On Zoom. Loved the chat so much I wrote an article for Catapult.
I directed “Ad Nauseam” - a play about a play written by Raefah Wahid. The cast of passive aggressive actors all attempt to stitch together a show that is the pinnacle of perfection. With this singular goal in mind, the play begins. And begins. And begins. And never ends, because to end would be to give up the pursuit of perfection. Also, Real Housewives are somehow involved. And characters interacting in character in the Zoom chat (my favorite).
If you’ve read through my site or been to a Fresh Lime Soda performance before, you’ll see that whenever I give or write an artistic statement at the beginning of the play, I tend to ramble incoherently for like 45 minutes about how our production’s choice of disco in the second act was actually a tribute to leftist South Asian street theatermaker Safdar Hashmi or how Sally messaging “lol” in the chat ruptures the false binary between spectator and performer in theater. Obviously, both of those things are true and gospel, but I will cut to the chase.
Part of Fresh Lime’s mission is creating explicitly political theater, that archives or provokes resistance. A lot of political theater is really traumatic and cathartic and painful. This is not that play. This performance is a comedy - an abstract, metatheatrical comedy with a nonzero amount of references to the Kylie Jenner Lip Kit. Perhaps when you watch it, you’ll think: “what’s political about this performance” or even “what’s South Asian about this performance” or perhaps “wow, they’re referencing the Kylie Jenner Lip Kit again, huh.” These are all good questions you should have in mind, and this play is obviously about a lot of things, like perfection, beauty, and of course, circles, but to me, this play is about joy.
On the spectrum of Lope de Vega to Federico Garcia Lorca (theater is to educate versus theater is to entertain), this falls more sharply on the entertain side, so there is a group song, many overlapping multimedia elements, and because this play was meta-theatrical, I decided to heighten that and confuse the audience as much as possible (is this audio interruption a Zoom accident? Is the actor muted on purpose? Are they in character right now?)! FUN!
