devoted to an industry whose work has been hijacked by mass psychosis and whose workers have become a cult? Do I pretend and drink the Kool-Aid or do I die of thirst?
[3:11] So great some great writing i read that earlier and i was like oh that's the creative juices it's very nice very good very good thank you very good and it's funny because you sort of say i don't like the identity politics and how do you introduce yourself.
[3:27] Exactly. Well, OK, for context, I guess for context, because it's very easy to be a young white straight male in society and have these opinions.
[3:39] Oh, like so you're sort of saying I've got some bona fides because I'm gay, I'm biracial. And so I'm not just some white guy with these perspectives. Is that what you mean?
[3:50] Well, it's also that when I enter in those spaces because of those prerequisites, because of those immutable characteristics, It's already assumed whether or not I was even in theater that I am on that side of things, right?
[4:01] Right.
[4:01] Because I'm part of the LGBTQ community, the black community. It's just, you know... All of that stuff is kind of assumed upon entry into the tribe in any way. So I guess that's why I added for a particular context for you and for whoever's listening. Okay, got it. But no, that's not how I introduced myself. No, in fact, I find those things to be the least interesting things about me. I am what I do, not what I didn't have control over.
[4:28] Well, now I must ask. I don't must ask, but I will ask. You don't have to answer anything. when you say biracial that's quite a like putting your hand in the scrap bag a scrap a scrabble bag and trying to figure out what you're going to get what kind of.
[4:41] Biraciality so um i uh i'm, i don't know i always make a joke and say that i'm a mutt um but uh i've said that before in front of black friends and they found that offensive but um uh west when i did the 23and thing it was a west african scottish native american and uh and a dutch very very dutch, oh okay so that's uh so and.
[5:05] Do you know much about the family tree how this all came about is this something that's.
[5:08] No i don't i know that i have i know that because of my last name i have a clan and a tarkin in this and scottish that i could like purchase if i wanted to um but but i've done i've done a little bit of investigating but no i don't i don't know my family hasn't kept enough uh records and whatnot and on my mom's side that uh her father kind of uh her father's family kind of disowned my grandmother um there was a divorce and there was so there i have a whole kind of like side of my family on that and that i never knew um and that that line was kind of broken by a lack of contact because they didn't like my grandmother i don't know much about that drama so um so i'm kind of you know mostly just going by my last name and what i got from you.
[5:50] And tell me a little bit about your well actually i'd love to hear a song if you have something handy uh before i don't know how tired your voice gets uh but uh a song yeah i mean you you're a singer right you write music i'd love to hear a song i do i'd you don't have to i mean like but you know i i love hearing people's musical talents in particular uh i envy good singers so uh i'd love to hear a song i.
[6:15] Could i could i could i could i'm not warmed up and i could i could give you a uh i haven't sung in a while that's another reason why i'm just like like i said it before i go crazy when i don't sing for too.
[6:24] Long but.
[6:24] Um i mean i could give you a link to my kind of youtube reel in general if you wanted to here.
[6:29] Would you mind if i included a song like we could just paste it into the show after uh you don't have to it's it's totally up to you.
[6:39] Yeah i i guess i'd prefer in an ideal world god i wish i.
[6:44] Could say yes because that would be great.
[6:45] Exposure but yeah.
[6:46] Yeah. Okay. All right. All right. I'll just, you know what? I'll, I'll sing, um, some Bronski beat and I'll just pretend it's you.
[6:53] Okay. Sounds good.
[6:55] All totally set. Totally set. All right. So tell me a little bit about your origin story, your background, your lore, your childhood and all.
[7:02] Um, well, I grew up in, uh, in the Midwest and, uh, in an area where, um, I was kind of, um, the art, it was a relatively, uh, well off middle-class neighborhood. Um i i kind of i guess had a slightly less money and had to work a little bit harder than i think my my my peers in general but i was very tokenized because of how because of the the demographics of where i grew up um but i didn't really take offense to that sorry what do you mean by tokenized, uh as the one black guy in all in the group of friends or the one gay person that everyone knew you know and.
[7:37] Tokenized does that mean like, that you're treated differently or special because of that, or is that something else?
[7:45] More of just a general sense of reverence. When my high school newspaper did a story about kids in high school coming out, I was the one that they went to. When the diversity speaker came to school, they had a big thing in the auditorium. The administration just came to me and said, would you like to introduce them? Um, because I was charismatic and outgoing and I was in theater, but also because I represented a whole lot more diversity than the school in general had. So I, and I didn't, so I don't say tokenized in a, in a relatively negative way. It was just like, I would have conversations with people like, I never knew, you know, I've never known any gay people before. It's interesting that you don't, uh, insert stereotype here. Um.
[8:34] So right, So I had a very encouraging family. I kind of fell into theater when it became clear when I was in elementary school that I was not able to sit still and be quiet. And my elementary school teacher was like, get this kid into theater. He was one of the directors at the community theater in the area. My mom took me to my first audition, and I went there kicking and screaming. I didn't want to do it, but the second I was on stage, she couldn't get me off. So from then on, I was doing theater anytime I could. I started doing choir in high school, which led to learning singing. I started playing viola in fourth grade. So I was in orchestra. So that kind of gave me all of my music theory background. Sorry, you said viola? Viola yeah that's interesting because that's actually.
[9:19] Technically the gay violin but that's a proper topic for.
[9:22] Another time so don't want i played violin though.
[9:25] I was the straight violin i.
[9:26] Wish i wish i had played violin i they trick us into playing viola because nobody wants to play viola you know all of the all of the viola jokes are a thing um so i always resented uh my my first music teacher for looking at my hand and going you have a viola hand because you know i wanted but it's also screwed me up it's also screwed me it's not it's sort of a thing but it also screwed me up because uh because reading alto clef which is the viola is the only instrument in the entire orchestra uh even outside of strings that plays exclusively in alto clef so i couldn't read any other music so when i got into choir i was like what is this so i had to learn how to when i started to do singing too i was like okay now i have to read treble and bass clef great i have to learn two more right right thank you for ruining it so anyway so um so between uh doing choir and and that in theater in high school um i uh i started taking dance when i was in middle school i just kind of like all of these things kind of coalesced into you know i love being on stage i love i love storytelling i love the uh you know the singular um aspects of it that it's not like being in movies it's that that one production that you go and see is the only time that production will ever happen for both the audience and for the people on stage it's a It's a unique kind of ancient tradition within human cultures that I really appreciate.
[10:41] So I went into musical theater, graduated from an undergrad in Western Michigan University, and then I went on to Boston Conservatory after a couple of years of battling with Sally Mae and figuring that there isn't a whole lot of theater that is union in the Midwest. I had to get somewhere where there was. And so I, I, uh, looked at.
[11:03] And, uh, there's only two master's degrees. And at the time, there were only two master's degrees in musical theater in the country. One was in San Diego and the other one was in Boston, Boston conservatory. So I went there for my master's and, um, then I stayed there, um.
[11:16] And so that's when I graduated there in 2018 and kind of just entered the theater world of New England, which is upwards of like 60 plus union theaters. It's a bit of a clicky kind of in-group thing. It's hard to get into playing more than just ensemble roles. Like you kind of have to be one of the Boston, they call them Boston favorites. But, you know, it was really difficult because theater school, you said you went to school for theater, right?
[11:51] I did, yeah, I did.
[11:54] I don't know if it was the same for you, but my experience with theater school is an extremely toxic environment full of people who are more interested in breaking you down than actually helping your talents or helping foster your talents.
[12:05] If they don't mind fostering your talents, as long as you're willing to foster their stupid ideologies, then.
[12:10] Than right but if you if you have any questions.
[12:12] Or criticisms or anything like that uh then uh yeah they they loathe you.
[12:16] Oh yeah exactly and i thought especially when i got to boston it's just you know it was that was one of the most toxic environments that that whole experience that i've ever been through i almost i graduated from there like afraid afraid in a way that i never was before to get up in front of people because i felt just like the the idea of progress in a class setting is you get up in front of them and you sing a song and they tell you to remember how you're, you know, you're some sort of horrible childhood trauma and then recount it in front of a bunch of strangers. And then you start crying and then you sing your song again and everyone says, wow, that was so much better.
[12:51] Right, right, right. Yeah. It's basically it's a struggle session. Yeah.
[12:56] So it's trauma trauma is not is not training um so you know i got out of that um but i think the real reason the real benefit to being there was not uh the the geographic location the access to technology through berkeley college uh through the merger with berkeley that was happening at the time um so i got a whole lot of access to great um great music production technology and whatnot um a bunch of software you know i just sat in berkeley library and stole everything i possibly could so that i could keep it forever um uh and uh then uh then i started auditioning i was doing really well uh relatively i like i said up until about 29 uh 2019 well so tell me.
[13:32] A little bit about what because that's that's always the big challenge right like what what was it that happened for you after the school because you know school you've kind of guaranteed roles and then and then what.
[13:43] Um, well, uh, as soon as I graduated, um, you know, there's, there's the, like, you're going to be on Broadway idea of, of being an actor. And, you know, that's really, that's just kind of the, the marketing campaign they put in there to get people into their schools. It's, it's the idea that you can make a career out of theater that isn't being on Broadway isn't really part of, part of, you know, the, the, the, uh, the message that they, they.
[14:10] Purport to enforce throughout, you know, your goal is to be on Broadway. That is the height of being in theater. When, you know, I came to realize, especially in my master's degree program, that, you know, being in theater or being a theater major, making a career in theater can be any number of things, you know, and that doesn't have any sort of geographic location. And after seeing a few shows on Broadway that I thought were utterly trash, especially at the time, I'm just like, you know what, I've seen this production done twice as good in some regional theater nobody's ever heard of i think i need to rethink this and so you know i i spent um as soon as i graduated i decided i liked boston i liked that i could you know after 20 i could drive 20 minutes and and be in like a you know a nature reserve see trees and at the same time there was the city demographic and there was a lot of auditioning in the area so and i knew a lot of people the connections were were relatively good so um so i you know i was auditioning for as much as i could i did a couple shows while i was in school though they kind of discouraged that because of the workload um but uh but i you know i was i was getting a pretty consistently good role uh, consistent roles um not like mainstream not like like lead roles but i would get cast in something because i was i was a man i was a dancer so i could be in the court i could be in the ensemble just about anything relatively versatile my biggest problem is that they don't really know where to put me in general i've had actually um did a workshop with um john buccino who came to not john you know um.
[15:36] Oh, God, I can't remember. Just a really, really great composer whose name eludes me at the moment. But he pulled me aside after we did the workshop in school. And he said, you have a fantastic and very, very unique voice and memorable presence. And I want you to be prepared for the fact that nobody is going to ever know what to do with you.
[15:56] Sorry, but why? Tell me. I'm still not sure why they wouldn't know what to do with you.
[16:01] Because uh there is um type is a huge thing and pushing back against your type or whatever your type is like for uh being being a black guy in theater i mean gives you a set of pre-assumed, probable roles that you'll want to play the richie in chorus line the uh seaweed in hairspray that kind of like i sing like a black guy i sing like i you know uh like i got gospel church background. That kind of sound, that kind of style, that kind of presentational... I don't know if you've seen or heard about Hadestown. The MC in Hadestown is very much like that. But at the same time, my dream roles never really had anything to do with my type. One of my dream roles is George Surratt in Sunday in the Park with George.
[16:53] Which is a role.
[16:55] Sunday in the Park with George.
[16:56] Oh yeah. Okay. Got it.
[16:59] Which is Sondheim. It's not really traditionally black music when it comes to like, it's not gospel. It's not like heavy jazz. It's Sondheim. It's golden age relatively. So, but that didn't really matter. It wasn't about riffing like a, like a black singer. You know, I don't want to sing like Usher or Beyonce or whatever. It's really about playing whatever role I think I can really devote myself to. I know that maybe historically speaking, George Seurat probably wouldn't have been black, but that isn't really the point of the show itself. However, if I were to walk into an audition for Sunday in the Park with George, I'd have to really, really go against preconceptions about who and what would play that role. Mandy Patinkin originally played that role. I think Jake Gyllenhaal played it in the revival. It's, it's, you know, it's kind of got a traditional, this is what we, we assume is going to be for that role. And then, so I'm always fighting my own stereotypes or my own pre-assumed type when I walk into auditions, which means that, you know, it makes, it's kind of like the getting, getting someone to consider something that they, because directors in audition rooms have a, you know, they have an idea of what they're looking for. And if it's not if you're not that but you could do something better it's really hard to get past that that assumption um so that's what i mean by that.
[18:19] Okay got it got it okay so you got some i hate to say secondary because you know they're not me some secondary roles you got some decent stage time and you got to play with the audience and and all of that that kind of stuff so what happened from there i'm sorry when did you when did you graduate 2018.
[18:36] Was when i graduated.
[18:37] From Oh, gosh. The timing. With my masters. The timing. Oh, the Lord.
[18:40] I know, right? So I had one year of a couple of... I went to all of the audition season stuff, but I was still in school at the end of my master's degree. So the year of 2019 was really when I started going heavy on auditions, revamping my website, getting all of my reels and stuff together. And I managed to book quite a few roles that would have, as of the end of, around late fall of 2019, was when I had been working for a year and a half at the Genius Bar at Apple.
[19:17] And when I looked at the contracts that I have, that I had lined up for the following year already, and I looked at, you know, financially speaking, I wasn't going to be rich, but I could actually live off of this because I had joined Actors Equity. So as far as the minimum weight, like I knew what at minimum I was going to make for each of these contracts. I did supplemental work, still do graphic design and UI UX design. And so, you know, I chose to rather than kill myself in a retail store dealing with disgruntled customers all day long and then going to rehearsals every night, which was absolutely exhausting. I tried that twice and it absolutely killed both of both jobs. So I was, you know, this is what I went to school for. This is what I want to do. And I have I now feel like I have enough to do it. So I quit Apple, this was the December of 2019, I quit Apple. And then the next three months happened and COVID hit and every single theater shut down, all my contracts were canceled. And, uh, from there I was kind of sent adrift into the world. Um, and so, you know, and like I said, after theaters reopened.
[20:25] Was it's not the same auditioning isn't the same theaters when i'm when they didn't go bankrupt they do shows now that they that are safe that they know that they have uh the money to do they do far less contracts there's pre-casting is rampant um because it's much easier to do a show and pre-cast with people you know who you've already worked with that you know are going to work well that you don't you know that there's it's much more much less um likely for anybody to take a chance on someone that they haven't uh put a whole lot of responsibility on before.
[20:56] Because if the show tanks or if the show doesn't do very well, if there's issues, recasting is just difficult. The casting process is expensive. They have less administrative capabilities. All of these things lead to theater being kind of more of a if-you're-already-in-you're-in kind of thing. Otherwise, it's very, very difficult.
[21:16] I've done a couple of productions since then that feel like um like i did i did a production um uh uh of wizard of oz and it was like they cast the absolute minimum amount of actors to do way too much each one of us and it like it be it was it was it ended up being just we were it was a bad show it was a bad show because we we didn't have enough resources and it wasn't.
[21:41] It wasn't fulfilling the whole process was exhausting and um not even worth the amount of like energy and time we put into it and you know at the end of the day it it made the theater the money that it wanted that they wanted it to i guess but um you know beyond that it was it was rough and and so i'm looking at i look at other auditions that are available and um you know i i go to them i get callbacks and whatnot but at most i'll get cast in an ensemble role playing three 13 different minor characters um you know so and again it's because because you know okay well he's a man who can dance who can sing who can play who's you know a tenor who's got a relatively low to high range so we can stick him in 17 different places at once but at no point am i considered for the you know the the the lead role or for any sort of like lead supporting character specific character because uh it's much easier to put me in a place that they don't have a whole lot of other people for um and so you know on top of that it's just like i said there's just less there's far less and i get into uh i did a production of um um the color purple and uh, it was way different than i had ever expected uh it's not because i don't know if you've ever seen or or read the color purple uh.
[22:59] Yes i've seen it.
[22:59] But uh but it's, it became this weird kind of, are you this kind of like black enough hierarchy? I was called back for one of the main roles. There aren't a whole lot of main male roles in that, but the one that I was called back for, I know damn well I nailed. And I don't, I have, I have enough humility to know when I do a good, good or relatively bad audition. And I know I nailed that callback. I know that, It felt very much like the guy who was cast in the role was blacker than me, and that's why he got it. And that kind of sense of things, at one point at the beginning of the rehearsal process.
[23:46] One person had to drop out, and so the ensemble role that they filled, there's a sequence in Africa where there's an African tribal leader character, and the person who was set to play that role had to drop out. So another girl who'd just been singing it in the ensemble as a placeholder, we just assumed she would take it, but she spoke up and said something along the lines of, I don't feel like I'm Black enough to be playing this African tribal role. I feel like that could be potentially problematic. First of all, it's like a dream sequence, so it's not actually literal anyway. And second of all, what does that even mean? What African tribal leader is going to watch this and then write an angry letter to you. Like, I don't understand how that kind of... And as soon as someone spoke up, like that person said that, the rest of the room was like.
[24:39] Now we can't do it now we can't keep it there because it was said that was said out loud so now we have to put someone else in and they did put some blacker in it so it was just like, you know and uh at one point they were talking we had we had a blackout night one of the one of the shows was they called it blackout night and it was a night where specifically black people were invited they didn't explicitly say white people weren't invited but obviously that's the assumption that you don't you don't buy tickets to the blackout show if you're not black like that just to me is It's so counter... I don't see the distinction between that and Jim Crow, in my opinion. I don't see this, like, we need a blacks-only night. What? What if the alternative were to have... I mean, what if we did a production of On the Town and had a white-only night? I mean, I feel like the conversations around what stories we're telling or whose stories we can tell and why They have dissolved into this tribalistic, boring, uninteresting slop. And I find myself wishing that there was some sort of light at the end of this tunnel. As far as like what demographics of people became the most woke when woke kind of took over like i think the last the last dregs of woke are going to be left over in the entertainment theater and movies like that back and industry well they can keep it.
[26:07] Going for a lot of time.
[26:08] I know and they i'm sure they will um so so yeah so that's you know that's that's kind of i just get it's it's exhausting it's exhausting because i'll sit in a rehearsal room and they'll be just talking about whatever thing trump said the night before and everyone has to make a joke about it everyone has to have an opinion about it and i just like i stay silent like you know i believe i've been a follower of you and and uh people like jordan peterson for a long time and i believe very strongly in the idea that the more you lie the more you kind of degrade your own soul and sense of integrity and yet so so so i just stay silent unless someone asks me a question and i try to be as as unspecific as possible lest i you know give away the fact that i'm not one of them.
[26:56] No it's like you.
[26:57] Gotta rub.
[26:57] Yourself in the zombie juice to get through the zombies right.
[27:00] Exactly exactly so so you know i i this is the first year where i've really just kind of stopped i didn't i didn't even do the audition season this year um i've kind of transitioned i've been doing cabarets with uh um actually more more like mini concerts with a group of people uh they're mostly for charity they're mostly for free it's all kind of we don't get paid for it or anything but you know it it scratches that itch a little bit um but uh but yeah so um, it's uh it became it became another thing too because i without that those contracts without you know that amount of of pre-covid uh opportunity i uh i was like okay well now i have to have a career again now i have to figure out what the hell i'm going to do with my life so that i can pay bills um because you know i had only ever used kind of graphic design and uh and ui x ui ui ux design as as a supplement um i never really you know i didn't go to school for it it was more self-taught. So I kind of ramped that up in the last couple years.
[28:04] It's still not the living I want it to be, especially in Eastern Mass. The cost of living is astronomical. So I've.
[28:16] Had a whole crisis of future.
[28:21] Being on Broadway wasn't the height of what I wanted to do. I have other aspirations i have um a whole uh different kind of set of goals that at one point i want to get a doctoral degree in um uh uh what's called so there's a several of the names for it but uh biomusicology uh or neuromusicology basically the science of how uh music interacts with the brain on a biological level and um because there's a whole lot of really interesting studies that go with that, studies from scientists, and then there's theater therapy and music therapy, but there's never really been a comprehensive deep dive into the understanding from a musical theory, perspective how these kinds of combinations of sounds make your brain remember and feel and and, uh interact with the world um and interact with uh other people socially speaking um so you know like why is it that a minor chord instills this kind of um this kind of feeling in everybody just despite what background they're from or what part of the world they all feel the same thing when they hear these sounds and why um and that has you know there's there's a little bit of research into it, but I feel like there's a whole, kind of set of potential research opportunities there that I really want to explore. And so that's kind of my end goal. One of my end goals is to explore that.
[29:48] Open an institute. The other thing is, at some point, the loftiest goal is, I think the best artistic collaborations come from people who are from different, not just different backgrounds, but wildly different artistic perspectives or cultural perspectives and that is even less likely nowadays um because of you know differing perspectives become a hierarchy of which which perspective is most victimized and therefore most important to to uh to communicate and so um you see far less collaboration or if you see collaboration it's less of a collaboration more of a one one tribe.
[30:26] Works with another tribe by conceding that the other tribe's message is better. So I've had ideas about creating a scholarship program/institute that creates artistic collaborations, particularly musical and theatrical collaborations between different cultures, cultures that are wildly disparate.
[30:50] My graduate thesis was an exploration of this from a music perspective, I took all the different pieces of my own personal demographic, using 23andMe and whatnot and created a 40-minute production of songs that were interpolated using instruments, using instrumentation and background tracks that I wrote myself using all the instruments that were native to all the different cultures that represent me. It was all about identity. Your identity is essentially what you do and what you make, uh given all of the combinations of things that went into you and so my advisor was like there's no possible way this is going to work you can't put drone instruments like bagpipes and whatnot along with any sort of electronic instrument or mate or or uh or electric guitar or anything and i was like i'm gonna prove you wrong and i did so um so that kind of thing i think is uh really really interesting exploring combinations of things you wouldn't you wouldn't ever think you can combine um so anyway that's kind of a diatribe on on where i am and where i want to go But at the moment, it's hard to know where I'm.
[31:57] Where where the the uh financial stability aspect of this comes into play because yeah you know um and at the same time i don't want to abandon i don't think theaters god it's just it's just so different it's so different and it's it's great you know everybody says whoa back in my day um i just remember go my the first professional production i did over the summer and while i was still in my undergrad and i just remember what working with it didn't really matter what you look like or where you wrote like all of these identity political things were not part of the storytelling they weren't part of the rehearsal process um they weren't taken into account in a way that is detrimental to just telling the story um you know it just seems like everything is so superficially secondary everything is so much more about um and i like for example um i don't know if you've seen hamilton um no i have a i have a very don't bother i have a very unpopular opinion about hamilton because I think all it really does is tell a bunch of people that they're already not racist.
[32:57] By in essence, and this is something I took from an article I read, to looking at history and blackwashing it as a way of making things more palatable. And it doesn't challenge you. You don't walk out of that thinking something new. It's all about just being something, being progressive, making this statement. Isn't it? cool that we're all singing rap music even though we're founding fathers except we had to cut the part about slavery where where jefferson and and hamilton are arguing about slavery there's a whole rap sequence where they do that because hamilton was actually pro-slavery jefferson was not and because that didn't really work with the message of the show we couldn't say hamilton, hamilton couldn't be uh advocating for slavery they had to cut that because it was an inconvenient and truth of the history that they were trying to recreate. It's just like, you know, that kind of thing is just, if you're going to tell a story, if you're going to, what is the, Isn't the purpose of this to show someone who wouldn't normally go to a show like this that there's a different way of thinking, isn't it? Isn't the purpose of any sort of transformative entertainment experience for someone to think differently than they already have? Not for a bunch of people who are already woke to smile and feel good about how woke they already are.
[34:23] Everything feels so disingenuous. It feels like, you know, we were the people for diversity. We were the different people. The theater kids were the weird kids. But now it's like, you know, if you're one of us, you have to believe all of it. It's just, it's so hilariously hypocritical that. You can't think differently. You can't say differently. You can't behave differently while they call it progressive. It baffles me. So anyway, that's where I am now.
[34:55] And you said that you came out of high school or something like that?
[34:59] Came out, yeah. High school.
[35:01] And how was that process for you?
[35:04] Fine.
[35:05] I mean, when did you know?
[35:07] I mean, I always kind of knew. um that was never really a big issue i had a relatively progressive uh family my mom was never really that like i'm fairly certain that she her best friend was gay i always called him uncle jim i never really knew that we never really talked about it but like any but like it wasn't there was never a a time where i thought i wouldn't be accepted um i do remember because we didn't have there was any sort of like um gay straight alliance or anything like that um and so i i was part of the the first group of people to to create that in my high school um we got a little bit of pushback from our administration until our advisor which was one of my english teachers uh was like no actually if you if you if you stop us from forming this we can take legal action but it wasn't like it wasn't like one of those things that would be on the news now because whatever you know we made we had a gsa a bunch of kids came to it and then at one point the school newspaper story about kids. Okay, Straight Alliance.
[36:06] Okay, sorry, yeah.
[36:08] Um, I'm not sure if that's still kind of a thing in schools, but it was, that was kind of the, you know, the thing to do if you, if you wanted to kind of create a group where that was good.
[36:16] Yes, yes.
[36:16] Yeah.
[36:17] Yeah.
[36:17] So, um, so yeah, so the, I mean, I came out, like I said, the newspaper did a story on me and like one other student who, um, who came out while they were in history. His story was a whole lot more tragic. His parents weren't really accepting. He had to move out so that I wasn't really all that featured in the story, uh, because my, the process for me wasn't really that, that crazy. Um but uh you know i i kind of knew i came out as i it came out to my friends first and then to some close family member family friends and then i told my parents and that was kind of that so um it was never it was not really an issue at home um i uh yeah so i think the only issue my mom was my mom had was that she would never have grandkids um uh at least that was her assumption um i still plan on having children at some point um one way or another um i have some moral hang-ups about that recently especially just thinking about it i've been with my partner for over 12 years now um planning on getting married as soon as there's it's more of a financial and like kind of life status thing getting married is very expensive we want to be we want to have it's much more um of a priority to get to get land and find you know stability um and so um but uh but yeah so.
[37:34] So that wasn't really ever an issue for me uh aside from the fact that you know i ended up being you know the one gay gay guy everybody knew that you know that everyone was like oh i've got this friend you're gay can you answer this question about how all gay people think sure i can answer that for you um so but i never got offended i never found it offensive i don't like i don't see those people and wet fingers at them because it's just like when you don't have any sort of information you need information you know no no not not all gay people love to go shopping in fact i freaking hate shopping um you know that kind of thing so, um yeah okay.
[38:13] Uh all right i think i i think i understand as a whole and i'd love to dive into the sort of theater world and how i could best help you in that area so you want to say in the theater world it's repulsive to your sensibilities in the ideological capture right i don't want to overly.
[38:34] Summarize what.
[38:35] You're saying but it's.
[38:36] Something sure sure yeah i mean i mean sensibilities in the sense that like i i remember what it was like when everything didn't have an underlying quote unquote message i remember when it was just kind of an experience that wasn't rife with this, constantly polarized overly political uh uh umbrella above it um that thought it just feels very it feels very oppressed by that it feels like there are certain things you can't really say or do certain shows you probably just should avoid and if you do them you have to make sure that you're saying the right thing or doing it the right way you know ideas like a straight person needs to stop playing a gay role when there's a gay person available aren't we all just actors like that idea wasn't really a thing when i when i first entered the professional world and now it's like rampant so you know yeah right.
[39:24] Right or you can put you can put non-whites into white roles, but never the other way.
[39:31] Ah, of course, exactly.
[39:32] Right, right. Okay. Well, I suppose how close are you to finding it unbearable to be in the theater world? In other words, what do you have to lose at the moment?
[39:51] Um, my mind.
[39:53] No, no, no. I mean, practically. And what I mean by that is, um, You say, oh, one social media post wrong, one this, one that, and you're never working in this town again. So how much do you want to work in this town again?
[40:10] More than anything more than well not more than anything i guess i guess uh, and that isn't that isn't really hyperbole either like i've seen, like because you say i it was when i was in when i was in my undergrad or my graduate school um this was this was when uh trump was was going for his first term and i i found hillary to be a demonic otherworldly being and i and uh i uh you know i i wasn't vocal about it but i wasn't like you know i was pretty sure that i was going to vote now i'm gonna now.
[40:46] I'm gonna have to set up a special folder in my email inbox for demonic otherworldly beings who are now.
[40:52] Highly offended and haven't.
[40:53] Been compared to hillary clinton so.
[40:55] Let me just let me just do that okay all done yes all done how dare you compare.
[41:00] Us minions of hell okay all right.
[41:03] Right right so but of course One of my fellow classmates had to have a sit-down with me so that I could tell her why I was a quote-unquote Trump supporter, because that is now a class of person. So, you know, that—and so—, That kind of thing easily gets around extremely quickly. That person goes to an audition, or that person is behind the table because they're a consulting choreographer for that production, and they're in the casting room, and my name comes up, and the fact that I am a quote-unquote Trump supporter is like, that key just kind of turns, that kind of like, no, no, we're not really interested in that. You know, that happens and it's like a pandemic. It just kind of races through.
[41:51] So, you know, the only way that you can really overcome that is if you are such a moneymaker, you know, like some massive, you know, whatever, like some of the action stars, the past and so on, they'll hold their nose. But, you know, if you're not a guaranteed moneymaker. And the other thing, sorry, I forgot to mention this earlier in terms of going with the unknowns. I'm sure you've had this process. I've certainly gone through this process as a director where somebody gives a fantastic audition, and then the closer they get to the show, the more they start to choke. And you're like, oh, God. Whereas at least somebody who's tried and true, they've carried a show. You know they can handle the pressure. You know that they rise to meet the challenge of the occasion and so on. So, yeah, the great audition and the terrible stage presence is an unfortunate coincidence, but it does happen.
[42:38] Oh, for sure. For sure, for sure. Well, and that's what I was saying. That's why directors are far less inclined to take any sort of risk for somebody when they haven't been vetted in that kind of role before, just because so much more is at stake. Precasting is just a huge thing. If you're one of the quote-unquote Boston favorites, you are pretty much insured to get several roles, to have them fighting over you for whatever, because you'll make them money.
[43:06] Right. Okay. So, yeah. So, what is your, I mean, the theater world is a smoking ruin financially. It's become increasingly dependent on the state, which means leftism. And it's become toxically, of course, and claustrophobically ideological. And uh art is supposed to be about play it's not supposed to be out like everyone has to stand in line in their blood-soaked avenue to the revolution or something like that it's really supposed to be a spontaneity play and fun and this is a you know mother courage and her children bertol brest style just grim horrible everything's cliched you know all the all the rich people are fat people with monocles and all the poor are just noble and heroic and it's it's also i can't do theater because it's just also grindingly predictable and you know it's it's like when you go see a what was it i watched a movie with kenneth brownock it was a uh death on the nile right and i think there are like six people who might have done it and two of them are black and you're like well you know it's not going to be the black people because so so it's my the mystery has gone down by at least 25 there's no way exactly it's going to be the black people uh so yeah, it's just kind of boring and dull and predictable and so on, right?
[44:26] And so I guess, yeah, I mean, what is your status at the moment of getting work in sort of mainstream theater?
[44:34] Non-existent i did not i did not audition this year i'm actually one reason is because um the amount of time and effort it takes to do it just couldn't be sacrificed lest i am not able to pay rent um and so you know i had to i had to make some decisions about how important it was for me to survive first um and so if if if not only i'm willing to not make enough money i'm willing to scrape and grind if I need to, if it means that there's some sort of payoff.
[45:04] I did one production that I absolutely loved, and it was kind of an enigma. It was All is Calm, the Christmas Truce of 1914, 1912. Really beautiful. Yeah, beautiful, beautiful production. And I loved every moment of that.
[45:21] It fed my choral background because it's all acapella. It was really, really musically intensive. It was a story about entirely different cultures coming together, and it was in like seven different languages and a bunch of different really interesting folk stories were part of it it's like like like a gem of a production we actually won the elliot norton award that year so um it was beautiful it was a beautiful experience it was a beautiful production and i loved it and those kinds of productions are i i've found exceedingly rare especially now so um so i didn't audition this year i'm actually i'm part of a, a uh a a team of developers working on a an application um for um for a lawyer um and you know it's just a kind of a startup thing it makes it makes a decent amount of money but not an application.
[46:10] For a lawyer.
[46:10] Yeah yeah um like a um a legal case management software um so it's just an application for you.
[46:18] Know sorry i got this.
[46:19] Whiplash yeah we're.
[46:20] Diving out of.
[46:20] The world so But now we're talking about entrepreneurial tech stuff. Well, yeah, exactly. I mean, that's where my supplemental income has always come from, has been doing graphic design tech work, that kind of thing. So I've kind of had to ramp that up, unfortunately, at the expense of any sort of really furthering of artistic stuff. And because the audition environment is so rife with precasting and the productions are relatively unfulfilling, the amount of time that i would have to take to do it it's just not worth it anymore um it's not worth it at the moment so i.
[46:55] Did not hang on so when you say it's not worth it at the moment the time i mean you have your songs you have your audition pieces and i'm sure all of that so going for an audition doesn't take that long right so tell me what it means is not worth going do you just not think you're going to get the role like because it's not like well you need two weeks full-time work to do an audition, right? You just, I'm not, it's not exactly dip in.
[47:21] Dip out, but it's not a massive commitment.
[47:23] Right?
[47:23] Doing the production itself is a massive enough commitment to where I, like, if I were specifically, If I'm coming home every night after all is calm and I feel like I'm doing a really, really great thing, I feel like the storytelling is great. The fact that I'm not making as much money as I would if I were focusing entirely on something, something that, you know, the contract that I had to give up in order to be able to do this production because I couldn't do this. You know, the contract for for this, you know, this logo designing this brand development job. I had to give that up because I chose to do this production. Okay.
[47:54] So what you're saying, you're saying financially it's not worthwhile.
[47:58] Correct. okay got it and it would it would be i would be able to take that i would find a way to take that hit financially if i felt like every production i did was fed that need within me but i still i feel just as hungry for some sort of i would be more willing to do it if i felt like each one of these productions still had that kind of artistic integrity um juice that that that i if it wasn't like furthering.
[48:22] Ideas you find abhorrent and so on.
[48:25] Right okay.
[48:25] And you said also just in terms of financial survival but you know i'm i'm sure you know that old joke what do they call a what do they call a drummer without a girlfriend homeless.
[48:36] I've not heard that i mean wouldn't your partner.
[48:39] I'm not sure what his financial stability is like but wouldn't your partner uh fuel and fund your ambitions if that was necessary for your joy.
[48:47] Yes and uh and i would be far beyond homeless if it weren't for him at this point, for sure. But I guess... I guess I wonder, again, is it really where I want to be beyond the financial thing? Is it really where, like I love performing for the sense of like integral storytelling. I love it so much and like the last few productions I've done, I've gone home and gone, I don't feel like I'm doing this. I feel like I'm doing something else. I feel like I'm playing a part, the part of somebody who's in this tribe and we all do this thing and we all talk about this thing, this like weird ideological system we all have to constantly like push forward with our production and I'm like, This isn't why I wanted to do theater.
[49:34] And I guess for me, it's less about wanting to do theater.
[49:38] You want to use the talents for the service of good, not of corruption, right?
[49:41] Right. And I don't know how and where to do that anymore. And maybe, you know, it doesn't necessarily have to be theater, but I feel like it's, I don't know what that is if it isn't theater anymore. So, you know, for so long, I thought about it.
[49:55] It's not that nobody's interested in exploring the richness of the human condition or challenging, established ideas or just being curious about what it is to be alive it's all yeah it's all just ideological and splitting and anti-white and blah blah blah it's uh yeah yeah it's pretty it's pretty pretty wretched as a whole so sorry and you were saying something else and i interrupted sorry go ahead no.
[50:16] That was uh that was that was it so uh it feels wretched to do it i think this is the biggest part of that like i can you know it's just like you know what i was saying before that feeling of like, I'm lying to both myself and my peers and this audience right now and I don't like it. I don't, I'm not serving myself, I'm not serving them, I'm not serving humanity by doing this.
[50:35] Yeah, I remember, as I was at the National Theatre School in Canada and I remember being at a production of, a play called figaro gets a divorce which was a sequel to of course the famous marriage of figaro figaro figaro and i just remember looking around and like i feel like i'm in an asylum here i don't feel like i feel like i'm in a deeply sick place yes deeply sick play this is of course you know decades and so this is like 40 40 years ago a little less but yeah a long time ago so yeah the rod is deep and the rod is old. And I eventually just couldn't, I couldn't stand it.
[51:13] I just found it, everything just felt weird and unhealthy and unnatural. And I've always thought, you know, I grew up on, you know, Dickens and Shakespeare and Ian Foster and so on. So for me, everything should be, you know, deeply human. You should never feel more connected than when you're doing art. And I never felt less connected and more alien than when I was doing art.
[51:36] How do you i'm assuming you went into theater what wanting to do that how do you feed that need within yourself or how did you find kind of redirect that
[51:45] that kind of like artistic need or that need for artistic fulfillment in general that.
[51:53] Is a fine question that is a fine question i mean i i can write so i i moved to novels i mean i produced.
[52:02] A play.
[52:03] Or two and i i moved to novels. And that was my way of sort of staying connected to the sort of humanity question.
[52:11] And I believe that art should further the good as a whole. So, I mean, I still have, I wouldn't say a lot, I still have a little bit of ideology in there. And that's sort of my concession. Like, I'm not going to write the novel if it's just going to be nothing about virtue or goodness. And so I have to sort of say to my creative engines, okay, you can let rip, but we're going to have to vaguely drift in the direction of, I'm not like Ayn Rand and other sort of people, or I guess people like Bertolt Brecht and so on. They're like rigid straight jackets of ideology like nobody steps out of line the salmon all swim in the same freaking current and uh you know everybody stays on the bus until the bus is at the destination nobody looks out the window and i sort of i'm i but i'm also not like mad chaos, play guy uh i i do have to have some i like a sprinkling of ideology just to sort of make it good but most of it's play so right uh so i had that option but of course i went into the tech world as as you may or may not know but so i was sort of able to keep it going but yeah the idea of going back into the uh theater world it may be in the very outlying areas in the real amateur productions it's less of this ideological straitjacket but i i perceive that to be the absolute opposite of art art is there as you say to hold up a mirror to nature and to help us more richly and deeply connect to ourselves and to others and this is all about divide and.
[53:39] Conquer and further the revolution and and so the endless seeds of hatred that have been plaguing mankind since the fall right so i uh i couldn't do it but um you you you can do it yeah i mean if you if you want to be on stage i mean i can tell you how to do it uh it's it's uh and it It actually won't be that hard.
[54:01] Okay.
[54:03] Well, do you think that society's a little fucking tired of this work stuff?
[54:08] Yes.
[54:08] Yeah, so write a parody. Write a parody about someone trying to keep any vague semblance of humanity, like the producers, right, Mel Brooks? So you could write a play about making a play. You could write a play about trying to keep humanity among these lunatic blue-haired ideologues.
[54:31] And pitch it to who and where.
[54:33] Who cares? Just do it yourself. And I say this from experience, though, obviously not a lot of experience. So, you know, take that for all that it's worth. But you just come up with an absolutely, you know, as funny as you can make it, as biting as you can make it. Come up with as funny. I mean, that's the easy part, right? Just come up with a great play. Right. But no, just, I mean, you've got the experience. you've certainly got the righteous anger and a lot of the best comedy comes from righteous anger. And so what you want to do is just be, you know, Freddie Mercury, death on two legs style, vicious, write down all of your incredible frustrations, how hypocritical and bullying, because the atomization of identity politics is a ripe subject for comedy. Like really kind of biting satire of comedy. The best kind of comedy is that which eviscerates the sacred cows. And the more sacred and the more cow-like, see, it's even got nosely, the better, right?
[55:33] Yep.
[55:33] So, uh, you can just write about the theater world and how impossible it is to do a show, when you have these identity politics, it can be incredibly funny. It can be extremely daring. It will absolutely get attention. I mean, there's no way. I mean, it might get a bit alarming attention and so on because the left doesn't have a massive sense of humor, least of all about itself. But for the average person, I mean, in terms of doing good in the world, if I was still in the theater world, I would absolutely be writing as biting a comedy as i could i just finished reading the audiobook a comic chapter in my audiobook so i'm sort of in that mood but i would just write a scathing and biting a comedy as i could about this woke world and uh you would be absolutely shocked at what a chord this will strike because everybody is tired of this relative minority
[56:34] of lunatics running the entire artistic agenda yeah.
[56:40] I guess I guess there's a there's a line that I guess I keep I keep avoiding what making the decision of whether or not I would cross it as to, you know, if I were to do something like that, I can give you a giant list of all the people that I wouldn't that would never, ever speak to me again.
[56:55] OK, and and so I mean, you know, you're talking to the cancel king on the planet, right? So, oh, no, the ideologues who hate humanity maybe won't be talking to me. Oh, no.
[57:06] Right. Well, not even that so much as I see, I don't and I don't fault the vast majority of people who are stuck in an echo chamber. They're being forced into that. They don't even know exists.
[57:17] Hang on. Well, this is why you can't write a biting comedy. Where's this forgiveness thing coming from?
[57:24] Oh, I don't know. I want to feel like you could be right.
[57:27] Hey, if you can carve me off a slice of that forgiveness pie and shove it down my windpipe, my life would be a whole lot easier. So I'm I'm I'm ready and willing to be fed, bro. What do you what do you got? How are they not responsible?
[57:39] I don't know. I guess the average person stuck in this ideology because of their echo chamber.
[57:44] No, there's no echo chamber. We've got the internet. What are you talking about?
[57:48] The internet. Well, yeah, algorithms are the echo chamber.
[57:51] No, no, no. Who you choose to follow, right? Everybody who's intellectually responsible finds ideas that oppose them. You have to, right? You have to.
[57:59] Nobody's intellectually responsible anymore. That responsibility has been taken.
[58:02] No, no. There are people who are intellectually responsible. But what I'm saying is I believe the echo chamber stuff if you're born and raised in an 11th century buddhist monastery okay i get that you know you kind of got a monoculture going on and it's not like you get to read ancient aramaic or know the sign language of the cherokee or something like that but like literally opposing arguments or different perspectives or it's it's like it's in your ass all the time everybody's got the library of alexandria up their ass constantly because you put your phone in your back pocket, you have access to all human information, past, present, and of course, increasingly in the future as we sort of get stuff, new stuff in the pipeline. So at a time when, I mean, it's literally somebody who's born in a library and is taught to read everything goes to like three books over and over again. You say, well, but they're in an echo chamber. It's like, bro, they're born in a library. We have a library in our ass.
[59:01] Mm-hmm. So how do you, to go along with that metaphor, if someone has convinced them that every other book in that library except for those three are absolutely demonic and will therefore send them to hell for reading them, the fear and anger toward all of those other books overcomes their inherent sense of curiosity.
[59:28] No, it's not that. it's not that it's that what what's the big d word they value so so much what's the big d word diversity right right right so if you value so i value all perspectives i live in a library i only read three books howard zinn communist manifesto or whatever it is right so so but but if they claim to value if they claim to value diversity and they don't read opposing opinions They are damned by their own standards There is no escape from that.
[1:00:03] Well that's true I agree with you It's really hard to get anyone to see that Obvious and.
[1:00:09] Overwhelming But that's why you write a play You're right, I mean, you could write it with songs. You could write it with wild costumes. You could write it with books coming to life. You could write it with Karl Marx popping out of his grave and saying, whoa, guys, guys, too far. Too far. What are you doing? Right?
[1:00:28] For sure.
[1:00:29] Santa Claus bringing the gifts of actual diversity dressed as Karl Marx. I don't know. Like this, this, I'd be just good. I'd riff all day. Right. But, but you could do a lot of things to just make this, Because there's no level
[1:00:41] of absurdity you can't go to that somebody hasn't already done. And so it is a ripe target for satire.
[1:00:50] That's true. And do you think that, because you said that the rot is deep and it's old and that you've experienced it much longer than... Sorry, the use of the rot.
[1:01:00] You mean the punishment?
[1:01:01] You said that the kind of rot, this kind of ideological capture, the capture as it's deep and old. And do you think the eradication of this rot is possible only if people do exactly what you're recommending more often? Or, you know, do you see the light at the end of this kind of tunnel?
[1:01:18] Well, I mean, I wrote a woke character, a pretty scathing portrayal of a woke character in my novel, The Present, and certainly struck a chord with people. So, I mean, if art is here for health, then art has to be an antibody to indoctrination because art is not supposed to be indoctrination. Art is supposed to get you deeper in touch with your humanity and your reason and so, it's it's it's a very powerful thing to be to be doing and you it's certainly because you've been tormented by this for well over a decade right because you had it in in your education your master's degree as well right so when you've been emotionally charged and tormented by something for over a decade, that's where your creative juices are going to be.
[1:02:11] Yeah, my partner keeps telling me to write. He's also a decent writer. He's one of those jack-of-all-trades people who also has an overwhelmingly great sense of personal discipline and has found a way to create his own business that's livable. But on top of that, he's a guitarist and an artist and kind of an anomaly. But he's tried to convince me for the longest time that I can write.
[1:02:34] Oh, you can. Honestly, the letter that you sent was funny, biting deep incisive was great i mean that was that was you just typing hey here's what i'd like to chat so without a doubt you can write without a doubt you have the characters and where is, the anti-woke comedy.
[1:02:54] It's not here yet.
[1:02:54] SNL did some stuff about this, you know, sort of black lesbian job application in the 90s, right? But where is... Now, you might do it and get bomb threats. I don't know, right?
[1:03:07] So there may be a reason why. I'm not saying do it. I'm just saying that look into it and certainly give a shot and see if there's enough emotional energy there to write a script. But I sort of think back on...
[1:03:21] I don't care about the bomb threats.
[1:03:22] I'm sorry?
[1:03:22] I wouldn't mind the bomb threats Right Yeah.
[1:03:26] The insurance company might, the theater might But no, I sort of think of like Everybody was completely exhausted with lawyers, When Dickens wrote his great anti-lawyer diatribe Because he was a court reporter before he was a novelist And Dickens wrote his great anti-court diatribe, Bleak House And that actually led to some reforms some serious reforms in how legal cases were pursued because it was just an endless process. So there is this sort of scathing, this scathing takedown of the pompous and the overindulgent and the hyper-important, the satirist pricking the vanity, what King Lear did to arrogant elders, right? So you know if i were in your shoes again please remember i've been canceled so make your decisions accordingly but if i were in your shoes i would at least try the script i would at least say, because having a good person that the audience sympathizes with boxed more and more into.
[1:04:39] A, uh, a, an immobile paralyzed corner, uh, and, and making it funny.
[1:04:47] I mean, it's like the dark comedy of Kafka or, and I can never remember the name of it. There was a wonderful film set with a, based on Bertolt Brecht, I think. And, and read, please read, um, Paul Johnson's got a book called Intellectuals, which has a fantastic chapter on Bertolt Brecht and how corrupt he became. But there's a german movie about a director constantly who's been captured by, ideologically captured and funded by the communists and just how how corrupt it becomes and yet that level of corruption i think, i almost can't take the wokes i know it's dangerous i get that right because it certainly has uh had some challenges for me which uh is uh i guess natural to their world view but, it is they're they're so goofy in so many ways i know that that i feel i feel like and this is why it's sort of left can't mean right but but i feel like if i were in your shoes i would just sit down and write and i wouldn't write with the intent of getting it ever done i would just sit down and write and say i'm just going to pour everything out about how impossible this world is.
[1:05:55] And, I mean, you could have incredibly funny dialogue. You would take a Shakespeare play or whatever, right? That's completely innocuous and not based upon, you know, class or race or gender or anything like that. And you would just have it completely atomized by everybody's ideological interpretations. And we can't do this and we can't do that. And this is better and this is worse. And nobody can get anything done and so on. And you'd need a counter tension, right? Right. Whether it's a backer who just wants a fun show for his grandmother to come and watch or, you know, there has to be someone that can push the agenda forward with the resistance of the left wanting to sort of capture it. Or maybe maybe the lead guy is more based and he's funding it. Right.
[1:06:41] And so he's hired a bunch of the, quote, best actors. They're all they're all super woke. He's driving it, though, and they need his paycheck. Right. So the idea that you would have socialist ideologues greedy for the capitalist money would be funny too, right? That's kind of comic as well. So whatever, you could sort of set up because you need both the tension towards the left and you need the tension away from the left to produce sort of the sparks of good comedy.
[1:07:07] And of course, naturally, there would be a director who would be against the exploitation of the workers who'd be trying to sleep with every female, male, and perhaps even pet cast member that's in the uh because that's almost inevitable like the moment somebody says that they're against the exploitation of the workers you know they're trying to you know bend over, like a pipe cleaner i'm sorry right.
[1:07:28] Well as soon as they say they're against the exploitation of workers they're most likely exploiting the workers.
[1:07:34] Yeah yeah they either pay them for free or trying to impregnate everything that moves yeah so yeah i remember um a friend of a friend was uh in a play It was in Macbeth and the director was working his way through the witches throughout the entire production. He was kind of a leftist. Anyway, so... I would, because you can definitely write, and you definitely have the emotionally charged experience, and you would absolutely cast yourself in the lead, right? Because, you know, as a sort of gay, biracial actor or singer, you would, you know, imagine you won the lottery, right? And you wanted to put on a play, and you didn't necessarily understand all the woke stuff. You just wanted some really good actors, and you wanted to cast yourself in the lead. Then you would be funding it and you would have all of that weight and clout and and maybe you just won so much money you could open it on broadway so everybody's just desperate to do it but also desperate to hijack it and you know there just could be a lot of really uh funny tension there because the left normally just runs roughshod right because they control uh everything right they control the the media they control the uh the funding sources and the theaters and the unions and so on right but if you won the lottery and you got to put on a play and uh wanted I just want to tell a straight story, not a straight story. You know what I mean?
[1:08:53] Yes.
[1:08:54] I just want to tell a plain story with good characters, rich depth, and human. I don't want gay unicorns. I don't need Peter Pan, who's by species, or something like that, right? So that would be something that a lot of people have faced this kind of frustration, and to get people to laugh at that which scares them is a very powerful thing. So again, just sort of goofing around here, but I would say that, to write, just write it as if it's never going to get put on. Because if you think about it getting put on, it's going to, you can't ever see it from the audience viewpoint when you're writing things. You can only see it from the inside, from the character's viewpoint. So just pour everything you have out about your incredible anger and frustration. These assholes took away what you love the most. And they took a beautiful thing in the human experience. They took a beautiful thing and corrupted it. They're like Gollum without a redemption arc right so i would say that just pour it all out never ever be afraid of becoming too absurd, I mean, I had a flying...
[1:10:05] There is no such thing.
[1:10:06] Yeah, I had a flying robot, angels protecting children 500 years from now, right, in my novel, The Future. So never, ever be afraid.
[1:10:14] Always go further. I love comedy that doesn't ever stop. Like, you think there's a line? They just keep going, right? And so I would...
[1:10:22] Yeah, have you seen Book of Mormon? I think that was one. That's one of the... Because Trey Parker and Matt Stone were part of the creation of that. They think they wrote the book for it. It's one of the, I think, one of the best book musicals of the latter 21st century.
[1:10:37] Yeah, I noticed they try that only with the nicest religion known to man, so I wouldn't put them down as particularly courageous.
[1:10:43] Well, I mean, yeah, if you see, it isn't just about Mormonism. It really does rip apart just about every single mainstream Western religion all across the board. It doesn't pull punches.
[1:10:55] Right i think so i mean we have a new a new uh mystery religion of identity politics and so on and so i think that and and also you know however you would do it in a novel it would be pretty easy how you do it on stage is is a different kind of challenge but one of the things that's you know kind of a true meme is that people whose personal lives are a complete disaster truly believe that they have the right to tell everyone else how to live it really so how how you portray the sort of, utopian ideology of the people in the play within the play and then compare and contrast it to how absolute a disaster their personal lives are would be something that would give it a kind of bittersweet to me comedy that's bittersweet is really you know where you're like yeah laugh i thought i'd cry uh so you could also have a little couple of side vignettes in order to and And also the other thing you could do, which would be pretty funny, just sort of popped into my mind, is you would get 12 actors or 15 actors a night to protest.
[1:12:06] So they'd be in the audience and they would throw things at the stage and they would protest like themselves on fire no don't have that but no you would have them protest and you would have as part of the play the protest and the arguments you could even throw in some stage combat as they rush the stage you could have security uh take them down and then the curtain could come falling down and that's your intermission and everyone's like was that was that real like that to me would be a lot of fun to i love it to stage so honestly just just make the whole experience make the whole uh you know everything that that wild and crazy that you could imagine.
[1:12:44] Would happen you could hire protesters to be outside that's so freaking stuff pamphlets uh with donation uh donation urls into the hands of people like how dare you go into this this monstrosity of a play right he's the he's the mochaccino white supremacist i don't know whatever they're gonna whatever they're gonna be saying but i would yeah i would just make it the full the full woke experience i would even uh again depending on your budget um i would even get titania mcgrath from x who's like this this parody of the left uh i i would get uh i would buy fake articles and and just how outraged outrageous this all is and beat sort of left of their own game and honestly you could just have a whole campaign to just uh you know this horrifying and make it kind of cool to go and and and so on and i think it would be um.
[1:13:44] Uh you know you could even you could even um three quarters through the play you could end the play because a credible threat has been received and you have to clear the clear theater, and that's the end of the play or something like that right like you could just make it the full the full experience oh you could also have um uh you could have uh prizes for who informs on someone else in the audience oh.
[1:14:06] My gosh yes.
[1:14:08] Like if you see anyone or hear anyone saying anything remotely not woke you know just put their seat number in you're going to pick a random prize every night or somebody's going to get a reward so you could the full eastern european stasi experience the eastern german stasi experience of informing on your neighbors like you could just work it would be a whole i love the stuff that spills off stage and so you could just have i'm sorry shine.
[1:14:31] A spotlight shine a spotlight on them in the middle of the show and so this person was this person is is not part of the tribe this person thinks differently we hate them.
[1:14:40] Well and you could actually even have that person be an actor drag them on stage put them through a struggle session like there could be any any number of things like.
[1:14:48] A like a jordan peterson re-education.
[1:14:49] Yeah yeah yeah something like that like just have them re-educated and um and so on you could give uh rotten fruit to people in the audience to throw like i don't know you could just really make it a wild evening that would be completely unforgettable and again you know total brainstorm just like no idea is too outrageous about uh just what an experience who could make it and people would come out, it would be like a cleansing fire. People would just come out feeling like a million bucks, like they finally got to laugh at all of these people who've been driving society crazy for the last 50 years.
[1:15:23] Well, I'm forced them to find a way to laugh at themselves. I mean, it's really hard. It's funny to watch people who don't want to be, who don't want to laugh or don't want to be amused be captured by something that they can't help but laugh at and then catch themselves and get angry that they laughed at it.
[1:15:38] Oh, absolutely. I would break the fourth wall continually and have the actors be completely enraged that the audience is laughing at them.
[1:15:45] Yeah.
[1:15:48] So, I mean, Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author is a play that's probably worth, because it's a real sort of famous break the fourth wall play. But I think that kind of stuff would be just a riot. And people would have no idea what was coming next. They wouldn't know what was real or not, you know, and sort of that Andy Kaufman wrestling thing. Like, they wouldn't know what was real or not. And you could actually have some ad libs and have the play sort of change every night. And I think that it would be something that would then would be worth for people to come back. What was real and what was not? Well, you'd have to come back to find out kind of thing, right?
[1:16:25] Right. Yeah. That's a great idea. And also, I mean, just the act of doing it might, it sounds at least a little bit cathartic.
[1:16:33] Well, it would be, even if for whatever reason, you never got it off the ground, just writing it all would just be great to just get stuff out of your system. And because what, you know, I think what a lot of people feel is helpless, right? Yeah and if you were to sort of fight that helplessness and really uh give people uh you know sometimes sometimes you just have to show courage and it breaks the spell right and if you wrote and it is ripe for satire hell now i'll write it just kidding i'm kind of busy at the moment but no i would i would and if you've got a if you've if your partner uh writes well uh that would be really great i'm sure i mean you have a great sense of humor so i'm sure that the comic stuff would be uh enjoyable but yeah just um and and satire on art uh is is uh long overdue and and certainly it was what's been going on over the last 50 years very much overdue.
[1:17:29] Yeah, I will definitely do that. I've been battling this for a while. It's also just kind of like, what is my future job? What is the person that I see myself as 15 years from now? Like in the last five years or so, that person has entirely been like, I don't see, I don't want, I don't know, I don't know who that person is anymore. Maybe it's the playwright who kind of started the process of pulling theater back from the dregs of wokeness. So it's possible. Do you see, I mean, like I said before, it's been like this for so long. Do you see an actual change in the arts? Or is it more of a kind of like wrangling in of all the people who agree with us? And it just, you know, more turtling of it as opposed to...
[1:18:18] Sure, you mean at the moment, like absent the sort of stuff we're brainstorming at the moment, you mean sort of- Correct.
[1:18:23] Yeah.
[1:18:23] Yeah. No, so art has moved from the provocation of division and hostility to preparing people for actual violence, right? So this is all of the zombie movies. This is the horror movies. This is the gore stuff, like the 28 days, weeks, and years later, and so on. So, yeah, the art is now preparing people for significant levels of violence, which is why everything's just so weird and dark and gruesome.
[1:18:54] Yeah, there are significant levels of violence. The Overton window for what violence is acceptable has come into a differently interesting place, too. So, yeah, it does feel like that anger and violence and radicalism is, like, the only thing that exists right now for anybody.
[1:19:13] Yeah, and everything that is nice turns horrifying, like the Midsommar. Oh, what a nice little town. And it's like, oh, right, so no spoilers. But, yeah, everything, there's no good guys winning. There's no good guys. There's only bad guys. And violence is the only language that's really...
[1:19:29] Really spoken which is a shame because that's just not how i don't know that just seems to be we've we've learned i feel like we've learned that lesson several times over in several different societies over the course of human history at this point like the idea that just beating up a problem is going to solve it is is uh something we should i feel like we could have we should have already kind of gone past but well it solves the problem.
[1:19:51] If the problem is there's not enough violence for some people. Some people, they really thrive on and love violence. And a peaceful society is hell to them. And they just need to, you know, you see these videos of like Sweden in the 1960s, like everyone in the strollers and walking along in a suit and tie. And it's like, that's hell for some people. They just want nature, red and tooth and claw, and they'll just keep poking society until they get what they want.
[1:20:18] Why do you think that is?
[1:20:20] I think there's evolutionary reasons so a peaceful society gets complacent and a peaceful society is almost always taken over by a more aggressive society so uh it is um now technology made that sort of impossible so there's different ways that they're taking over countries now as you know but i think that there's just a bunch of people who evolved to be very violent because that worked in terms of getting resources and you know the the horrifying crime of rape that was enacted throughout almost all of human history about whatever conquering tribe meant that the most violent got to spread their genes the most, right? Like one out of every 17 people in East Asia traces their lineage back to like Genghis Khan's balls, right? Which were about the most active outside of the NBA I've ever heard of. So I think that there's just evolutionary reasons for that. But we need to be able to identify that and keep that at bay, which we've sort of lost the ability to do so because we put people who like violence, like statists, we put people who like violence in charge of our children's education. So it's all downhill from there.
[1:21:27] Yeah, well, I've long since decided that if and when I have children, they won't go anywhere near the public education system.
[1:21:33] Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah, so I would say give that a shot. I mean, you can do that on the side, and you can do that while working full-time and even entrepreneurial stuff. So I would work on... And it doesn't have to be what we're talking about here. It could be anything, but the stuff that is the most passionate for you is the stuff that the best art is going to come from. Like Shakespeare, Edward Hamlet, after his son Hamlet died. Right so whatever is the most emotional and powerful for you is where the greatest creative fruition is going to come from and most people who are actors particularly actors who enjoy more complex texts uh can write and i would not underestimate your ability particularly if you've got a partner to do that and finely tuned comic anger is one of the great purifying, forest fires through the over tangled human psyche to sort of clear and and start things anew from a fresh perspective and i think it's been quite overdue for a while and yeah let me know if you you won't do it and i'll do it i.
[1:22:44] Will do it well i will certainly try i will certainly sit down and put some ideas out there um are there any other books you mentioned the book intellectuals um and and the six characters in search of an author are there any other books or plays or anything that kind of like reflect this idea or have a you know a historical kind of reflection of of what you know what's going on right now.
[1:23:04] Yeah so uh i'm just talking in terms of sort of flexibility of stagecraft you might want to look into anne marie mcdonald's six characters uh good night to stimona good morning juliet that's a pretty good um a good play of course shakespeare in love the movie is a has a play within a play uh ayn rand's the night of January the 13th, I think it is, or January the 21st, it's a play which is a...
[1:23:31] A crime thriller and the the um the jury is taken for the audience and depending on how the jury votes the play ends differently uh and so yeah i would definitely look for the kinds of plays that are uh breaking the fourth wall obviously death of a salesman's pretty pretty classic one where the fourth wall kind of comes and goes i don't think he directly addresses the audience but there's lots of play in the movement of the story but yeah i remember six characters in search of an author there's a mistake when the curtain comes down and the character kind of stuck in front of the curtain they have to find their way back that's actually the intermission but it's supposed to be an accident so i thought that was quite clever and audience plants i was um a friend of mine was it was in a play called catching sam and ella catching sam and ella catching sam and ella and um there were audience plants audience plants can be can be great in a play particularly if they're really good and really are believable then uh that's that's pretty wild.
[1:24:37] Noises off is another i'm just remembering.
[1:24:40] The producers of course as a great satire on uh artistic production and so on and i'm sure that others will come to mind but i would uh i would look into, uh that kind of stuff fight club of course is a breaks the fourth wall from time to time as well but uh so yeah i i would just say like absolutely no limit like like no rules theater is the best because it really keeps people's attention when they don't know and you'll get the smartest people to come because dull people like repetition smart people like novelty and i do love that what the heck is going on is this real or is this not real i think that's really a fertile place and i think that would be a lot of fun for audiences to participate in and boy would ever would that ever be something that people would talk about like i went to this play last night they were yelling from the audience there was a fistfight on stage someone got dragged into the wings you know like there was a uh there was a bunch of police ended with some kind of threat it's like it was wild like i don't know what the heck was going on but it was hilarious the bits that i saw something like that i think would be would be a lot of fun to play with the.
[1:25:44] Uk police broke in and carting somebody off because of a tweet.
[1:25:47] Yeah, don't, don't, don't. I wouldn't have it open in the UK. That's not it.
[1:25:52] Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you. I very much appreciate this. If nothing else, just to kind of get these thoughts out. Just writing that letter to you was cathartic. Like I said, I've got a lot of friends that I've made through the industry, and then I've got my partner, but I feel like the group of people that I feel like I can actually not be playing the role of the palatable version of myself for them, it just gets smaller and smaller. And so, you know, being able to say these things out loud to another human without feeling like I can, I mean, you know, and also there's a relative sense of anonymity and also that most of the people that I know probably will never, ever, ever watch this.
[1:26:35] Um well and if they do when when you're out of a particular group trying to hammer your way back in, won't work because especially if it's a group that thrives on power right so if you've kicked out of a particular group that thrives on power and ostracism trying to get back in it's just going to reinforce their power and have to become even more cruel right so you have to abandon the old to get to the new now if you put on a play like this then you'll meet i guarantee you you will meet a whole bunch of new people and those whole bunch of new people like through the show i've met a whole bunch of new people through through what it is i've done over the last 20 years so all of those new people they're going to be your future friends they're going to be your future companions through life they're trying to get your way back as you said in audition, this year. It's like it's almost November, right? So that's why I was asking, like, how down are you with that world? Now, if you're down with that world, there's no point trying to court them. There's no point trying to please them. You know, that old meme, you know, I wouldn't do this because it might offend the left. Well, the left is offended whether you would wish it or not. And so you put on something like this, and it will open up entirely new social connections that are completely invisible to you at the moment because you're stuck between worlds, if that makes sense.
[1:27:55] Yeah, it does.
[1:27:58] All right frustrating.
[1:27:59] Kind of purgatory for sure.
[1:28:00] Okay is there anything is that helpful is there anything else that i mean i this is the most practical thing that i can think of is to sort of use you're very legitimate and i sympathize with the pain and uh you know hit back and in this way yeah.
[1:28:13] No no there's uh there's nothing else i'm sure i'll have it i'll call in and again at some point this has been very enjoyable and i i'm so glad that you're kind of back.
[1:28:19] Oh yeah it's fun if you want to brainstorm man i i live with that kind of stuff so uh if you want to fight around with things that might be fun to do uh from a play standpoint i've written like i don't know 30 of these damn things so if there's anything that i can do to help uh it would be a fun and i think people would enjoy hearing the creative process so uh yeah feel free to come back in and we can fight around some more with ideas that.
[1:28:41] Sounds good um a quick question about the recording is do i get i know that you're you're recording this um do i am i able to get like a copy of that or how that works how does that work.
[1:28:51] Yeah yeah it's a call-in show so it goes out but i can send you a copy ahead of time for sure that'd.
[1:28:56] Be great um yeah for sure um cool well i look forward to the nervousness of seeing myself on youtube.
[1:29:04] Oh yeah don't worry about myself uh no problem i can make your voice a little deeper or anything like that if you want to do a little bit of disguise that's totally fine oh.
[1:29:13] I think the circumstances will give me away if there's any i don't know i'm not really i'm not going to like share it on a bunch of social media. This was really more for me anyway.
[1:29:21] So, okay. All right. Well, keep me posted and I wish you best of luck and I appreciate the chat today.
[1:29:26] Will do. Thank you so much.
[1:29:27] Bye.
[1:29:28] Bye-bye.
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