I left the show feeling AMPED up and ready to take on a creative destino with a why-natte attitude. An INTERACTIVE installation (a haunted house but with a pizza delivery swamp caper kinda thing?) that lead into a play, it brought me to existentiality of immersive joy. like when you are alone in an airplane: its taking off, you are listening to a folk singer on your headphones, you just cant help but let out a solitary tear. you just don’t really know why. that kind of taped in emotional subconsciousness filled me as I left the Elysian into this chilly October evening.
This really reminded me of my first and formative experience with interactive / alternative theater. I saw a play called Woyzeck while in high school in Atlanta, GA at a venue called Eyedrum. It happened in many locations all over a warehouse and you could interact with the characters and follow or not follow to path of the story during the play. it was that initial feeling of like, woah, DUH there are so many ways to do theater and art and the audience can actually feel like they are in on the world with all the characters. That blew my mind. Why dont they tell you that THAT’S how theater and plays could be?? instead the most alternative to the tradition is seeing Leonardo di Caprio’s Capulet Crew get into a gas station shoot out.
Back to the play… Mikey the snail, Vicky (or Melvin? or Valery? IDK, Nosferatu’s daughter ok)’s love interest, did it for me, those micro gestures, the blossoming from shy awkward butch crush to full blown awkwardly confident bang-tastic rapping mollusk just did it for me.
As Curtis Mayfield used to say, If there’s hell below, we’re all going to go. Not to ruin the play or anything, but Lorenzo’s cute final words about everything just being all right in hell made me wanna hug my neighbor and roll my eyes and do a belly roll all at the same time. I think i liked it cause its like, “listen we just made this whole damn play for yall and even made up all these crazy songs, and we even had a live band with a freaking CELLO playing perfectly perfect music probably improvised so exquisitely for every little moment and joke, we dont need to have a dumb poignant ending, we just wanna be silly cause sometimes even when there is some crazy shit going on everywhere and stuff sucks! you also dont know what to say and end up being saying something not totally devoid of meaning like ‘dam that really stinks, im so sorry. I hope everything is going to be ok buddy’ “
The DIYness of this play makes me so happy. Coming from a place where DIY art / music / and occasional theater performance were experimental, common, and very rough around the edges, this show made me feel at home, energized to pursue creative ideas. Clearly it was pretty polished and thought through, but it was also chaotic and haphazard and random in the best ways possible. You just dont see much art that is really DIY in LA, and this felt like some real people doing something rough and real and a reflection of the beauty brain consciousness! Freaky Natures does seem more polished then last time, but even though its more cohesive, there is still a lot of chaos ADHD brain of unfinished thoughts and non sequitur ideas peppered in there that it felt like it still retained its core freak diy values. Freak Nature makes you feel like you are switching between passenger and drivers seats of a VW Beetle clown car while also being tossed in an absurdist size salad spinner of trash, foam, your uncle’s workshop, and all your shower thoughts at once.