High School Musical Part 4: The College Years.

For the entirety of teenage institutionalization I was a productive member of the Drama Club.  Coincidentally, the revival of thespianic arts came about around the same time.  With the annual releases of High School Musical, the premiere of Glee, Broadway going on strike, the hipster movement starting and other homoerotic reasons, being in DC was the cool thing to do.  And while a good percentage of "players" were already over-enthusiastic assholes trying to emulate their favorite Drama Club series, there was a sudden influx of carbon-copy drama students who wanted nothing more than to prance around and do improv with dildos.

Not Pictured Visible:  Dildos.

This was primarily the reason most of my cast-mates hated me.  I became pretty enraged at the whole ordeal and turned myself into the Drama Club badass - which is a way to say, I was the best so eat a dick.  I adopted an obsession with "anti-players" like Steve McQueen, Robert Redford, Paul Newman, and Gregory Peck - men who all share one thing in common; an over-sized pair of nuts capable of Haitianesque seismic activity.  Needless to say, I could not WAIT to get the hell out of teenage institutionalization so I could tackle the real world of theatrical artistry where my take on the craft could be appreciated. 

After taking a year on the stand-up circuit, I decided to focus back on theater for 2012.  To ease myself back into the scene, I chose to hunker down at the People's Improv Theater (the PIT) and participate in some of the bullshit they got. 

For those of you unfamiliar with New York, the PIT is literally a block away from one of the most hipster CUNY (City University Of New York) schools in the state - Baruch College.  Baruch is not only responsible for being a leader in organizing OWS, it's also a spawning pool of opinionated hipsters just waiting to get their shitty facial hair in the spotlight. 

All these factors accounted for, the PIT acts like a beacon for people I hate - especially on a free night.  But I had hope, this was NYC and I'm sure I'd be meeting some real talented performers...

I don't consider myself an actor, I consider myself a BECOMER...  Wanna make out?

HOWEVER.

When I arrived, I was immediately transported back to the first day of theater class.  You had the flamboyant gay guy that all the girls wanted to fuck, there was the handful of ugly people in the corner who never acted well but always gave good ideas and last, but certainly not least, the bitch everyone wants to fuck - the over-acting diva, Vanessa Hudgens incarnate minus the Disney masturbatory fantasy.  Even worse, they were all just as loud and annoying as before, taking pictures to show that HEY I'M HERE PERFORMING, PEOPLE MUST KNOW ON FACEBOOK.  Let's hope they weren't as talentless as I remember.


Upon further research, I realized the inevitable...  Every single dude I met tonight was going to be dressed like the biggest faggot.  And I don't mean to sound like a real ninja, when I say shit like that - but come on...  The appropriate amount of scarves for a straight man indoors is somewhere around don't fucking do it.  I barely let that shit slide outdoors.  (There's nothing wrong with being gay, unless you're straight.)

So I join the "drama club" in the basement and get situated.  Now, I don't know if anyone is familiar with improv warmups, but they usually resemble the first day of first grade.  In this event, we were playing a game where, "we will transfer our energy to another player in the form of a funny face and a loud noise, then that player who receives the energy will transfer it to ANOTHER player!"



HOW FUN!  I can scream like a retard at someone else to "warm up" for freestyle improv - that's the only way, right?  Wrong.

This is precisely what I find wrong with theater, now-a-days.  There's so much time spent on being yourself and losing all your stiffness and let's work with levels and let's do yoga and let's wear scarves and shut the fuck up, it's getting to the point where every single person is becoming the same shit because we're idolizing the idea of being an artsy-fartsy sonnamabitch instead of just being one.  A proper warm up for any sort of performance should be pretty clear:

Glass of whiskey
Cigarette
Stretch body/jaw
Tongue twisters (quietly to yourself)
More whiskey
Cigarette
Performance

Yeah, I'm a fucking actor, what do you do?

So that's what I did at the PIT to the dismay of the others, but it worked (more on that).

Once the event started, performances were shit.  I mean, what do you expect from people who use the talent of the current cast of SNL as a standard?  All the guys did characters reminiscent of one another, nothing special or surprising - all the lines were predictable and all the laughs were given.  Maybe after facing the rough-n-tough world of stand-up comedy, bombing a few times here and there I'm a firm believer that a laugh should be earned - not rewarded for standing on a stage and being terrible (unless you're in a freakshow, then it's totally hilarious). 

I won't even get into my performance because I kicked ass - although I will mention that I created the bastard son of Robert DeNiro and Steven Seagal - because I want to arrive at my finaly point (if there were even points before this).



Whatever this fun-loving Occupy generation is up to, it's making me sick to my stomach for some reason.  There's this relentless system of cheerful support and forced niceness everywhere - all I hear is "good for you" and "that's great" and "let's see how many dudes we can get on this ass-train, daddy."  As this new bullshit leaks into my world of performance, it makes it more and more cynical.  My peers are sheltering each other and prolonging High School as long as they can into their 20's. 

That's not good, folks.  This is how people grow up completely oblivious to utter and dispicable failure.  But we're just getting so soft, we just need to realize that we need failure.  If you don't have that shit - you're gunna be 26 and having a breakdown I had a year ago. 

Wait...  I CAN'T have a horse with a Prince Albert piercing?

You got that kind of time?  Fail a bunch now and get comfortable with that sting, makes shit easier later.